I know, this is actually slow and I could do it faster using Packetderm bandwidth, but I’m at home and fifteen years ago this would have taken me over a day. That is progress. Even ten years ago when the first invocation of cotse was made it did not have this kind of bandwidth. Now I have it at home.
This will be the story we tell our children. Gone are the “I had to walk both ways to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill…” tales of my parents, replaced with my “You kids are spoiled, I remember when we were lucky to have a 300 baud acoustic coupler connect. We used to listen to the whistles and could tell the connection we got by the sound of the whistle.”
Granted, I also remember three channels on the black and white TV and no computers, I may even have a TV in the closet with a pong line on it, but my mark on the door jam measuring our progress is bandwidth. Faster and cheaper. Fiber in the homes. Wireless faster than high cost wired connections of yesterday. Video now on my cell phone. These were dreams fifteen years ago, now taken for granted by my kids.
They get impatient with the download, “is it done yet dad”, while I am amazed at it’s speed. I have no doubt that the title of this post will be laughed at as slow in another ten years or so. It will probably be wireless speeds that do it too, with us even in our pocket and wearable devices.
Anyway, I never walked to school barefoot in the snow, but I certainly do remember that 300 baud acoustic coupler connection from my DECWriter to the University’s time shared Vax.
I went shopping the other day to buy a few necessities and saw that the grocery was getting rid of some rose stock. Two dozen, all colors of the rainbow, for only $10 (score!). Being a practical man I saw an obvious benefit to an inexpensive and unexpected two dozen roses. So I grabbed them.
I got home, clipped the ends, and I put them into a vase. Roses always go over well. I went into my office and pondered how I would redeem my brownie points. Unfortunately, every plan has a fatal flaw, especially in a house with cats and kids.
The cat thought only one thing, “he bought me a salad”. He was happy. He promptly ate his salad then apparently decided to see if he could find creative spots to vomit it back up. A nice floral pattern, of course, they were multicolored roses. Remember, I’m still sitting in my office, completely oblivious.
This is how it went when my girlfriend got home.
She takes off her shoes and steps in cat puke. I think the cat vomited on everything (I imagine that he ate more than the recommended daily allowance of roses for a cat). He even vomited from a beam ten feet up onto everything below. Yes, eewww.
The kid comes running out “Mom, Steve got a bunch of roses for only $10 (he said they were a score) and Oliver ate them then threw up everywhere. I tried to stop him.” I’m still sitting in my office, completely oblivious. I guess I needed to be kept in the dark about it until Mom could be shown.
It didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.
The VPN service was finally released and is off to a very successful start and it’s running better than we hoped. Thanks to all for your help in testing. By seriously overloading the server during the testing phase we were able to design and tweak our design so that we have a robust system that will keep burst speeds high for all. We are happy with the results and we think you’ll be happy with them too. One of the features I am most proud of I can’t advertise, but if you are a customer and e-mail me, I’ll tell you what it is.
Dedicated servers, sorry, but they are currently sold out. We hope to have more SMTP servers and proxy/VPN servers soon, but we did completely stop offering the full dedicated e-mail setups. We operate on slim margins and the manpower involved in those hit it’s saturation point (mainly because I needed to pull some resources back to the subscription service due to it’s growth). Perhaps in the future after we staff up we’ll offer them again.
Justice Department Wants Phone Locales Without Warrant
The article above should alarm you. Must everyone be reminded of three truths?
- Laws go on books much easier than they come off them
- Governments and power structures change. A benevolent one now does not mean the same holds true for the future.
- History repeats. Abuses of the past will reappear in the future.
Picture your worst view of the future in terms of who might hold political office or power (national, local, or municipal) and what they might do. Then give them the power to locate you any time they want. Sound unpleasant? Stop them now.
This is covered completely on our VPN pages, but I want stress it clearly that PPTP should only be used as a last resort. Even then, it should be used in conjunction with SSH tunneling as additional protection.
PPTP has major flaws. It’s encryption uses the password as the key and it’s datastream carries a retrievable password hash. To make that perfectly clear, someone can take your password out of the datastream and decrypt your traffic.
