Tag Archives: technology

My Nokia E7 died

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Early in the monday morning I picked up my E7 to use it for both phone calls and as a GPS for my trip in Germany and I’ve found a bad surprise.
For no apparent reason it was asking me to insert the USB cable and then to disconnect the device no matter if I had or not something connected.
Acknowledging it was not helping: in a few seconds it was back with one of the two requests.
I’ve tried all the possible combinations suggested in this thread on nokia.com, but nothing worked.
I hope to get it fixed under warranty 😦

December update: I got it back fixed under warranty. Horray!

Vodafone station issue: round 2

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Today I had again issues with the voice calls using the phone connected to the VF station.

People told me that the my voice recalled them the creature of the black lagoon and that Skype voice quality was way better.
It’s very annoying.

I know that my phone is not directly connected to the PSTN but is actually converted to VOIP by Vodafone’s own router, but this should be transparent to the me as is a VF technical implementation decision and not a hack on my side.

What is interesting is that it looks like the issues started after i got the line upgraded from 7mbit/s to 20mbit/s (not really achieved yet)
Tomorrow I’ll do a test with another phone: if I can’t sort this out soon I’ll revert back to the 7mbit/s and save the money extra money of the nominally better and faster line.

If anyone would like to take a test of the 20 mbit vodafone and share the results it’s possible to join this speed wave

UPDATE: on Friday afternoon (October 19th) the line drown in the black lagoon altogether.
No ADSL and no voice at all for about 30 minutes.

UPDATE: on Saturday evening (November 17th) no ADSL again. Vodafone’s reliability is way worse than what I get with Wind/Infostrada.
To make things worse it’s not possible for the end-user to tell to the Vodafone Station to connect at a lower speed in an attempt to improve reliability.

Vodafone station issue

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Today my home network had quite a few problems.
First Vodafone’s station decided that for my VOIP line was ok to abandon me in the middle of a conference call.
It turned out that it was not a temporary issue: the interface was reporting that everything was ok yet I was unable to place or receive other calls.

The hiccup of Vodafone’s device also got my dual wan router confused: even having a second WAN line working fine I was no longer able to access the internet.

I felt positive about the VF Station so I have reset everything else first: the PSTN+VOIP phone (Siemens Gigaset A580IP), the dual wan router (Netgear FVS336Gv2) and the network interface on the notebook

At the end pf the troubleshooting a physical power off of the station was needed to bring the service back.
Quite inconvenient as the device is located in a cabinet and not readily accessible and it’s not the fist time this happened to me.

Firmware upgrade frenzy during the weekend: Nokia N9, Synology DS411Slim, Netgear FVS336Gv2

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The Nokia N9 looked like if it was running on windows 7: over 280MB of updates. Twice.
Hopefully I’m on the most recent version now and, yes, email synch seems to be faster that when unboxed as promised by the update description.

The upgrade of the DS411Slim doesn’t look like has fixed my issues with slow transfer rate from the encrypted volume.
Even worse: I’ve had the time to test with the regular volumes and it looks like they are slow too.
I’ll post more detail on my findings once I’m done with the backup od the encrypted volume and can remove it from the NAS.

The FVS336G was working stable (with the exception of a relevant slowness in managing the WAN interface up-down-up transitions) before the upgrade and seems stable now too.
I decided to give a try at the updated FW (3.0.8.12) : the list of fixed problems in this release was impressing and I was on an 18 months old version (3.0.7-24)

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: DSM 4.0 not helping performance for me

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I’ve written recently about the poor performance writing to and reading from an encrypted volume on my Synology DS411Slim.
In an attempt to improve the bad numbers I’ve decided to take the risk of updating from a firmware that I knew was working for me (DSM 3.2) to a more recent one (4.0)

The interface looks sleeker than the previous one, but unfortunately there it is no improvement at all in writing to the encrypted volume.

DSM 4.1 is available too, I’ll likely give a try at it too as there are no major reports of problems.

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: major negative impact also in reading.

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A few days ago I created an encrypted volume on my DS411Slim and reported a major degradation in writing speed.
I hoped that reading was maintained in the original ballpark, but this is not the case.
12.5MB/s is all I can get and is very bad in comparison with the former 70+ MB/s

Since my first post I did some research and, according to Synology’s own tests, I should get about twice the current speed.

I’ll give a try at a more recent version of DSM (I’m on the stock 3.2) to see if it provides better performance.
I’m usually a bit reluctant to update the firmware of working devices, but the opportunity of getting better performance on the 50GB backups is pushing me in this direction.

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: an unpleasant surprise

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Some time ago I built an encrypted volume on my small nas from Synology and today I did the first real test.
I’m backing up an entire volume with Disk2VHD, a nice free utility from Microsoft’s Sysinternals tools to make online volume snapshots.
I did this in the past several times from the same machine on a regular non-encrypted volume on the same nas obtaining about 37 to 40 MB/s of sustained writing speed.

Given the hardware encryption engine included the nas I was expecting a similar performance with the encrypted volume but this is not the case.
The speed is down to 7MB/S, a sharp 80% loss.
I’m running DSM 3.2
I wonder if this is common/expected or not.
The backup will have to be again a nightly activity until I find a way to get back the high-speed when using the encryption 😦

Update: I’ve had the opportunity to test large reads too and it’s not looking good

 

Packard Bell iMedia I6657IT: you get what you pay for. And nothing more.

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I helped a friend to pickup a new pc for his video editing hobby.
He was on a budget yet needed some muscle so we picked up this system (4-cores i5 and 8GB of RAM) even if we weren’t able to find online a review of the system.

After just a couple of days the box arrived from Amazon and we unboxed and installed the system last Friday.

On the plus side: the system has a nice HW specification for a good price, is compact, mechanically robust and extremely silent.

On the minus side: it ONLY has what is implied by the advertised HW.
We opened the system to add the HDD from the older PC and found out that there is no space to put it.
But this is a piece of the expansion problem: only the SATA headers for the included HDD and DVD are soldered on the motherboard.
The same cost-saving approach is used for the other interfaces that are common on DIY core i5 system.

There it is one PCIe 1x slot available that could be used to add SATA and or USB3 ports.
We should be able to go for an external high speed enclosure to expand the system in the future.