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I decided that I wanted to try upgrading my Shaw@home service from the “high speed” service to their new “Xtreme” package.  The new Xtreme package uses a new DOCSIS 2.0 Motorola modem that can handle better raw throughput.  I was hoping that the upgraded service would allow me to use more bandwidth without affecting my phone service quality, since we’re using Primus’ TalkBroadband service and it can be very bandwidth-sensitive.

Immediately after installing the new cable modem, I happened to get a call from my parents.  They could barely hear anything on their end of the call and ended up having to call me on my cell.  After some network diagnosis and many tech support calls to both Shaw and Primus, it turned out to be that the packet latency with the Xtreme service is much more variable than the high-speed classic Cybersurfr modem service.  When I had first installed the modem, my ping latencies to my default gateway were hitting times up to 600ms.

Thankfully, Shaw gave me my old cablemodem back without a hassle.  After reinstalling it, my VoIP quality is back to normal and I can make decent phone calls again.

Just a warning to anyone with Primus service considering an upgrade to Xtreme!

This one almost speaks for itself:

Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider

Forty-nine percent of 1,007 adult Americans said in phone interviews they believe Bush is a “uniter,” according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday. Another 49 percent called him a “divider,” and 2 percent had no opinion.

Slashdot is mentioning a new exploit that affects SP2 only.  It’s basically another “remote command execution” letting anyone run anything on your system.  No mention of it on blogs.msdn.com or Scoble’s weblog.

The sad thing is that those using XP SP1 aren’t affected.  It’s only those who are up-to-date with their patches.

One year ago I was showing people Firefox to see how nice the browsing experience was.  Six months ago I started pointing out how IE was fundamentally flawed and how Firefox is more secure overall, but let people make the final choice to switch on their own.  Now, I think I’ll be actively recommending that people still using IE switch over.  Might be time to discuss installing a user-agent filtering transparent web proxy at the office too.

Just to prove to myself that I’m still working on this cabinet, I started staining the sides with a black stain that I bought a few weeks ago at Rona.  This stuff should not be used in a poorly ventilated basement.

It’s looking good after the first coat, but it will surely need a lot more to get it the depth of black that I’m looking for.  I’ll probably end up having to put a really shiny topcoat on it to give it gloss I’m looking for.

I also discovered that I know absolutely nothing about sanding stuff properly.  Mental note: I need to research what the best grit of sandpaper is to use for the OSG plywood the cabinet sides are used for and what I should be using to prep the stain for a second coat.

After a month of playing around with the Primus service, it’s finally starting to settle into a stable and reliable home-phone system.  My major problems in the first few weeks were (in no particular order):

• (solved) Calls couldn’t be made after leaving the router up for a few hours.  All calls would result in a busy signal until the router was rebooted.  The problem with this was likely that the RTP connections were established by the first phone call and left up behind the firewall.  This problem was solved with a new WRT54GS router (see below).
• (solved) Making calls while Bittorrent or other P2P apps were running would result in crackling on the other side of the phone call.  This was fixed by properly setting up QoS on the WRT54GS.
• (solved) Phone calls were plagued every ten seconds or so by load popping noise on our side.  This happened whether it was plugged directly into the cable modem or behind a router.  From what I glean from Primus’ tech support and forums was that it was a bad interaction between their service and Shaw’s routers.  It seems to be working fine now.

All in all, the service is pretty good now.  I finished off my QoS tweaks this morning to get rid of any problems while we’re on the phone.  So far there don’t seem to be any excessive delay, crackling or echoing problems.

The biggest solution to the problem was changing out my old Linksys BEFSR81 router for a brand new WRT54GS.  I also took a leap and tried installing the upgraded Sveasoft firmware on it so I could take advantage of SSH and other utilities.

The BEFSR81 had a problem in gateway mode where it would drop stagnant connections from behind the gateway after a while.  This seems to be fixed in the WRT54GS (both stock and Sveasoft firmware versions).  In fact, I didn’t have to forward any ports whatsoever to get it working.  Very cool!

The other problem with the BEFSR81 was that it supported QoS, but not very well.  No matter what settings I tried, it wouldn’t give enough priority to the VoIP packets to survive while Bittorrent was running.  I had to set the upload/download maximums on the QoS page of the WRT54GS before I could get this to work reliably.  From what I’ve heard, a cable modem may queue up outgoing packets if you’re close to your maximum outbound rate.  This is pretty terrible for VoIP since packets need to reach the other side 100-150ms later to get a good quality call.

In the last couple of weeks, Primus has also been supporting the VMWI light on my Nortel Vista 350 properly.  The light comes on when we have voicemail and turns off once you’ve listened to it.  They seem to have preliminary support for emailing voicemail messages as .wav files, but it doesn’t seem to be working reliably.  It’s pretty nice to have an attachment in your mailbox to listen to whereever you are.  Saves having to remember the external voicemail access numbers as well.

I highly recommend picking up a WRT54GS or two and making these things part of your network.  It’s such a powerful little wireless router/gateway that it would be worth it at twice the cost.