Laptop overheating? The wonder of compressed air

Posted: 13th November 2011 by admin in Uncategorized
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Does your laptop shut down suddenly? Or do you get 3rd degree laptop burns when you rest it on your lap? There is an easy solution – that doesn’t require any technical knowledge – compressed air.

Before I tell you about compressed air, let me tell you some other solutions I have tried that didn’t work. The worst laptop I have for over-heating is a workhorse Toshiba BW1. The recommended way to solve an overheating issue is to take the laptop apart and clean out the fins on the heat-sink. Unfortunately on the Toshiba, getting at the fins entails stripping it down completely. I started tearing it down a couple of times. But after spending an hour, I decided to just put everything back together before damaging something or not being able to put it back together.

Instead I installed a Windows application called SpeedFan that let me turn the fan on full blast. This just delayed the inevitable shut-down especially when the kids started to play their favorite game, MineCraft. And I couldn’t find an equivalent fan control program for either OSX86 or Ubuntu Linux.

I finally licked the Toshiba over-heating problem – and it’s a simple solution anyone can do. Buy a can of compressed air called an Air Duster.  They are available all over the place; London Drugs, Canada Tire, Best Buy, Future Shop.

Every few months spray the exhaust vent area on your laptop thoroughly, You will probably see lots of fine dust flying out of the vent. This is good. Keep spraying until no more dust flies out. The can will get quite cold from the expanding air. There will still be some dust stuck inside the heat-sink, but you’ll remove enough that the laptop doesn’t overheat.

The only dtawback to this solution is the cans of compressed air are stupidly expensive – about $10 a can. If you know of a cheap place to get Air Dusters in Vancouver, please leave a comment.

Implementing Quality of Service on a Coop Network

Posted: 15th November 2010 by johndvan in Networking
0

A student COOP asked us to re-configure their routers to improve the performance of their network. To save money the students have a single high speed internet connection with their ISP which is shared between all 31 students in the residence.

To give you an idea of the savings. If the 31 students in the COOP each paid for an individual connection to the ISP – their total monthly bill would be 31 students x $30/month or over $1000/month with taxes. Instead they rent a single high-speed connection for $60 per month plus taxes.

Background

There are 31 students in the COOP residence sharing a single high-speed internet connection . The COOP is spread out over 3 buildings; the main residence, an annex building and a cottage. The main building has a business-class connection with the ISP; 10 Mbps down/ 1.5 Mbps up.

Presently due to the poor router configuration the network performance is quite variable – one person downloading can slow down the network for everyone else. The students want their router configured to ensure that the bandwidth is distributed equitably. If one students is home he/she should be able to use the entire bandwidth, as additional students connect the bandwidth should be distributed equitably between them.

Being college students, there is quite a variety of internet services being used;  Peer-to-peer file-sharing (torrenting), gaming, local file sharing , as well as needs for the basic web for school/homework, email, FTP, etc.

After trying to deal with “Why is my internet so slow? Can’t you keep people from torrenting?” for too long. The COOP administration asked us to implement a Quality of Service (QOS) system to ensure that all residents got their fair share of the bandwidth, The COOP also wanted to minimize any additional hardware costs.

Topology

The broadband cable comes into an electrical closet on the ground floor of the main residence building where it goes from the broadband cable modem (ISP provided) to a D-Link DIR-625 Wireless router.

The signal is fed out from the D-Link router to a

* Netgear 16-port switch (Main Residence)
* D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless Router acting as Wireless Access Point for Main Residence common area
* Linksys 5-port switch (1st floor Annex)
* Netgear 8-port switch (2nd floor Annex)
* D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless Router acting as Wireless Access Point for Main Residence common area
* Second D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless Router acting as Wireless Access Point Annex Building common area
* Netgear 8-port switch (Cottage)

Use Case

We interviewed  students to find out how they typically use the network to find the cause of the performance issues. Here’s the typical scenario.

It’s 2 in the afternoon and Bob is the only one home. He logs into World of Warcraft (WoW) and gets dynamite throughput.

Half an hour later, Joe gets home and starts his Peer-to-Peer torrenting program to download a movie for the evening. He doesn’t have his client capped for uploads, so he is eating up a lot of the upload connection. Suddenly Bob starts getting lag on his WoW

Jill gets home an hour later. She goes to check her email and starts watching a video on Hulu. She sees a lot of pauses in her video as the player can’t keep up with the stream.

