I’ve been a little lax in properly reading my RSS feeds of late. But this article on Australia being 11th in broadband penetration caught my eye before I used the magic mark all as read.
While I am entirely hesitant to truly believe what is said in this article: 1) because it seems deliberately vague; and 2) There are no references nor can I find another correlating story. If it is true then my initial response must be: being 11th doesn’t mean it’s good enough. But then one should look a little deeper at the top 10 results: South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are very different, demographically and geographically, from Australia you’re really comparing apples and oranges which, we all know, just doesn’t work.
Compare two metro areas: Sydney and Seoul. I know that Sydney will have worse services at higher prices. Which obliterates the “is good enough” argument. I feel that access should be equivelent – it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. And then to bring it home: Sydney vs Cobar; no points for guessing the outcome there.
All this got me thinking though: I just managed to crack the 3 digit friends size on Facebook (shameless linking). If all we’re generally using our broadband for is socialising: do we need 100Mbps or FTTH? No I don’t think so. And believe me I like my internet(s) to be fast.
That’s apathy though.
To Senator Minchin: it’s not a competition, it’s about having good service for reasonable price, and those stats to be globally equivelent. Let’s pick the technology we should have in place nation wide and implement it.
Everyday Life facebook, internet, nbn
I really like pfsense it makes a really good firewall, router, vpn connector – alone or together. The web interface is intuitive and the first-run wizard “just works”. I am using it to run an OpenVPN VPN.
OpenVPN comes with a feature called “TLS Auth”: which basically uses TLS to encrypt the SSL handshake between client and server. Ok that wasn’t basic: makes saying hello safe. However the pfsense GUI for configuring an OpenVPN server does not, yet, support tls-auth. As documented in the previous link you can add custom configuration options and manually create the file until v1.3 is released.
Here’s the point: The pfsense + openvpn boot scripts will write the OpenVPN configuration files and security certificates to: /var/etc/openvpn_serverX.* (X being the instance number). So for consistency you might be inclined to create your tls-auth file as /var/etc/openvpn_serverX.tls.
DON’T!
The /var/etc folder gets cleared on reboot. Which is a feature of pfsense’s PHP init scripts + in hind sight sensible.
So today’s lesson is: When manually specifying tls-auth support for OpenVPN on pfsense-1.2.X put the tls-auth file in /etc/openvpn_serverX.tls so that it is persistent.
Work openvpn, pfsense
The government announced NBN2 and the globe kept spinning; nothing new to see here. However we (as in Australia) got a regulatory review and that was probably a good outcome. As I’ve been half following the NBN in the news I’m finding some of the review findings/submissions interesting. However there are some things that just make me want to go into cryogenic stasis – I might see something change that way.
To think that this is even a source of contention is rediculous. The practical requirement, in my opinion, of getting HIGH speed internet(s) is Fiber to the x, FTTN being the most likely for a first build out, which means optical fiber needs to be run to every pit of every exchange. (NB. I refuse to use the word broadband as it is really a description of relative technologies; not a service).
The risks of having hanging cables are many. Downtime from damage is a biggie. But that is entirely irrelevent. Pits can flood shorting out the copper circuits; someone can dig before dialing; etc… and security wise: it’s not like the current copper network is at all protected from someone who knows how to patch a copper pair – having said that optical fiber splicing is arguably harder so that’s a plus for “back to the exchange”.
None of those risks qualify my statement of rediculous though.
We have perfectly functional cabling conduit and other accesses for rolling out FTTN. The position should be they will be used. To all the people involved: Get over the bureaucracy and get something done for once. Conroy/DBCDE: buy back the wholesale stuff from Telstra – that’s the governments penalty for not seperating during the privatisation; Telstra shareholders: set a price for the buy out – consider it a forced buy out or unfriendly takeover if you will but take a spoon of toughen up: other countries privatisation arrangements seperated wholesale and retail from the outset; Telstra was a bubble that is now going to either burst or be popped; and that writing was on the wall from day one.
In summary: there shouldn’t be an option. It’s rediculous.
In The News dbcde, internet, nbn, networking, telstra
Back in the good old days of being a full time student I was pretty geeky/nerdy (which ever you feel works). I had my fingers in all sorts of random projects + I had a room of computer hardware that I could use to build something fun, cool, useful or random. Once I started working it became hard to be as dedicated so most of that stuff went away 
…
Now I’m finding that work leads me to implement solutions that, can be bought off the shelf, but often are WAY beyond our budget (like 10 times beyond considerable). I’ve also found that I miss having my Huawei E960 to “hack” – just for fun and because it looks like someone might finally have a working toolchain, maybe.
Which brings everything in full circle: what I wonder is whether I should re-take up some involvment in open source projects, building custom hardware products, etc… I am not overly good at business marketing; I just don’t have the salesman gene. So there is limited fiscal reward. Work needs some of it: but there is danger in having an entirely custom built with no community support product. I believe in open source so contributing back is a good thing in my opinion (i.e. that’s a positive).
Where do I start? Hmmm that question is one that drives me to get out of the technology field all together. Which leaves me thinking that perhaps I need to find project or product that I’m truly passionate about and start on it as opposed to asking an open ended question.
And then sometimes it would be nice to simply preach the gospel and see where life goes.
Everyday Life random
It has been a little over two months now since I wrote anything of substance. A “busy” time. Or when not busy: complicated. You get that. It’s all good. So what do I mean by the subject? Well that’s relatively simple.
Actually no it’s not. Hmmm. This was meant to be an easy post before bed. Read more…
Everyday Life kokoda, prue, rickshaw
If you are using the Wordpress plugin Contact-Form-7 on a Webserver that is not configured as a mail server you will get an error.
By default the error is: Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.
The only solution I have found is to install, on my Ubuntu Server(s), a sendmail provider (i.e. sendmail, exim, postfix, etc…). After which the error goes away.
Everyday Life email, php, wordpress
After my little rant I decided to look deeper into the history and workings of the current political system. Which turned into more of a deeper look into different political systems, strengths, weaknesses, and how they fit in with my particular view points. But once I got passed that I started reading about the Philosophy of Democracy. You know what: Democracy is good!
I know. That’s not an overly astounding conclusion. But it is worth-while questioning if the system you have always known is actually correct.
I’ve spent three days reading about Australian Federation and the Australian Constitution. I can hardly summarise that. However I have come to understand I would need to change the Australian Constitution in order to fully enact my more radical ideas. Such an action is not unprecedented; and even allowed for in the Constitution. But requires an enormously intricate majority vote: Majorities in both Houses of Government plus a people’s majority vote plus a majority of state based majorities.
Of course the only real way to achieve that is to be in a position to introduce a bill for referendum into the sitting government… Where I go from here I don’t know just yet. But I feel strangely invigorated to “try and make a difference”… which could make the next few years very interesting.
Everyday Life politics