Most of us were probably sucked in by the hype and puff the ISP’s threw around with their line speed claims. But equally – and speaking purely for those I know locally – most have elected to ignore the words in front of them regarding line speed.

What am I saying?

Well let me guess that if you’re not on cable or fibre (lucky you if you are) then like me you are on a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) setup. In which case and in the UK you would have signed up for an “UP TO 8Mb” or whatever speed your ISP listed service.

So why then should you expect 8Mb?

Is it that you ignored the up to?

Is it that you don’t understand the magic behind the system and why, unless you live on top of an exchange you are highly unlikely to ever get the maximum speed?

Or did you get suckered in by the glossy print and only afterwards you found out your 8Mb was in fact never going to be more than 2Mb?

The reality is that line speeds get affected by any number of issues including:

• length of the line from the exchange
• the quality of that line
• weather conditions
• is it day or night – at night long range radio signals can adversely affect your speed
• Is it a contended (ratio) service
• The time of day will affect speed – busy times, slower speeds
• The quality of the line in your house
• The make / model of router used
• Little things like TCP/IP overheads
• .and so on….

Why am I up in arms about this?

Well simply put I don’t like it when national TV shows (The Gadget Show) put forward mis-leading campaigns and end up making the situation worse rather than explaining it.

They currently are running a campaign to get more truth in advertising from our ISPs regards line speeds. OK, there doesn’t sound much wrong with that except that the campaign is centering around the use of the words “up to” and neglecting to mention the fact that it means precisely that – that you will get a speed “up to” whatever.

Now maybe I’m being too logical and literal and expecting too much from people to actually read what’s in front of them?

• Am I being too literal?
• Do you expect 8Mb if you’re on an Up To service?
• Why?
• Or does my job mean I accept why line speeds will never be what anyone expects?

Come on folks, lets hear from you as Jason Bradbury (one of the shows presenters) tells me via Twitter that he and “most Gadget Show viewers” aren’t happy.

[EDIT]

And as a follow up he tells me:

Point well mised, methinks.

Up To 8Mb is a post from: Church Techy

Then this post shows everything that is bad about people in this world …

from the too young child allowed seeming total freedom to do what she wants…

to the father that shouts abuse at a webcam from behind his daughters shoulder…

to the mother that stands off camera and mutters obscenities…

to sites like 4chan and Tumblr that have degraded the usefulness of the internets.

It’s a sad world that brings an 11yr old child to public tears on a youtube video.

The rest I’ll leave up to you to decide.

Nuff said.

Lessons in Hate is a post from: Church Techy

OK if you’re going somewhere interesting and tweeting / sharing something of interest at the same time …

Or maybe you’re using it as a sort of diary tracking your life movements but are keeping it to yourself.

Then I get that.

But I don’t see it that way.

What I see are lots of stuff like this:

John Doe checked in at Some Restaraunt
Yum, breakfast.

Maybe it’s my age but I don’t think so – as a lot of the folks I ‘see’ using this are my age.

• So why?
• Go on, can you sell it to me?
• Do you use it for sensible purposes?

Sell This to Me is a post from: Church Techy

Those of you that know me from reading here and from Twitter will also know that I’m not in this for the fame or even the fortune. But every blogger wants to know they are being heard.

No matter how small their audience.

We all crave feedback.

I’ve just completed the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog(ger) which is Darren Rowse’s (he of ProBlogger fame) ebook having picked it up to go through the OurChurch.com 31DBBB Project – and I want to publicly thank Paul of OC for his efforts in staging this project.

However, the final day (which was yesterday) co-incided with me thinking about my celebratory 2yr post for the blog and the last days project was all about planning.

What surprised me though was that rather than give me the kick up the backside to do it (and typically I’m an organised planning type of person anyway) for the betterment of this blog – actually turned out to be a much more melancholic thought process along the lines of “should I go on?“.

So I decided on a quick recap to see what have I brought to the world of blogging in the last 2yrs?

• I’ve brought my unique voice.
• I’ve brought a technical view that isn’t always seen in other blogs and this has hampered my blogging. It’s made the ‘niche’ I’m in a very narrow one and I’ve tried – except for the very occasional post to stay away from personal or political or spiritual thoughts. Perhaps that mix would have been better for you?
• Ive brought my willingness to share my knowledge and to continue learn from you.
• And I’m trusting that this allows you to learn as well.

