Weird Network Problem at Home

Well, I got home from work the other night, and proceeded to fire up my PC to check my email.

Hmmm.....no network connectivity.

I powered up my Ham Radio PC to see if it had a network connection, and got the same type of error message.

I went and reset the Ethernet switch in my little "Network Closet", and things worked for about 2 minutes, and then the network connection dropped out.

About this time, my stepson arrived home, and said "Hey, could you check the Internet for me? I can't get on".

I told him I was in the process of doing that, and went and power cycled our Verizon router, and waited for it to come back up.

STILL no Internet connectivity, so then I tried to connect to my weather server, which is loacted in the living room, but on a different segment of our LAN.

Uh-Oh.....can't get to it, either. Hmmm....my little $20 "Dynex" Gig-E switch in the closet must have rolled over and gone casters up.

Since my Audio/Video PC is still set up on the dining room table, I powered it up, and was able to get on the Internet to see what Best Buy had in stock for a new Ethernet switch. I would up buying a Netgear 8-port switch like the one I have on my desk in the Radio Room to tie everything together with, and proceeded to swap out the "dead" Dynex switch.

Oh, boy......STILL no Internet access from the Radio Room.

Thinking perhaps the cable from the router to the switch had gone flakey, I then pulled the cat6 cable going to the router, and ran a cable directly from the router to the switch on my desk.

STILL no Internet! I went back to the living room, and tried connecting to the Home Theater receiver and/or the Oppo Blu-Ray player (they're both "Net Aware"), and discovered I couldn't reach either of them.

Hmmmm...something is definitely rotten in the network segment with the Home Theater, Radio Room, and stepson's bedroom, but a direct connection to the router works, as my wife's PC, and the Audio/Video editing PC have full connectivity.

Back to the network closet, where I unplug everything except the cable back to the router, and the cable to the Home Theater gear, which has it's own little D-Link 4-port 10/100 switch.

NOW I can get to the Onkyo receiver and Oppo Blu-ray player from either PC that has a direct connection into the router.

I reconnect the cable to the Radio Room segment and all works well.

I reconnect the cable to the back bedroom, and all works well.

I reconnect the cable to stepson's bedroom, and BLAM.....the whole network GOES DOWN.
And for the first time I noticed via the LED's on the network switches, that there's a tremendous amount of traffic flying around.

I pull the cable to stepson's bedroom, and all the traffic disappears.

HMMMMMM......WTF is going on in there? His PC and his X-Box are turned OFF, and I know I have the BIOS in his PC set so you can't remotely hit the PC with a Magic Packet to turn it on.

X-Box go berserk? Cable get crushed/shorted?

I go into his room, and he helps me pull his PC from under the desk, and I see the special Netgear "Home Theater and Gaming Series" Ethernet switch I bought for him some time ago. This switch has the traffic on certain ports prioritized, so that your X-Box or PS3 gets priority over any other device connected to it. It supposedly reduces the "Ping Times", something critical for networked games, but otherwise it's just an Ethernet switch.

It has five ports. One port goes to the Network Closet in the Radio Room, one port goes to his PC, and one port goes to his X-Box.

But all 5 ports have cables in them. It's then I notice that two of the ports are "bridged" with a yellow cat5 jumper cable.

I seem to remember having a yellow Cat5 cable in there so his girlfriend could use her laptop until we got all the wireless issues solved, but I thought I'd pulled it out after we got her laptop working on the wireless network segment.

I ask him why he has the cable connecting the two "unused" ports, and he says he doesn't know anything about it, but then his girlfriend chimes in and said she saw the free end of the yellow cable "just dangling there" and decided it had to go *somewhere*, and since it looked like it would fit into the unused port, she plugged it in!

Now, I don't remember specifically why you never connect two ports togther, as it's lost among all the dust of my brain somewhere under "Networking 101", but I know it's a Bad Thing to do so.




Ahh....found it. It's called a "Switching Loop" and causes the switch to broadcast out of *every* port it has,  causing a "Broadcast Storm", and will bring even a well-managed network to it's knees.


As soon as I unplugged one end of the mysterious yellow cable, "traffic" on the LAN went to about zero, and all connectivity was restored.

