A couple of years ago I bought a Belkin wireless router. No big surprises there. My main PC connected to it via a network cable, my kid's PC using wireless.
In Windows it works great. In Linux it didn't. There was a noticable delay (around four seconds) from entering a web address to the page starting to load. Every time.
In the end I switched to a different router which nicely avoided the problem, and the old router took up it's new position as an "emergency backup."
Now the new router has finally failed, and so I've switched back to the "old" one, and yes, it is still slow to browse in Ubuntu. The funny thing is that once the page starts loading it loads quickly, but there is that long delay before it starts.
So now I'm stuck with it, and with the benefit of a couple of years more experience under my belt it is time to find out what's going wrong.
Let's turn to our good friend dig and see whats going on:
dig www.google.com
This gives the following response:
;; reply from unexpected source: 8.8.8.8#53, expected 192.168.1.1#53
; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 59114
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 3 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.99
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.103
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.104
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.147
www.l.google.com. 3 IN A 209.85.229.105
;; Query time: 36 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sat Feb 11 17:45:21 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 132
The first line gives a very good clue as to what the problem may be.
reply from unexpected source: 8.8.8.8#53, expected 192.168.1.1#53
The unexpected source is what I would have thought was my primary DNS server (and indeed the router's configuration confirms this, with 8.8.4.4. as the secondary). The "expected" IP address is the router itself. This explains the slow browsing - as there there will be a delay while the DNS request is made to the router (which doesn't respond) before moving on to the true DNS server (which does).
Running the connection information tool confirms this. The router is being set up as the primary DNS server, with 8.8.8.8 as the secondary and 8.8.4.4 as tertiary.
The fix? I've set up a manual IP address for the desktop, which is just out of the router's DHCP scope, and manually specifies the correct DNS entries (but remembering to set the router as the gateway). Browsing is now just as fast on Ubuntu as it is on Windows.
Sorted!
Showing posts with label Wireless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wireless. Show all posts
Saturday, 11 February 2012
Friday, 4 April 2008
FreeSpire 2.0.8 - First Impressions
Regular readers may remember my quest to find the perfect GNU/Linux for my elderly HP OmniBook XE (40 gb hard drive, 156 meg RAM, running at a cracking 450mhz). I have tried a few different distros with varying levels of success - Green OS being the closest so far.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
Friday, 14 March 2008
Things to do on your day off #1 - Reconfigure Your Network
Around this time last year I invested in a cheap-and-cheerful Dynamode BR-6004 Wireless Router and a LinkSys wireless PCI network card. This was to allow my children to access the internet from their bedroom without me having to run cables through the house.
The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.
I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.
There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.
None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!
Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.
The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.
I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.
There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.
None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!
Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.
Saturday, 2 February 2008
XP on old hardware
Regular readers may remember the "fun" I had trying to get my el-cheapo wireless cards running under Linux. The USB adapter as it turns out is broken (it only runs for ten minutes at a time before crapping out), the WalkLAN PCMCIA card doesn't run properly under Linux although it is supposed to be supported (it locks the system solid).
To test the card out I decided to re-install Windows 98SE and test the card with that - but wouldn't you know it, I can't find where the install CDs have gone. Fortunately I'd a spare XP Pro license so for an experiment I've installed that instead.
The actual install was straight-forward, if a bit slow. I've got to admit I wasn't expecting too much performance-wise from this once it was installed. After all, a Celeron 433 with 160meg of memory is hardly an XP powerhouse.
How wrong I was.
It runs like a charm. It is fast to boot, all the hardware appears to be supported (mind you, I'd have been surprised if it wasn't) and after tracking down the driver for the WalkLAN card the wireless support is spot-on.
At the moment to stress-test the card I'm installing all the required updates to Windows XP (nearly 100 of them!) which should take over an hour to do. And while I'm doing that I'm also browsing the web, and writing this in Blogger. Internet Explorer, while it isn't my favourite web browser by a long chalk, is actually performing well, and is certainly keeping up with my typing.
The battery life seems OK too. I'll test this a bit more over the weekend and update this with my thoughts on it, but looking good so far!
Update 04/02/2008
I've been pleasantly surprised with how well this runs. OK, so it's a bit iffy for YouTube, but that's more down to the display than the Laptop (lots of moving stuff tends to blur quite a bit). But beyond that small gripe the rest of it is fine and dandy.
Hibernate works well - it shuts down quickly and restarts from cold in well under 40 seconds. This is probably down to the fact that it only has 160 meg of memory to restore.
Browsing works well, both in FireFox and Internet Explorer. The wireless card has worked flawlessly - even during the kids mammoth CBeebies browsing session lasting a couple of hours.
Before anyone asks, no, I'm not becoming a Windows convert. If the wireless card had been supported properly in Linux I'd have still been using that, but until I get the chance to swap the card for something better then I'm pretty much stuck - especially as I'd need to prise the wife away from the laptop with a crowbar to get her off Ebay. . . .
A couple of things that are pretty good to install to get that good freeware feeling back:
Rocket Dock - A pretty good MacOS style dock copy. Although officially it needs a 500 processor (or higher) it works really well on a 433.
The Gimp - Needs no introduction really. My image editor of choice.
Open Office - The Microsoft beating free software office package (well nearly anyway).
To test the card out I decided to re-install Windows 98SE and test the card with that - but wouldn't you know it, I can't find where the install CDs have gone. Fortunately I'd a spare XP Pro license so for an experiment I've installed that instead.
The actual install was straight-forward, if a bit slow. I've got to admit I wasn't expecting too much performance-wise from this once it was installed. After all, a Celeron 433 with 160meg of memory is hardly an XP powerhouse.
How wrong I was.
It runs like a charm. It is fast to boot, all the hardware appears to be supported (mind you, I'd have been surprised if it wasn't) and after tracking down the driver for the WalkLAN card the wireless support is spot-on.
At the moment to stress-test the card I'm installing all the required updates to Windows XP (nearly 100 of them!) which should take over an hour to do. And while I'm doing that I'm also browsing the web, and writing this in Blogger. Internet Explorer, while it isn't my favourite web browser by a long chalk, is actually performing well, and is certainly keeping up with my typing.
The battery life seems OK too. I'll test this a bit more over the weekend and update this with my thoughts on it, but looking good so far!
Update 04/02/2008
I've been pleasantly surprised with how well this runs. OK, so it's a bit iffy for YouTube, but that's more down to the display than the Laptop (lots of moving stuff tends to blur quite a bit). But beyond that small gripe the rest of it is fine and dandy.
Hibernate works well - it shuts down quickly and restarts from cold in well under 40 seconds. This is probably down to the fact that it only has 160 meg of memory to restore.
Browsing works well, both in FireFox and Internet Explorer. The wireless card has worked flawlessly - even during the kids mammoth CBeebies browsing session lasting a couple of hours.
Before anyone asks, no, I'm not becoming a Windows convert. If the wireless card had been supported properly in Linux I'd have still been using that, but until I get the chance to swap the card for something better then I'm pretty much stuck - especially as I'd need to prise the wife away from the laptop with a crowbar to get her off Ebay. . . .
A couple of things that are pretty good to install to get that good freeware feeling back:
Rocket Dock - A pretty good MacOS style dock copy. Although officially it needs a 500 processor (or higher) it works really well on a 433.
The Gimp - Needs no introduction really. My image editor of choice.
Open Office - The Microsoft beating free software office package (well nearly anyway).
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