However.

The reality is that in 2yrs most of my posts have averaged zero responses.

• And even when I deliberately try to court controversy (I Am a Criminal) I get very few replies.
• Amazingly, by far and away my most popular post in terms of SEO is my brief spiel about nlite for Windows 7.
• And my most popular for comments (3 Links to Starting on Twitter)was due to the 31DBBB project and this type of post I don’t typically do as I see it as information already easily available.

So for 2yrs I’ve been trying to work this out.

• Trying to understand what folks want?
• Trying to understand what will make folks respond.
• After all, my stats show that you visit here in your 100′s each day.
• The stats further show that I’m getting repeat visitors – which implies I’m saying something you want to read about.

In short – I don’t understand.

And so rather than plan specifically for this blog yesterday’s task leaves me with a weird taste in my mouth.

One that says “give it up Stuart“.

One that says “put it all on your personal blog then no-one will care how infrequent you post“.

So that’s where I’m at.

BUT – I’m extremely thankful for the last 2yrs and extremely blessed to have interacted with some of the folks I have (Lee of Security_FAQs or Greg of TheBetaVersion) and hopefully get to know them a bit.

I’m grateful for the crowd of us that co-write (cough) over at ChurchTechMatters. Even if we don’t write like we should we have formed a community.

I’m extremely blessed and thankful for all the folks on the 31DBBB project – some of whom have been kind enough to comment here or drop me an email or two. There’s over 60 of them but the ones that stand out right now are: Paul at Live Intentionally – Phillip at SynapticLight – Jennifer at JenniferJanes – Jon at BlogOneAnother – Kevin at Campfire Cowboy Ministries – Chris at The Prayer Experiment – Nolan at NolanBobbit – Seiji at The Ignition Point and L.L and Becky and JD and the Coffee Couple and so on.

The reality though is that at this point I just don’t know what’s next for this blog.

For now, I will say this: as and when a subject matter crops up that is right and relevant to the blog I will continue to add them whilst I make my mind up. My Internet Safety Sunday series will continue and my usage of Twitter and commenting on other blogs will also continue.

• Have you any thoughts to add?
• And I mean any at all on the direction of the blog, my writing style (or not), the subject matter, what you like, don’t like, etc?

Reflections is a post from: Church Techy

It’s about a mistake or an oversight when setting up a Windows 2003 server running Active Directory (AD) and DNS. So if you know nothing about these things then please feel free to check out one of my other more regular posts – such as this one.

- o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o – o -

OK, on with the issue.

Please bear in mind that this used to work using a workaround despite the oversight. It stopped working when due to reasons beyond their control our hoster had to put us on another server and hence a different IP, but more on that in a moment.

We have a W2k3 Server running an AD Schema and all works just fine. The server is a fairly basic accounts and policies type box with nothing fancy on it. For sake of argument, lets call the schema name we picked as being ourdomain.org and the oversight being that we didn’t add in the MS recommended .local flag.

Skip forward a year or so and we’ve also registered a website with the same name as the schema – can you see where this is going yet?

Skip forward until very recently and we start to develop the website and all is working well except that the folks internally can’t reach the website. No problems thinks I and talk through them setting up an hosts entry pointing to the hosted server – and this nicely resolves the issue.

You might wonder why I didn’t just add an A record to the DNS setup? It’s a valid question but at the time I was away from all tech but my phone and this was the easiest & quickest fix available.

Then we get to last November (I’m pretty sure this is when our issue it started though at the moment it’s supposition) and our hoster falls prey to a hacker. No data is lost but the hacker decided to hose a whole bunch of file systems. The upshot being that our server required a bare metal restore but still had issues afterwards so ultimately we got moved to a new box and consequently a new IP.

So I think, simply change the IP and all will be well.

Not so.

I started off by just editing the hosts file on the server with the new IP and flushing the DNS cache – all appeared good as I can tracert to the new IP and ping it. Additionally an nslookup reveals that the ourdomain.org is being seen as the correct internal IP and that www.ourdomain.org is being seen as the correct external IP.

However, firefox can’t connect. Its status update flickers between ‘waiting for’ and ‘connecting to’ the domain, while IE8 says it “cannot display the webpage”.