In retrospect, I should have fired up Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) on my Linux box and observed what type of traffic was bringing the network down, but by the time I "fixed" the problem, and restored everything to normal, it was 2130, and my bed time!

Happy New Year!

Now get back to work!

You have tens of MILLIONS of welfare scammers, disability scammers, Social Security scammers, and ALL of Washington D.C. to support!

Video Project In The Home Stretch....

And yow...I learned more than I really wanted to, but what I needed.

After fighting for a day with trying to get the project exported to Adobe Encore, I just gave up, and figured I'd just burn the compled file, already in MPEG-2 (DVD) format to a disk.

That worked, and it's playable, BUT.....

It didn't have any menus, and required me to do some things with my Oppo BDP-83 Blu-Ray/DVD player that *might* not be possible to do with other players in order to get the disk to play.

Since I'm not sure how many copies of these my brother-in-law will make, I figured I'd better do my best to make these a "universal" disk that will play in any player.

Off to the Adobe Encore forums!

Adobe has some very nicely done on-line tutorials, so for most of today I've been reading, experimenting, and most importantly, LEARNING how to use all the software I have.

It's NOT real intuitive, and the Dynamic Linkage between the two programs has to be done correctly, or *nothing* happens.

Well, I finally figured that part out, and how to make those nice menus with "Play", "Set Up", "Chapters", "Extras", and all that stuff you see when you pop in a store-bought DVD and play it.

Fortunately, Encore has a "Check Build" function you can invoke that checks all the various things required to get a functional DVD built, and boy, did it come in handy.

After reading all the warnings I got the first time I ran it, and spending several mores hours reading the forums, I was able to understand and fix all the warnings and errors it generated when it checked my project.

The first disk id rendering now, and I should be able to burn it and test before the end of the year......!

After that, assuming it plays OK, I "just" have to assemble the various sequences for each disk I want to author, export them from Premiere Pro to Encore, and build them.

And I'll probably forget all this stuff in two weeks, and go through the hair-pulling routine again the next time I use the software.

CWII Waiting In The Wings?

The Silicon Graybeard had some links to some very interesting reading.

The first is a great piece over at Free North Carolina, and the other a piece over at Angry White Dude's place.

Go over to Graybeard's place and RTWT, as he's much better at writing about this stuff than I *ever* will be.

MY take on things?

I don't really know what will happen, but if Big Brother starts pushing too hard, I think we'll see a lot of Matt Bracken and Vince Flynn "Term Limits" stuff start to go down.

One thing to keep in mind, is that even if you back off a rattler after you've annoyed him, he still might strike.

And since the dunderheads in power are too stupid or too ideologically driven to back off......

Video Project Progress

Well, I *finally* have all twelve tapes on hard-disk, a process called "Ingest" in the biz.

I had some real hair pulling moments doing this, as somewhere along the line, the audio settings in Windoze got changed, and seven of the twelve tapes recorded without sound.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

After I re-recorded them and stopped the capture, Premiere Pro would hang up with a "Conforming XXXX.AVI" message, and the progress bar indicating it was saving to disk never budged. After a few minutes of this, the program would stop responding, and die.

Took me most of a day, a lot of head scratching and book reading (Yes, I *do* RTFM), and prowling the Adobe Premiere Pro forums, but I figured it out. The bit rate between what Windoze had the sound card set to, and what Premiere Pro was using, didn't match, causing a huge problem that Premier Pro tried to correct, by transcoding the audio (part of the "Conforming" process) to the bit rate used for DVD.

WELL.......if the bit rates are different enough, it can take forever to resample the original audio stream, and convert it to the new rate.

And in some cases, it simply can't be done without causing big "holes" in the data stream, which the program won't accept, and so you spiral down in flames, waiting for the job to finish.

SO, now that I have all the tapes *properly* recorded to disk, I assigned the "In Points" and "Out Points" to each of the 18 "clips" I made from the twelve tapes. The "Ins" and "Outs" are simply the points at which the video starts to play, and are used to eliminate the first few crummy/bad/distorted frames of video that the camcorder produces when it first starts to record. They're used for other things, like selecting where you want to do other stuff, but for now that's how I'm using them.

Now "all" I have to do is to assemble the clips in a sequence, add the transitions ("Fade To Black" stuff) between the clips, make sure the completed sequence will fit on a DVD, and save each sequence as a "Project".

