Jon spends a supportive month tackling problems with a Vodafone base station, debugging tape drives and helping his sister log into her bank.
Jon spends a supportive month tackling problems with a Vodafone base station, debugging tape drives and helping his sister log into her bank
My village supposedly has excellent 4G coverage on Vodafone. I say “supposedly” because I just went to its Coverage Checker, entered my postcode, and its pin location on the map was a good eight miles away in the wrong village. Having poked the map to bring me back to my actual house, the diagram shows that I’m on the edge of a purple splodge of “4G Indoors and Outdoors” and a yellow splodge of “4G outdoors, variable indoors”. My iPhone 6 Plus gives me just one bar of signal when sat in my kitchen, so I think I’m more yellow than purple in my splodginess.
The solution to up those bars? Hop on my motorbike to the nearest Vodafone emporium to buy one of the company’s Sure Signal devices. The principle behind these devices is quite simple: inside this large wall-wart mains plug is an entire 3G GSM base station that provides you with your very own “pico cell” in your home. Your GSM phone call is wrapped up in IP packets, and then connects over your internet connection to Vodafone HQ. Your voice IP packets are then unpacked and your voice call is put back onto the phone network. It even appears to work for 3G data, which surprised me somewhat.
Clearly, I thought, such a technological marvel would be a truly horrible thing to have to set up. All that GSM-to-IP routing to worry about. But no, the lady in the shop positively trilled that this would be easy – “go to the website, pop in your phone number, and it just works”.
A miracle, surely, was going to occur. The fact that you can squeeze a 3G base station into a mains plug and then sell it for a few tens of pounds is something that makes my mind boggle. I was recently looking at 3G base station simulators for the lab, and the price tags started at a hundred grand and upwards. Of course, such a piece of test equipment is a whole lot more clever and configurable than my wall-wart plug, but the price differential was indeed startling.
I zoomed home on the bike, and was soon unpacking the Sure Signal unit. I went to the Vodafone website, logged in with my business account information, pressed the Sure Signal button and was taken to the registration page. Maybe Miss Trill was right, this was going to be easy. I was a little unsure why I’d magically moved from Vodafone Business to Vodafone Domestic, but no matter. I entered the serial number of the unit, pressed go and waited.
Then I faced a screen full of server-side gibberish as some process in a remote server decided that it was having a bad Saturday, throwing up pages of remote script code. I logged out, and logged back in again. I tried to re-register the device – that didn’t work because it was now stuck in some never-never land between unregistered and fully registered. The error messages from the website took on a whole new level of opacity at this point.
I decided to chance it and see if the device was actually registered, so went into the configuration part. Miracles from above; it was there. But it seemed my phone wasn’t registered to the device – you have to specifically register the numbers of all the Vodafone phones with which you’ll use it. My list was empty, and it flatly refused to add mine on, saying it was already there. In a fit of “tea and no-tea” logic inspired by the much-missed Douglas Adams, I decided that my phone was probably registered, but not in a way that could be shown.
I was right. An hour or so later, the lights stopped flashing on the Sure Signal unit; I had five bars of signal. Even better, attempts to call out and receive calls worked just fine. Whether this lasts is a complete unknown at the moment, but for now I can say: this month’s technical problem number one, solved.
Avast for Mac
The Facebook Messenger window pinged and it was my sister again. Enter technical problem number two. She couldn’t get onto her Barclays banking website from either her MacBook Air or her iMac. She had tried Chrome, Safari and Firefox on both machines, which was a level of initial self-help for which I expressed some admiration. I tried to log into Barclays myself, and had no issues from any of my machines. Clearly, there was an issue at her house.
I fired up TeamViewer and connected to her laptop. Sure enough, the problem was just as she described. I was receiving a nasty certificate error on the banking website. It had all the hallmarks of malware. So the next step was to try Malwarebytes, which found nothing. I then noticed she had Avast Free for Mac installed, so I ran that. It too found nothing. I remoted over to her iMac, and witnessed the same behaviour. Again, Malwarebytes found nothing. But I also noticed that Avast Free for Mac was installed on that machine as well. Could this be a common cause?