Everyone else comes home and each of them are doing a mix of Skype, basic HTTP like Facebook,  email and Google Docs. Everyone is getting terrible performance and starts screaming at the systems admin.

Solution

The Quality of Service features on the DIR-625 in the main residence building was enabled and priorities were set for the different internet services.

DNS ports set to priority 10
Skype was set to priority 20
HTTP port set to priority 30
HTTPS port set to priority 30
Email port set to priority 40
SSH, FTP ports set to priority 50
Anything higher than port 3000 (WoW, BitTorrent) set to priority 100

The COOP will monitor network performance to see how this works out. In the future the COOP could upgrade the line they are renting or rent a second line if they need to.

Another way to improve the network would be to spend $100 to purchase a more sophisticated router like the ASUS  for the main router. This router can be upgraded to run an open source software package called Tomato.

Tomato can do more sophisticated traffic shaping; for example limiting torrents, games to a maximum throughput between 7am and 12am, leaving bandwidth for everyone to do their homew. Or reserving a minimum amount of bandwidth for certain services so that even if Susy, Joe, and Bob are torrenting or copying huge files, John can still browse and turn in his homework.

The Perfect Hackintosh Project

Posted: 9th November 2010 by johndvan in Dell Inspiron 1525, Dell Inspiron Mini 10v, Hackintosh, Toshiba Satellite P200-BW1
2

I think OS X is the best operating system out there right now in terms of power and ease of use. Windows 7 is gaining ground. Ubuntu is great for networking projects.

I’ve been experimenting with trying to run OSX on a number of different laptops; a Toshiba P200-BW1, a Dell mini 10v (10 inch display) and a Dell Inspiron 1525 (15.4 inch display).

I first tried installing on a Toshiba P200-BW1. Unfortuantely it has an ATI Mobility HD2600 graphics card which isn’t used in any of Apple’s models so there aren’t any drivers (called kexts in Apple lingo). The Intel 4965 AGN wireless card isn’t supported either.

Next I tried a Dell Inspiron mini 10v netbook using iDeneb 1.4. Good news, it worked but there were some issues with the graphics driver again. Upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6 resolved the issues.
I upgraded using a slightly modified version of the instructions from this Gizmodo article.
First the issues. The biggest issue was the Dell didn’t handle an external 22 inch Samsung 225 VGA monitor very well. After connecting the monitor Leopard refused to boot without the monitor plugged in. This defeated the whole purpose of having a netbook. Who wants to have to lug around an external monitor to use their netbook?

The second issue was sound lag when using GarageBand from iLife 08 with a M-Audio midi keyboard controller. Anyone who plays an electric piano knows how agonizing even small lags between striking a key and the sound emerging can be. I thought this was due to an underpowered processor, but upgrading to Snow Leopard has resolved this issue as well.

Unfortunately the 10 inch netbook display is just too small for my aging eyes.

Next up I installed on a Dell Inspiron 1525 using iAtkos S3 and some help from dailyblogged.com website. Everything seems to be working now except Sleep. The sytstem is still slower than the MacBook Pro due to a slower processor, smaller L2 cache and slower DDR2 memory but is still a my favorite system to work with.

It’s taken several months to get to this point. Just getting a real used or new Mac would have been much more cost effective, but I’ve learned lots and appreciate OSX a lot more after my journey.

OS X Snow Leopard Networking – Implement local DNS cache to speed up DNS lookups

Posted: 9th November 2010 by johndvan in Networking, OSX
1

DNS is a service that maps IP addresses to domain names (like www.google.com to 74.125.19.103) and vise versa.

There are several reasons why you may want to set up a private DNS server on your LAN. The main reason is to improve performance. On just a single page you may have to look up IP address for the domain name many times. If the DNS server is at the other end of a high latency link like satellite or a noisy wifi link, the multiple lookups will slow down page loads. With a local DNS server you will eliminate the overhead from DNS lookups.

If your LAN includes more than a few machines, a private DNS server is a more convenient way to map client host names to IP addresses than having to maintain a hosts configuration files on each client.

The tool you use to test your DNS server is called dig (for domain name internet groper). The basic syntax is:

dig @nameserver domainname

If you have Bind running on your local server you can use
dig @localhost google.com

Setting up a DNS server on OSX uses a special utility called rndc. The first step to setting up your own server is to configure rndc.