That will complete the editing portion of the project, and I can go on to "author" the DVD using Adobe Encore, and then burn the DVDs for my brother-in-law. He says his kids, now fully grown with their own children, have never seen the tapes.

The reason I built a studio-grade PC hardware and software suite, was that I wanted to be able to capture HD video from the Component Video jacks on the back of my DirecTV box, back when I had DirecTV.

I literally bought EVERY "consumer grade" video capture device on the market, and tried them all. Some of them has S-Video inputs, and a couple had "component video" inputs, and they ALL used USB to connect to the PC.

They ALL sucked, producing at best, video that looked like a VHS tape.

So, I bit the bullet, and bought a Matrox RT.X2 video capture card, which came bundled with a full version of Adobe Premiere Pro.

While this is still a top-notch video capture and editing system, times have changed, and now there are little stand-alone boxes that will actually do HD video, and they cost a whole lot less than what I paid for my hardware.

But then again, we're paying about the same for 40MB fiber-to-the-home as I was for my dual ISDN lines that gave me 128kB back in 1997, and those dollars were a whole bunch bigger.

Merry Christmas, Everybody

One of my "other" favorite Christmas songs is Gregg Lake's "I Belive In Father Christmas".

When he first released this song he caught a lot of flack for being anti-religious, anti-Christmas, and a whole lot of other things.

I caught him by surprise, as he intended the song to be about how Christmas has changed, and had become too commercialized.

The lyricist, Peter Sinfield, said that he considered it to be about the loss of innocence, and childhood beliefs.

Lake said later in an interview:

"I find it appalling when people say it's politically incorrect to talk about Christmas, you've got to talk about 'The Holiday Season.'
Christmas was a time of family warmth and love. There was a feeling of forgiveness, acceptance.
And I do believe in Father Christmas."

Doesn't sound "anti-anything" to me.

May you and yours have a very joyous Christmas, and a very Happy New Year!


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They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth

I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell

And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked to the sky with excited eyes
'till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'd be snow at Christmas
They said there'd be peace on earth
Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve

Christmas Project

For my brother-in-law.

He and his wife have a stack of VHS tapes that they've wanted to get archived to DVD for quite some time now. I loaned them one of my "spare" VCR's so they could sort through their tapes after the VCR they had died, and I couldn't fix it.

They went through ALL of the tapes they had, and found the ones with their kids growing up, and brought them over before I went out on the last launch.

Since I have professional ("Studio Quality" as of 2005) video capture equipment, and a couple of studio-type editing decks with S-VHS outputs, I got started on the project Thursday afternoon.

I hadn't fired up the PC that runs my audio and video capturing software since last January when I digitized a whole stack of LP's I have, so I spent most of Friday just updating all the software. The PC is running Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit, and after I hooked everything up and powered up the PC, Windows informed me I did NOT have a "Genuine" copy.

WTF???

Then I realized I had no network connection, having plugged the cable into an "Uplink" port on the router.

OOPS!

Once I got an Internet connection, it called home to the mothership, and the "NOT GENUINE WINDOW$" warning was replaced by a "Validation Period Has Expired. Would You Like To Validate This Copy Of Windows?", which is a whole lot better than "contact us to buy a new serial number"!

Turns out the PC hadn't been online in so long, and was missing so many OS updates, that Micro$oft didn't know what to do with it.

SO.....after spending most of yesterday updating the OS and most of my utilities, I had things running smoothly again.

Then I realized I *really* need two monitors to do video capture and editing with, so off to Best Buy. I lucked out on the monitor, and was able to get a 27" LG that they had just put on the shelf for $100 off! It had been a return from somebody who bought it, didn't have the right hardware to use it with, and dragged it back to the store for an exchange.

It "only" does 1920 x 1080 (they made the pixels bigger), but it's beautiful, and has an LED backlight, so it's very light, thin, and puts out practically no heat.

And while I was there I picked up a newer video card, an ATI Radeon HD7700.

I usually get NVidia-based cards, but ATI/AMD has a very slight edge in displaying video, as opposed to NVidia, who rocks the gaming world, and has FAR better Linux support.

So I've now captured about half the tapes, and have a rough idea how I'm going to organize them on the DVD's I'll author using all the Adobe software I have.

