Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Chromebook CR-48

Guess who got a Chromebook today?!  So far I really like it. I’m trying to get my stuff all “in the cloud” but it’s taking awhile to figure out the best way to move everything.

The great things about the notebook are:

  • it’s size – Nice and thin…could be lighter but not bad at all.  Perfect size for a “workable” machine.  They didn’t try an be an iPad clone and I appreciate that.
  • physical appearance – It’s one sexy beast.  Love the simplified keyboard and the fact that all the buttons look the same.
  • simplicity – This is more a comment about the OS, but it’s dead simple to use and figure out.
  • guest mode – Nice touch. I like that I can give it to anyone and they can mess with my stuff.
  • easy of use – Goes hand in hand with simplicity, but it’s worth commenting that they really went the extra mile to make it simple to use.
  • potential – This device is the future.  That’s clear to me now.
  • battery life – nuff said.  8+ hours and still cranking along

The things I’ve found that need improvement are:

  • remote connections – Gotta give me vnc, ssh and rdp. You just have too.  It’s not workable as a tool for me unless I can remotely control a “real” machine. 
  • Java, Javascript or something – Come on, this thing would be a powerhouse with a little client side intelligence.
  • Wireless signup with Verizon – I still haven’t been able to figure out how to sign up.  Guys…there money lying on the table…go get it.
  • More Apps – App store for chrome looks anemic
  • Mouse pad – works ok, but right click action with 2 fingers is difficult to pull off.
  • Google cloud printing is good, but needs improvement.  Need to find a way to set up a “shared” printer in a reception area so that guests can print easily to it over the web. That’s not easy with Google cloud printing.
  • Flash support – Just gotta have it.

 

So after my first 48 hours with it…that’s my view.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

iperf

iperf is a tool for testing the throughput of a network pipe. It came in handy today as I was testing out the throughput of our WAN lines.  We have T3’s at each site and one site in particular always “seemed” slow when transferring files but I didn’t know why.  I installed iperf on linux (yum install iperf) and set one side as a server.

iperf –s

Then on another box on the other side of the wire I installed iperf and ran it as a client":

iperf –c x.x.x.x –d  (Where x.x.x.x is the ip address of the box running as a server.)

The I got the following result:

C:\>iperf -c x.x.x.x -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to x.x.x.x, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[1840] local y.y.y.y port 1552 connected with x.x.x.x port 5001
[1816] local y.y.y.y port 5001 connected with x.x.x.x port 46524
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1816]  0.0-10.0 sec   439 MBytes   8.5 Mbits/sec
[1840]  0.0-10.0 sec   321 MBytes   6.7 Mbits/sec

This is a full duplex T3 line so I expect something higher than 8.5 and 6.7.  After some inspection I noticed that switchport on the backbone switch was set for Auto-10 instead of just Auto.  That was restricting it to Ethernet speeds. I changed it to Auto and it picked right back up (~30Mbits/sec).  I did this while other traffic was on the wire so it couldn’t entirely fill the pipe by itself.

Cool tool!