Step 1: Configure rndc

rndc is the DNS server configuration utility. Enter the following commands into terminal to generate a new secret key and configuration for rndc:

sudo -s
rndc-confgen -b 256 > /etc/rndc.conf
head -n5 /etc/rndc.conf | tail -n4 > /etc/rndc.key

Important – Watch out!

The rndc-confgen utility is extremely handy for generating new rndc configuration files, but it may set a different default port than named.
On my machine named.conf was set to port 54 while rndc was set to port 953.
You can use the following commands to ensure that the port number is the same in both configurations:

more /etc/named.conf | grep ‘inet.*?port’
more /etc/rndc.conf | grep ‘-port’

If both ports are not the same, it’s best to change one using pico before starting BIND.

Step 2: Enable BIND

This will set-up BIND to load up when your computer starts up:

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist
echo “launchctl start org.isc.named” >> /etc/launchd.conf

Start BIND

/usr/bin/named

Or you can start it more gracefully through launchctl:

launchctl start org.isc.named

Step 3: Configure named as a caching only name server

Edit /etc/named.conf to look like:

// Config file for caching only name server

options {
directory “/var/named”;

// Uncomment next line if you are behind a firewall of any sort
// query-source port 53;
};

zone “.” {
type hint;
file “root.hints”;
};

zone “0.0.127.in-addr.arpa” {
type master;
file “pz/127.0.0″;
};

Step 4: Reload Configuration

Whenever you make changes to these files (named.conf, rndc.conf, /etc/named), you need to reload the DNS configuration and zone files.

rndc reload

If you receive an error, try first using

rndc stop

You can also flush the DNS cache by using this command:

rndc flush

Handy DNS server commands:

rndc stop
rndc start
rndc reload
rndc flush

Step 5: System Preferences => Network

Click on the connection you are using to connect to the internet
Click on advanced
Click on DNS
Click on +
127.0.0.1
Click on OK
Click on Apply
Verify the cache is working by trying to load a web page in a browser.

Fix Sleep Problem on Dell Inspiron mini 10v Snow Leopard

Posted: 9th November 2010 by johndvan in Dell Inspiron Mini 10v, Hackintosh, OSX
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Sleep problem on Dell Inspiron mini 10v Hackintosh Snow Leopard 10.6. solution.

Issue Description:

User closes the lid on the laptop to force sleep, then opens the lid. The screen comes on but the OS freezes before loading Finder. User needs to do a hard restart to bring up the system.

Issue Resolution

1.Open up the terminal app and type “sudo pmset lidwake 0″

This prevents your netbook from automatically waking from sleep when you open the lid. Instead you have to press the power button to wake from sleep.

2. Next type “sudo pmset hibernatemode 3″.

This sets the hibernate mode to 3 instead of the default node 1.

Double-check that the commands worked properly by typing “sudo pmset -g”.

Verify hibernatemode and lidwake options are set as above.

3. Restart your netbook.

That’s it, test sleep by closing the lid. Reopen and touch the power button to awake from sleep.

Google Apps Access

Posted: 9th October 2010 by johndvan in Google
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Google now provides ultra-reliable fast hosting and mail services for your business. West 4 Communications can get your site up and running with Google Apps.

Encrypted secure access to email for your domain:

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname

for example
https://mail.google.com/a/west4.ca

The https protocol uses encryption to protect your log-in credentials and email contents.

Encrypted secure access to cPanel dashboard for your domain:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomainname

for example:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/west4.ca

Broadband Internet for a 17 inch Macbook Pro in Vancouver

Posted: 1st October 2010 by johndvan in Mobile Computing, Networking
0

Frank, a Humanist friend from Wales, just returned to Vancouver with a 17 inch Macbook Pro. In the UK he uses a mobile broadband dongle to connect to the internet. He asked me about how he can connect his laptop to the internet here in Vancouver. He said that he wanted a broadband (high speed) internet month-to-month plan without any contracts since he often takes trips back to the UK and doesn’t want to pay a monthly broadband charge while he’s out of the country.

First off there are two kinds of plans; home broadband and mobile broadband. Home broadband gives you a high speed internet connection into your home using the cable TV network or phone network. Mobile broadband gives you a high speed connection anywhere usng a dongle you plug into the usb port on your laptop (mobile broadband uses the high speed cell phone network that is available most everywhere).