I might even get creative, and add some period-correct music for the opening titles, as each tape has the date on it.

I won't be done by Christmas, but I should have a nice stack of DVD's for them for the new year.

And yes, they both realize that just because it's on a DVD doesn't mean it will be "DVD Quality", although I'll clean up the color balance and fix as much as I can.

I've done video capture and conversion for people before, and some of them simply didn't understand that you're strictly limited by the quality of the source material. Somehow they thought that putting their old tapes on a DVD would magically make them "DVD Quality".

The old adage of "Garbage IN => Garbage OUT" definitely applies!

Back to work......

New Shoes for the Jeep

I knew I needed tires, as the Goodyear Wrangler SR-A 245/65R17's that it came with were just about down to the tread wear indicators.

Then last Sunday, during the Great Battery Expedition, I was rounding a familiar turn in the rain, and the front end washed out and started to slide.

Yes, my Jeep has full-time AWD, but when the tires are turning, and applying power, and worn, they'll skid in the rain.

So, since I'd been researching tires for a few weeks, I decide on what brand and size to buy.

The OEM tires were 9.8" in section width, 65 in aspect ratio, and 29.5" tall. The rolling radius gave them 702 revolutions per mile.

I wanted a wider tire, with close to the same revs/mile, so I started looking at the tire manufacturer's websites to get the specs I needed.

A 275/60R17 would give me a tire about 10.8" wide, with close to the same revs/mile (697, a few less), and I settled on Bridgestone Dueller H/L Alenza tires.

The local tire place didn't have them, but they were in the warehouse, and they had them the next day bynoon.

I went in at 1pm, and was out by 1:45 with 4 new tires, mounted, spun balanced, with free rotation and balancing for the life of the tire.

I also spent an extra $23 per tire for a "certificate" that will replace the tire, for free, if it gets damaged in the shoulder or sidewall where it can't be repaired.

So far they seem to be pretty good tires. The ride is better, and they're a bit quieter than the Goodyears.
And they look great on the Jeep! Just enough extra width to make it look a bit more "serious", and with the 60 aspect ratio they're just as tall, filling up the wheel well nicely.

I do NOT cotton to those running around in SUV's with the 22" rims and the super low profile "rubber band" tires! The first curb they clobber will chew up the rim, and probably wipe out the sidewall.

And I always take it easy the first few hundred miles on new tires, checking the pressure, and retorquing the rims after a 100 miles or so.

Go Read This. NOW

H/T to Old_NFO.

An excellent response as to WHY we should have armed people in schools.

They don't have to be the teachers, but somebody on-site MUST be armed to prevent further mass killings like the recent one in Snady Hook.
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Jew Without A Gun

Tip of the hat to wirecutter, who got it from his friend Sammy.

I am republishing my three-part series about the LA Riots of 1992 in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets. It was a defining moment in my life.
I’m reposting this series as a cautionary tale because the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre has sharpened the claws of the statist utopians, whose ultimate aim is to disarm law-abiding American citizens.
Just as Obamacare has nothing to do with health, and cap and trade has nothing to do with so-called global warming, anti-gun laws have nothing to do with saving children’s lives.
It’s just another opportunity for the left to centralize power.

Go here to read the rest.

 It's excellent!

I remember the 1992 LA riots. I was living in Redondo Beach at the time, and we could see the smoke rising in LA quite clearly. Since we were under a sunset-to-sunup curfew, we made sure we went to the store during the day and laid in a decent supply of water and other food.
My roommate, my best buddy from college, had his Remington 1100 that he used to shoot skeet with, and we spent part of the day cleaning it, and swapping out the choke tube for the "Improved Cylinder" one he had.

And we went to Turner's and grabbed several boxes of 00 Buck, and a couple of boxes of slugs........


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Doomsday? We're Still Here!

I got an email from one of my Ham Radio buddies in New Zeland a few hours ago.

He said "We're Still here. What did you expect?".

One of the radio clubs in Arizona ran a special event station with the callsign N0D, for "Now Zero Days".

I tried to contact them, but they had such a pile up I gave up!

Here's their QSL card:

Anyway....assuming we *are* still here on Friday, I get to have the pleasure of getting 4 new tires for my Jeep!

Hope it goes better than the battery escapade did.....
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