Posts by: "laurence"

Getting around Starhub’s crappy home gateway.

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So you had a really awesome router, that had no issue with delivering a working signal into your room, or where ever your computer is. It has been working for a long time.

And one day, Starhub turns up saying that fibre is better, and they have a really awesome home gateway that they will give you for free, and you believed that crap. And you upgrade. And now, your home gateway disconnects every couple of minutes, and you can’t even achieve the speeds you used to, and the really awesome optical fiber box refuses you let you connect your old router (It’s the VLAN stuff that they have set up).

Had a chat with Rahul to try to figure out how I should get around this problem, because it’s really a pain in the ass, and decided to blog about it, simply because of the lack of documentation online.

  1. So if you have an old router previously that was working perfectly, check to see if it’s using 192.168.0.1 as it’s IP. If it is, change the home gateway’s one to 192.168.1.1, with 255.255.0.0 as the subnet, so that the home gateway and your home router doesn’t conflict.
  2. Next, connect to your home gateway via a ethernet cable, and deactivate the wireless (prevent interference with your router’s wireless).
  3. Then, connect your router to the home gateway.
  4. Next up, under Status->Lan Clients, check the IP address of your router.
  5. Go to Advanced->DMZ, enable it, select the internet connection for the WAN, and put in the router’s IP Address as the host.

And you can now connect to your old router and have a functioning wireless network in your house that doesn’t disconnect regularly.

Inferno

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So the speed of the MonoRail Transports (MRT) have allowed me to finish Inferno in 2 days.

Quick thoughts about it. Great storyline, great piece of work, but I have a nagging suspicion that I have read the story a few years before somewhere. It felt very familiar as I was reading it, except I couldn’t pinpoint where I had read it before. Perhaps it’s just the style of the writing that was familiar.

Overall, great book, worth a read if you are spending alot of time on the MRT.

Why I’m switching from AlienVPS to DigitalOcean

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So I’ve been a cloud nomad.

4 (or 3) years ago, I started thinking about hosting my blog, and using that as a motivation to pick up web programming. I bought the cheapest plan over at SingaporeHost.sg. 5GB disk space for SGD$8 a month. In fact, the earliest version of this blog was hosted there. After looking around, due to the fact that I decided I need to learn more than how to do programming in PHP, coupled with the fact that AWS had their 1 year free trial, I jumped over. Little did I know that their instances (micro-instance) had CPU stolen from them all the time. On top of that, the filesystem IO was starting to cost money, and there were days where I had around 50 cents worth of EBS IO. That was when I realised AWS wasn’t that good a deal. Then I jumped to Webfaction and it was really good. But I missed being root, and so I got another machine at AlienVPS. Was happy with their price points ($15/year, $4/month), and I got one of each VPS. They were using OpenVZ, and while that meant that some stuff required tricks to get around, you could get around it. Really slow customer support, but I reckoned with their price points, I shouldn’t expect too much.

Then came DigitalOcean. $5/month on KVM VPS with SSD for storage. It was the dream VPS service. Oh, and it’s on Tier 1 Bandwidth as well. And despite their cheap price, their customer service has an RTT of 10 minutes. Tried it on various occasions throughout the day, it has always been 10mins. And they even teach you how to set up VPN on their servers. What more can one ask for?

As of now, I have set up OpenVPN plus a couple of sites over to DigitalOcean, and I’m really glad I did so. And their new datacenter location in San Fran has an RTT of 200ms to SG, couldn’t have been happier.