In the UK both home broadband and mobile broadband plans are available for about 15 pounds per month with unlimited downloads. In Canada mobile broadband plans are much much more expensive than home broadband. This explains why I use a home broadband plan to connect up my laptops in the apartment and then just use free wifi cafes when I’m out and about. This being Vancouver It’s very rare that I want to use my laptop outside and there isn’t a coffee shop with free wifi close at hand.

Home broadband is offered by both Rogers and Telus. Rogers uses the TV cable network and Telus uses the phone network. Both provide you with a box (technically a broadband modem), a technician comes out and hooks you up. You can connect your laptop directly to the modem using an Ethernet cable (the technician will do this for you).

Nowadays most people want the convenience of being able to connect their laptop wirelessly instead of using the Ethernet cable. This gives you the freedom to use your laptop anywhere in your house or apartment. You just need to buy a wireless router from London Drugs/Best Buy/Future Shop. It will set you back $50 – $100.

Rogers and Telus offer home broadband plans for about $20 – $40 a month depending on how fast a connection you want. Of course they offer you discounts if you sign up for a year.

The other type of broadband is called mobile broadband and uses a dongle (adapter) that you plug into a usb port on your laptop. The dongle is used to connect to the same 3G network that smartphones like the Android and iPhone use. The best thing about mobile broadband is that’s it’s available anywhere in Vancouver that you can receive a good cell phone connection. Telus, Rogers and Bell all offer mobile broadband plans.

Rogers mobiel broadband dongle is called the Rocket stick and costs about $150 without a contract ($0 with a 3 year contract). And then there’s a monthly fee based on the amount of data that you use (rather than a flat monthly rate like home broadband). If you’re watching videos (lots of data) mobile broadband can get expensive.

Rogers high speed internet data plan $30 +taxes maximum 500 Megabytes of data a month
Rogers high speed internet data plan $35 +taxes maximum 1 Gigabytes of data a month
Rogers high speed internet flexible data plan the amount charged varies with data usage:
$35/500 MB
$40/1 GB
$55/2 GB
$70/5 GB

Bell’s dongle is called the turbo stick. 2 models – $130 and $175. Telus offers mobile boradband as well although I couldn’t find the dongle on the site.

Data used in a month====Bell Monthly fee====Telus Monthly Fee
Up to 500 MB $35 $35
500 MB to 1 GB $45 $45
1 GB to 3 GB $60 $55
3 GB to 5 GB $70 $70

If I had to choose a mobile browsing plan I’d go with the Roger’s flex plan with the Rocket Stick.

Improve your Google Ranking – Use Caching To Speed Up Your Site

Posted: 24th September 2010 by johndvan in Google, Wordpress
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Google loves fast sites. So how can you speed up your site without spending a lot of cash on a dedicated super fast server. Use caching (pardon the pun)!

Content Management Systems (CMS’s) like WordPress and Joomla are incredibly powerful. Each time someone visits your site, the CMS generates each page from scratch. It can be a lengthy process to build everything you see. First it will process the PHP code which will make numerous calls to your database and finally output HTML for your web browser to display. On some sites this could happen between 20 to 200 times per page! Multiply all that work times hundreds of users and your website can drag to a crawl.

If you enable caching each page is only generated for the first visitor. The caching mechanism then saves the data and serves every subsequent visitor the final result. When a page is added or updated the caching mechanism is triggered and a fresh page will generated for the next visitor, saved and served to all the following visitors. This speeds up WordPress by a huge factor.

Trust me, you want it, your visitors will thank you for using it and Google will be bless you. After testing a variety of caching applications West 4 Communications recommends using Hyper-cache. West 4 Communications engineers can expertly configure your site using Hypercache.

Improve Google Ranking Tip: Redirect Missing Pages

Posted: 23rd September 2010 by johndvan in Google, Hosting, SEO
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So, here’s the quick story. You start a website. You add pages and delete pages trying to hit the Google sweet spot that brings in traffic. It’s normal to delete or rename as much as half the pages on your site within the first year.

But what about those pages you deleted or renamed. Often they have been indexed by the Google search engine during it’s daily or weekly visits. And if the pages are in the index Google is sending people to those missing pages expecting to find what they are looking for. Only to get an error page. This is very disappointing. Is the person going to stay on your site looking for the missing page? Not likely. Google doesn’t like disappointing people so your site gets moved further and further down in the index. Missing pages can keep your site from improving it’s ranking or even leads to drops in your ranking.

What’s the solution? Set your site up to redirect people to another page if the page they’re looking for isn’t found. This is call a 302 redirect and can be set up using the .htaccess file on your site.