Testing this hypothesis was simple – uninstall Avast for Mac on one machine. A quick reboot later, and the web browsing sprung into life with a properly secured connection to Barclays. Remote back to the other machine that still had Avast installed, and the problem remained. Remove Avast for Mac on the second machine, and the Barclays website sprang to life.
“Maybe Miss Trill was right – setting up the Sure Signal was going to be easy”
Deciding where to pin the blame is somewhat obvious. Avast Free was doing something nasty with the core networking certificates on both machines, and blocking access to an entirely legitimate site. I’ve said it before, but when a tool starts to act just like the problem it’s claiming to fix, then my patience runs to zero. For completeness, I installed Avast Free Mac Security onto one of my machines – and it didn’t cause the same issue with the same build on the same day. But breaking three different web browsers on two different machines takes us beyond the realms of a singular mess-up and well into the area of a significant configuration or update problem.
Again, there’s much to be said for treating OSes and installations as disposable items, whether you have multiple virtual machines or simple hardware such as Chromebooks that you can blow away and start again.
This idea of disposable OSes ties in nicely with my third technical problem of the month. I’ve updated my Macs with the latest High Sierra version of macOS and, as I’ve detailed before, this comes with the new Apple Filing System. Apple is being cautious about the way it’s deploying this. For example, if your Mac has a Fusion Drive, which melds an SSD together with a hard disk, then the move to APFS is delayed. It was present in the betas, but presumably required further tweaking for Fusion Drives.
I’m about to go on two work trips that will take me away from the lab for over a fortnight. The first is to Germany, and the second is to Wolfram at Champaign, Illinois, home of the wonderful Mathematica software. More on its developers’ conference next month.
In the meantime, I needed to carry a whole pile of Windows 10 virtual machines with me. At some 50GB each, there were only so many I could carry on the fast internal storage of my MacBook Pro. So I invested in an external LaCie rugged hard disk. At 4TB, it has a useful amount of storage, and the presence of both Thunderbolt 2 and USB-C ports means it can connect at high speed to a host computer.
I formatted the LaCie using the new APFS format, and then decided it might be useful to use it as a Time Machine backup. But Time Machine simply refused to use the drive. After some digging, I found the answer: Time Machine makes huge use of hard links in the file system, and this isn’t supported by APFS. So you can’t currently set up a Time Machine store on an APFS formatted external drive. This heads-up might save you some time and hassle. I hope and expect that there will soon be a complete rewrite of Time Machine that will support APFS – but it clearly isn’t ready today.
Debugging a tape library
Onto my fourth and final problem – for this month, at least.
One of the archive formats we use in the lab is LTO-6 tape, housed in a 1U HP eight-tape library. It connects on SAS via a chunky cable to a PCI SAS card from Atto: the R680. This sits in a chassis that also has a PCI Thunderbolt card, providing the connection from Thunderbolt through to SAS. The box is then connected via a long Thunderboltover-fibre cable back to my iMac 5K workstation. This has proved reliable, and worked well every day using Retrospect for macOS as the backup software running on the iMac 5K.
But then something went wrong. The backup would start, the robotics would load the correct tape into the LTO drive, and a whole bunch of data would get written to the tape. Then, suddenly, something would reset and the whole tape library would disappear from the Thunderbolt bus. Nothing was reported on the HP tape library to indicate an issue like a faulty tape or a problem with overheating – the HP monitoring is done via a web interface on an Ethernet port, as you’d expect.
I decided that the first thing to do would be to update all firmware. It turns out that HP won’t let you have firmware updates unless you’re paying for support. But a nice tech-support chap was happy to make an exception for free, and that expensive component was updated. And yes, I’m getting the support contract back in place for this.
I contacted both Atto and Retrospect to see what they could advise. We updated the R680’s firmware, we put the Retrospect software into a high debug mode, and it became clear that something was resetting the R680 card. At this point, the best thing to do was to try swapping out the components. I changed the fibre Thunderbolt cable for a spare (yes, I’m mad enough to have a spare Thunderbolt-over-fibre cable), and I was going to put in the older Atto 1068 interface box; but it’s out of support.
