Using A VPN With A Tethered Wireless Broadband Connection

Posted by jerry as technology

I have a Blackberry 8703 from Verizon Wireless, and use it extensively.  I opted to buy the plan to use the Blackberry as a tethered wireless modem for a PC, for an extra $10/month.

I’ve used the blackberry as a wireless connection on many occasions, and it generally works pretty well, though often seems pretty slow.  One thing I had never been able to get working was the VPN client to my employer.  I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but one day I really needed to connect and had no other options.

Now, the VPN connection would establish, but I could not reach any systems on the company network.  I had spent a good amount of time as a network engineer in a former life, so I’m fairly adept at troubleshooting such things, despite my management lobotomy.

I opened up a DOS shell, and tried pinging the intranet web server  Sure enough, the pings were getting through.  But, I still could not get get a web browser to connect to the site.  After pondering it for a minute, I knew the answer.  I tried the ping again, but this time I set the packet size to 1500 bytes, the normal TCP maximum size.  Viola!  The pings did not get through.  I retried the ping, decreasing by 100 bytes each time, until I got to 1100 bytes.  At 1100, the pings worked again.

Next, I went out and found this document on resetting MTU size in Windows.  I followed the instructions in the section labelled “Change the MTU Settings for VPN Connections”.  I followed the directions to reset the VPN MTU to 1100 bytes.  A requisite reboot, and I was connected.

I have since observed that web browsing in general is much faster as well.  Originally, I had thought that the overhead of the VPN client was causing an overrun in the size of the packets, forcing them to be fragmented, which is generally not handled elegantly.

Hopefully someone is able to find this tidbit useful.

Maintaining Musical Groups As A Brand

Posted by jerry as finance

I was driving home the other day, listening to Squizz on XM. A new song started and a glanced down at the screen on my dash and saw that it was the group Dokken. I listened, but I didn’t recognize the song, though it was clearly Dokken. At the end of the song, the DJ announced ‘that was a new from Dokken’. Holy smokes, Dokken is still making albums!

I have a long drive, so my mind tends to wander. I started to ponder the question: “why don’t musical groups continue to maintain an ongoing brand, even after the original artists fade away?”, like Pantera and the Beatles. It seems that successful groups spend many years, and millions of dollars in building their brands, and that the brand essentially dies once the group disbands.

Allowing popular bands to dissolve is akin to the management of a successful company saying ‘well, that was quite a ride, time to go our separate ways’, and the company dies then and there. There is one clear problem with this example - musical artists continue to make money after the group disbands, because their works continue to sell without additional effort by the former group.

I suspect that the major problem with the continuity of musical groups is the pervasive use drugs, and general bad behavior and even worse business decisions.

Lowering The Price Of Oil Through Supply Increases

Posted by jerry as finance

I have read and heard repeatedly by analysts, economists and politicians that say “drilling for oil is not going to do a thing for oil prices now”, mostly in response to the latest actions by George W Bush to allow off-shore drilling again.

I understand the logic behind those comments. Drilling for oil now means that we may have more supply in 10 years, because of the time to actually find where it is, and the infrastructure build duration. But, that assumes the price of oil is simply a matter of supply and demand. We have more demand than we have supply.As much as many people don’t want to hear it, we DO have enough supply, on a daily basis at least. It’s true that we are burning through a resource that will one day be completely gone, but we’re not there yet.

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What To Do About The Shortage Of IP Addresses

Posted by jerry as technology

For years now, we have heard about the impending end of the Internet as we run out of IP addresses. For a while, it was so persistent and frequent, it became background noise to me. The only way to save the Internet is to move to IPv6, the story goes.

I’ve spent a lot of the past decade in various networking, programming and technology management roles, and dabbled a bit in web hosting work. One thing that is obvious to me is that we are not going to be moving wholesale to IPv6 any time soon.

I was surprised to see an article the other day bringing up the dreaded doomsday of the Internet, predicting that we have 3 years until the end.

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