At West 4 we regularly monitor your site for missing pages and create redirects to the renamed page or an alternate page with suitable content. We build this into all the websites that we set up and can add this feature to any website.

Getting a Buffalo USB Wireless N adapter WLI-UC-GN to work on OSX 10.5.8

Posted: 29th January 2010 by johndvan in BUFFALO Wifi Dongle, Hackintosh, OSX, WiFi
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All of Apple’s laptops come with a built-in WiFi adapter called an Airport. But I needed a second WiFi port for a client application. I didn’t anticipate any issues with just adding a USB wifi adapter.

However after checking out the three Mac stores in downtown Vancouver, Simply Computing, WestWorld and Mac Market I came up dry. No one even wanted to talk about using a USB wireless adapter on a Mac laptop. The consensus seemed to be it was impossible.

Well fortunately RAlink develops drivers for all their wireless chipsets that enable them to work with Windows, Linux AND Mac! The chipsets are used by a variety of manufactures to build WiFi N USB adapters.Here’s what I did to get the Buffalo WLI-UC-GN Wireless N USB dongle working with OSX 10.5.8, Darwin kernel 9.8.0. It took me a couple of days to get it running. Hopefully this post will help someone else get their Buffalo Wifi adapter running with fewer hassles.

Here’s a related forum thread Insanely Mac Forum Thread. I got the idea for the fix from ayenon – the site is in Japanese, but you can get the main idea by looking at the screen print.

I chose the Buffalo Wireless N USB dongle WLI-UC-GN because it uses the Ralink chipset which is well supported on Macs. And it was on sale for about $40 at NCIX in Vancouver.

I installed the driver, rebooted and plugged the dongle in. The dongle showed up in System Profiler, but the blue activity light on the USB dongle stayed on constantly. On a properly installed dongle the activity light should be flashing. I also got a “No Device” status when I opened the Ralink Utility. The problem boiled down to an incorrect product id in the info.plist file for the device’s driver.

The Buffalo USB dongle uses the Ralink 2870 chipset. (Google “Buffalo WLI-UC-GN chipset”

1. Download the Macintosh drivers version 2.0.1.0 from RAlink Macintosh Drivers. The drivers for for Buffalo WLI-UC-GN are labelled USB(RT2870 /RT2770 /RT307X /RT2070 /RT3572).

2. Plug in the Wifi dongle and verify it is showing up in System Profiler.
Click Apple =>About this Mac => More Info => USB => 802.11n WLAN

Verify that the device is being recognized and has enough current:

Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 450

3. Write down the Product ID and Device ID for the WLI-UC-GN, This should be the same for everybody.

Click Apple =>About this Mac => More Info => USB => 802.11n WLAN
The Product ID 0x014f or 335 in decimal
The Device ID 0×0411 or 1041 in decimal

4, Open up /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist using nano and scroll down until you reach the information related to Buffalo.

There are 3 entries 2870-1, 2870-2 and 2870-3.

The Product ID in the third entry needs to be changed from 336 to 335 to match the settings from system profiler above.

Write the file out.
Exit

4. Delete /System/Library/Extensions.mkext

cd /System/Library
sudo rm -R Extensions.mkext

5. Reboot (You should see a message {“Updating Boot Caches”)

6. Remember to boot with the -f parameter.

Important! While the system is loading the blue activity light on the WLI-UC-GN should start flashing. If the light on the dongle stays blue constantly it is not installed correctly.

If the blue light on the dongle is flashing you can go on to the next step.

7. Go into System Preferences and add another device for the USB Wifi dongle.

Apple => System Preferences => Network
Click on the + sign in the lower left. An additional drop down menu entry will appear in the list for “Ethernet”. Highlight it and click create. Click Apply.

8. Go into the Applications => RAlink utility => Site Survey and you should see the Wireless access points.

9. Add a profile for your wireless access point.

10. Open terminal and delete /System/Library/Extensions.mkext again. Reboot again. When the system starts the USB dongle light should be flashing. Open the Ralink Utility and verify that you’re connected. Check the link status. Open Firefox. Enter the URL google.com and verify that you are connected.

In OSX the internal ethernet adapter is usually configured as en0, airport adapter is configured as en1 and your new usb adapter should be en2. After installing the driver correctly you should be able to type “ifconfig en2″ into terminal to find out how the dongle is configured.

Done!

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