So I bought a new Atto 2068 Thunderbolt-to-SAS interface box and plugged it all in. Problem solved: the backups now work and they shrug off the load of archiving 40 to 50TB of
“When a tool starts to act just like the problem it’s claiming to fix, my patience runs to zero”
data. Kudos to both Retrospect and Atto support teams who were thorough, effective and coherent. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” was uttered by neither parties. And to HP for coming up with firmware updates too. Yes, this is an expensive solution for a small business, but backup and archiving must work, even when it’s but one of the solutions you have to hand for this task.
My mission to remove as much Wi-Fi from our house is continuing apace. The outside garages are now connected with armoured Ethernet, and also a 40m section of fibre with Gigabit transceivers at each end. This allows me to tuck away a small Synology NAS in the garage, where it can hoover up all the security camera data, keeping that traffic away from the main networks in the house.
My final move will be to bridge the two FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) ADSL lines. Both give around 80Mbits/sec on download, because we’re fortunate to be very close to the green BT cabinet.
One line is from Merula in Huntingdon, which provides all my business connectivity. The other is from Sky. Siting all internal devices behind a load-balancing device would allow me to increase resilience and reliability. Of course, the local phone cable to the green box is the same for both services, as is the fibre into the BT box. So I have no resilience there. But it would provide greater protection against upstream routing and hardware failure – and that’s worth having.
iPhone 8, no; Apple TV 4K, yes
I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed by recent Apple launches. The iPhone 8 has a useful wireless charging option, but I don’t want to splash out the thick end of a grand just to get that feature. The iPhone X looks interesting, but I’m unsure about the removal of the home button. I still love my Watch 2, and you’d think that the LTE version would tickle all of my “shiny, must buy!” weaknesses. But it hasn’t.
Why? I’m on Vodafone, not EE. The LTE support doesn’t fall back to 3G, so it’s a chocolate teapot for those of us who live out in the countryside where 4G is a rare treat, not a daily assumption. I use my Watch all the time for making/receiving phone calls, but that’s via my 7 Plus phone. A new Watch with LTE would effectively work exactly the same way for almost all of the time. Oh, and it doesn’t roam either, so the LTE functionality on the Watch won’t work if I’m abroad.
All of which has left me feeling a little flat. Until I saw the Apple TV 4K, that is. We’ve recently upgraded to the full Sky Q system at home, and treated our kitchen/ lounge area to a 40in Samsung 4K HDR TV. This offers quite astonishing performance for around 500 notes. So the Apple TV 4K was of interest, especially since Apple announced that any movies you had already bought would be upgraded to 4K versions for free, if they were available in this format.
I confess that I mostly use my Apple TV for Netflix, although the new Samsung TV does that very well. And it’s fascinating to see how the Netflix app buffers the incoming data, slowly increasing the data rate and improving the picture quality. Maybe I should get out more often.
Anyway, the Apple TV 4K arrived, I plugged it in, and started to set it up. It mostly worked, but seemed rather sluggish. A poke around the Ethernet switch showed that the Apple box was connecting at only 100Mbits. Clearly, something was amiss. A quick change of the cable, and it perked up to full Gigabit speed.
“The Samsung’s picture quality via the Apple box was better than what I see at my local cinema”
The first film I went to check was the seminal Blade Runner. And in HDR 4K, the picture was eye-popping. I then decided to splash some cash on getting Prometheus in 4K. This should have worked, but the spinning download icon brought everything to a halt. It took two days before this bottleneck cleared. I can only assume that the 4K library wasn’t quite ready on the servers. But when it came, the picture quality was better than I see at my local cinema, and I don’t have to put up with people talking and munching popcorn.
However, I’m most intrigued by Apple’s promise of a free 4K upgrade for already bought material. How on earth did the company persuade the content owners to do this? There is prior form in the upgrade from iTunes music to iTunes Plus many years ago, where you could upgrade the quality of an album from 128Kbits/sec to 256Kbits/sec for a small amount of money. But this time the upgrade is free. Hmmm.
Is there a downside to this box? Well, yes – and it wasn’t what I expected. Having chosen 4K HDR, it seems that everything gets munged into that format irrespective of what it starts out as. Surely it would make more sense to have some sort of end-to-end control of what’s required,but that seems to be beyond Apple and the TV designers. So consider the settings you opt for – and be prepared for a bit of fiddling.