Granted, there is more to it than that. They must somehow intercept your traffic, but while complicated, it is not impossible (we have seen and stopped attempts at arp poisoning attacks). They also must be able to crack the encrypted password hash.
There are tools to crack this. However, a very complex password will take eons to brute force. A common word, even if you replace vowels with numbers (this is too common people), may be cracked in minutes.
OpenVPN is subject to none of these weaknesses. It uses very strong certificate based encryption (blowfish). Even if someone does intercept your traffic, they can gain nothing from it. Use OpenVPN over PPTP.
I cover helpdesk because I actually like it and it keeps me “in the know” with what users are saying and how they are using the service. Granted, when things are running well, helpdesk traffic is very light (we have good docs) and so it is easy, but even if it becomes more difficult with increased size I will remain in direct contact with it.
A business benefit to me covering the helpdesk is that nobody gets an auto-reply or clueless support drone. I know I hate those when I contact support somewhere, I don’t want this service to ever suffer from that. Support needs to know the service inside and out (and right now nobody knows it better than I do) and a person, not a script, needs to reply.
Another business benefit is one that transfers from the brick and mortar world, people like personal attention from the owner. There is little difference in the reasons behind why people choose a niche service and why they visit a mom and pop brick and mortar store.
If you want auto-replies and to talk to people named Bob with thick Indian accents, you go to the places so big that you are just a number . If you want a person and even better, one with a vested interest in the business beyond just getting a paycheck, you go with a niche service.
I finally have OSX to play with, this means that I can develop on this platform now too. This quickly allowed for the creation of a preconfigured install for OpenVPN like I did for Windows. This makes both platforms “install and use” with our service.
VPN is just about ready for release. Userland is finished, support docs and install pretty much done (though I will add some user contributed docs and a page on tweaks for mtu settings and fragmentation settings), automation and management is complete, all that is left is billing backend. Should make an early Feb release.
Pricing was revamped. I did a little due diligence and made sure we were faster and either cheaper or close enough that it was a negligible difference for a better speed than other similar services.
The testing has been a great help. It allowed me to work the numbers to keep the speeds very fast with a lower price point. It’s a slim margin, but we always operate on such. Not out to get rich (although it would be a nice change from hovering around poverty in favor of the service), but more important is great services at a good price.
I think you’re going to like our VPN. Major service wise, this completes Cotse and provides every tool you need, next will be enhancement of existing offerings, better default quotas, more options, and possibly a little eye candy (though as a purist the thought does turn my stomach a little, but it’s what the masses want).
The testing is going much better than anticipated even at double my original estimate per setup. Giving everyone their own dedicated virtual NIC worked great. In addition to being easy to provide bandwidth control, it also opens the door to many future additions.
I completed the documentation pages (well, it’s never really completed, but what I call ready). I’ve coded the management backend to also handle VPN for adds, removes, and expire/renewals (still need to be able to run it all from my cell phone). I just have to build out the billing side. Unfortunately, launching a new service keeps me hopping with support issues as well.
Tonight I relaxed by rebuilding a friend’s laptop, but back to the grind for me tomorrow. I need to wrap up the billing back end to release and of course when I started that I decided to redesign, so I added more work. When done with all that I get to ready OpenVPN2 for release and add some more machines to the mail setup.
I do more than the entire IT staff of companies I used to work for, why again did I choose my own business? Oh yeah, the freedom. That’s the summer 
The is a followup to “Brrrrrrrrr”
I did find stickers that say Scooter Mom. They are secretly going on the back of his truck as well as his bike. Hell, I’ll stick it on the back of his rig next run he makes if I can coordinate being there before he leaves. I’ll post pics too. I wonder how long I’ll get before he notices.
Flat bed your bike because it’s too cold, tsk tsk, we don’t ride Harleys, our bikes are far more than simple butt bling. They actually run in all kinds of weather, not just on nice sunny days. So Jimmy, you have earned the award of Scooter Mom for the illegal use of a flatbed with a Valkyrie.
