I have a client who is having problems with Comcast and intermittent outages. We have both talked to comcast over the last few years to discuss the issue and come to no resolution or attempt at real troubleshooting. Tuesday a tech is finally coming out.

I will have pingdom stats this time to show how often the connection drops. Pingdom checks the firewall at the residence. It is possible for pingdom stats to be off in a few rare cases where the firewall is down. Currently that would occur because the power has been out or the hardware failed. Should give a pretty accurate show of Comcast uptime in a residence. I will update the stats if the hardware fails or power drops.

To troubleshoot the intermittent internet issue:

1. Ran pings from in the house to a bunch of addresses. In windows ping -t ping.mit.edu, fire up another command prompt, ping -t www.msu.edu, colorado.edu, etc. In linux just ping.
2. Swapped access points, copying config from ddwrt and moving to the other
3. New installation of DDWRT
4. Grounded cable splitters
5. Swapped cable splitters and coax
6. Called comcast, had them add a mac address for my newest cable modem. Seems on newer cheap ones you can’t copy the MAC. This guy was extremely helpful. Told me the Up link had some poor signal strength. At the time of the call. Only the cable modem was plugged in. This tells me there is a signal strength problem outside the house.
7. Tried with the Untangle UTM appliance inline and without.
None of these steps over a very long period of time has solved the issue, and now all hardware has been replaced.

Time will tell. And you will be able to monitor this locations performance as well as others on my Monitoring page very soon.

Be nice to the troubleshooting guy. I was nice to this one today and he was very very helpful. Crazy to have a native english speaker at 5 on a Sunday in the US. Maybe my comcast stock is worth holding on to. (disclaimer there… I own about $1000 worth of comcast stock. It pays pathetic dividends, I don’t recommend it.)

My main issue is turning off UAC to make it work. Apparently that is only for the discovery phase. With my recent hamachi fun and editing of host files I think I can put together a good walk through on how to run Spiceworks and have it monitor all your machines even if they leave your subnet. Anyone want to work on this with me?

I won’t get working for a few weeks. I’m going to run jetstress and a few other toys to optimize the disk on my new 2900. Any guesses on what will be the best? 10* 15krpm disks. My guess is a mirror for the OS and 2 raid10s. I’ll show you how to use diskpart to tweak performance out of the disk before you even format them.

Spiceworks has a few superduper flaws that I am not willing to spend (more) time resolving. I got to the point where I have a powershell script of an insane size to prepare a computer to actually be seen by spiceworks. I would be nice and post that info in their forums but they have wasted too much of my time to warrant my contribution. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I will not use it until they wake up and realize they need a client application. Here is my list of reasons Spiceworks sucks.

1. No client means you there isn’t a program to initiate contact with the server and send data or allow easy firewall control (click here to see all the people using group policy to DISABLE their firewall to fix problems. )

2. Too many remote services must be made available that shouldn’t ever need to be on. I want to close doors not open them.

3. Firewall rules require ports and pings shared with other windows services. A client would allow a custom port that does not need these ports open. I see this as a big security risk. Never open windows rpc ports without specific rules in place.
4. The server freaks out on its own too much. This screenshot above shows an example of it’s status this minute.

5. Even with my solid list of preparation steps, of 3 brand new out of the box Dell Vostros, 2 were seen by the server, 1 was not. Same process, step by step on each machine. Several double checks and a little packet sniffer work. I’m clueless. Shouldn’t be this hard.

6. Documentation for client preparation in the forums is pathetic. The target audience is small shops who aren’t going to have the experience or knowledge to do their nebulous WMI troubleshooting. Here are some pissed off users.

7. The server interface is SLOW and very bulky. For 39 devices my spiceworks processes are using 268MB.

8. Currently to monitor Vista machines you have to disable UAC!!! If you don’t have a problem with it, your users will freak every time they see windows warning them in the security center that it is turned off. This damages the credibility of an IT guy trying to maintain some sort of security in their shop. What? The company front door is unlocked? Who cares! Lets open them all!
9. As you can see, I have 6 workstations, 1 server and 26 unknowns. I could spend weeks getting the other devices working. (to be fair I could make 5 more macs show up but I already decided to drop it)

10. It will only work on one subnet! Hello spiceworks, build a client so I don’t build my own pseudoclient or tunnel on a vpn to make it work. I realize this is a shortcoming of windows and dcom etc. SO DONT USE IT!!! Use a tool that works. Spiceworks seems to be stuck on using a hammer to get the screw to go in just cause Microsoft or their CEO says so.

10.5 Spiceworks doesn’t support home clients. Which shouldn’t exist in a business but I’ve chatted with a bunch of people who have it anyways. Small shops don’t have money and sometimes do things wrong. I have to say that this helped me upgrade a few machines but it didn’t help monitor peoples computers on my network who brought machines from home.

I think if I was to continue I’d tunnel all the traffic through hamachi and maybe tool around with ipsec to get it all on a different port than windows file sharing ports. For now my solution is to use Hyperic. It is a great open source monitoring solution. I’ll post more as I get it running. I also still love Nagios even if it is a pain in the butt to configure. There are awesome virtual machines prebuilt for vmware that you can test out. Please use my google search bar above to search for them.

Mom says to speak of good things after bashing something. Spiceworks does a killer job on the helpdesk app, the inventory stuff is cool, the graphing is awesome manager bait. I could really use the application inventory but ONLY if it worked on all my machines. The reporting is pretty good and I really like the product review abilities in it. I see the ads as a good way to fund product development and don’t mind seeing items that are directly related to my field. Their support people are very nice. Oh and they have a lot of good educational documents you might want to check out even if you don’t end up using it.