Changing the servers secondary DNS settings to use say, OpenDNS.com’s DNS server makes no difference either. However, if I set both primary and secondary to use OpenDNS then we get straight through.

So, either there’s an isse with our DNS that is shafted in some way I can’t see or the hosters new security measures are denying us getting through or ?

So, is there a way to configure AD to force everyting but internal lookups to go through OpenDNS? Because using no configured internal DNS on the server, then a simple ping of an internal client ends up resolving to an external IP – can we say oops!

Any suggestions gratefully taken because I’m stumped.

This just in: I asked the hoster to check their firewall logs and whilst I’m not 100% satisfied that they are logging this aspect they tell me they can’t see our IP arriving. Which strikes me as odd as they should have my pings and tracert’s at the very least – but if they only checked for web traffic then it would efinitely (in my tired mind) point at an internal name resolution issue / clash.

Big kudos to anyone that can help solve this.

EDIT: Fixed it. Well sort of.

Basically the problem is the site has been developed using WordPress and that has “Canonical Redirects“. In short all requests for ‘www.whatever’ are being redirected to ‘whatever’ – i.e. no www. This has the effect for internal clients of getting to the site and then the site says ‘go and talk to your Domain Controller’ which in turn says ‘go to www’ and we end up in a vicious cycle.

So now I just need to find a way or a plugin or someone to turn off teh redirects for everything. I believe it can be done just the things I’ve tried this far haven’t worked!

DNS Problem is a post from: Church Techy

… I confess, I really don’t understand what (if indeed anything) I am doing wrong in my usage of twitter.

I took stock of a recent day’s usage and my twitter day consisted of a few RT’s; a few posts of my own thoughts and close on two dozen (I didn’t count that close so it could be more) responses I made to individuals that were of a helpful nature or in a manner to induce a reply or start a conversation.

Now, I accept folks are busy or have a reason to not reply or even don’t see the @’s but then what are they doing on twitter? Anyway, can you guess how many replied, continued the conversation, thanked or even just acknowledged me?

Well, no, it wasn’t quite zero but one!

One person took the effort to respond.

One person took the time to utilise <140 chars to converse with me.

The most stunning aspect (at least to me) is that the one person that did reply is a well known sportsman (in rugby union) and is a man amongst men. He’s a world famous name and probably revered as a god in his own country (New Zealand) – which not unlike mine is fanatical about their rugby. And what’s more, he took time to chat not just reply once.

I’m honoured – but I am thoroughly baffled and confused as to why nobody else could be bothered.

Am I getting it that wrong?

Am I a twitter fail and should just terminate my account?

Any clues folks?

Twitter Fail is a post from: Church Techy

When I was younger, there was a popular TV series called “Watching” and the basic storyline revolved around a shy boy and his brash on / off girlfriend. A major theme was people watching and it clarified something I have always enjoyed doing. That of trying to categorise folks just by observing them.

I find I do this on twitter as well and often wonder the who and what of the people behind each tweet. Certainly I can get what they release publicly through their tweets and blogs but that doesn’t tell me everything. Anyway a link to the TV Series set me to thinking about the types of tweet that people create and so here I present my list of the “types of tweet” I see:

• play by play
• your best friend
• spam
• direct marketing / sales
• informational
• replies
• compliments
• opinion
• achievements
• fun
• pictures
• help seekers
• critics
• cause champions
• introductions
• linkers
• reporter / status
• blog post
• retweeters
• pictures
• mundane or “did I really need to know that”
• trivia

What type of tweets do you write?

Have I missed any?

Tweet Type is a post from: Church Techy

To Those of  Us  Born  1930 – 1979

No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us,

WE ARE AWESOME !!!!

OUR LIFE IS LIVING PROOF !!!!

At the end of this post is a quote by Jay Leno… If you don’t read anything else, please  read what he said.

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE

1930′s, 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and 70′s!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and / or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints..

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars without car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren’t overweight..   WHY?

Because we were always outside playing…that’s why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on..

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps  and then ride them down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Play stations, Nintendo’s and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s,  no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call child services to report abuse.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.

Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best  risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.  We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.

While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it ?

That quote by Jay Leno:

‘With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?’

For those that prefer to think that God is not watching over us…go ahead and ignore this.

For the rest of you …pass it on.

The Older Generation is a post from: Church Techy