living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002 Networking at home...too early? Finally, we got the Powerlink at home. I personally did not have particular need for high-speed Internet connection: all my online activity can be realized satisfactorily on 50kbs/ dial-up modem. But I still called to order this popular cable modem, because--I want to keep my workaholic husband home. We don¡¯t have life; we work day and night at school. Among thousands of his excuses of sticking on his office instead of working at home, a major one is that the dial-up connection is so slow that he wastes too much time working on the remote application to his worksite. To protect my strong family value and realize my normal family life, I cannot wait to welcome the cable man to get my computer, modem and TV hooked. And I wish we will be happy everafter, like in the fairy tale... Let me tell you how things turn out after four weeks: Bin still work in his office every single night, and I have to stay at home to enjoy this high-speed connection alone to avoid wasting our $40 monthly fee. Why is it so devastating? Here is the story: Bin used to connect to his office Unix system with a software called Hummingbird. It works OK when we had our dial-up and a hub to connect our home computers through USB. But since we have this cable modem, the connection was cut down every two or three hours. It really pits Bin off every time he is running a super huge program on the remote system. We called on the cable guy to check it up, and were suggested that cable modem was not built compatible with USB, but with Ethernet. Ok, we ordered this routerthrough Amazon. It looks sleek and sexy, and has wireless antenna. After rebate, we got it for as low as 50 bucks. However, Bin has started to mutter for extra cost for my pursuit of new technology. I crossed by finger for better performance when we have the router hooked which later turns out as we expected: we never lost the Internet connection again. But here comes the worst thing, Bin¡¯s dear Hummingbird does not work anymore! We guess there is some compatibility problem with these two things, so we turn to SSH and X-win32, which are widely used in all universities. But the same problem happens. We were able to connect to the remote system, which is indicated in ping message, but we can never have the display window showing on the computer. Bin guessed since there is different IP address for each computer, router does not know where to send the data after it received it. That is rather frustrating, I still can not keep my husband home! Although we can hook his desktop directly to the modem so that X-terminal window works well, there is no reason to leave our other two computers unconnected. This is a age of home-networking! isn't it? We checked the device and configuration, and could not do anything different. Then we called the technical support of both router and school server, though we know they could never solve any problems. And after hours of routine check, both of them apologized they did not know what is wrong but blame the other party¡¯s fault, just as we expected. The school server ascribes the failure to the router¡¯s firewall management, while Netgear guy assumed the school server use firewall to keep request from outside. Come on, you should give us something better. We are always suspicious that technical support could know more than we do, but this time it goes too far. Both of them, plus cable company, could not give consistent explanation. As we surf the Google Newsgroup, we find we are not alone facing this problem. There are plenty of complaint, Q&A on this problem, but no effective solutions. My busy husband gave it up after two days of researching without any results and go back to his beloved office concentrated on his work. That really struck me. The high-speed Internet connection is not only for fun, but also for convenience of working at home and efficient home networking, at least in our case. It seems now we need to sacrifice one function to achieve the other. The more ironical thing is that some of the problem is inexplicable, unreasonable and unsolvable. We as the technical-rich group, can not figured out a lot of tricky technical issues after we switch to broadband (such as networking on Instant messenger, renewing group name for wireless connection, firewall configuration to really stop things we don¡¯t want and let in things we need, even DNS resolution). And the so-called technical support in most of cases can hardly give good explanation to application issues, not to say to provide good solution. Bin is putting himself in job market since this winter. Scared by the dammed economy, we are only seeking stable faculty position at schools. As we search the opening positions, we are surprised by the insatiate need for professors and researchers on networking and security. Isn¡¯t there lay-off every day on IT industry? But through our experience, I kind of understand why we need more professionals but not technicians for future of networks. Similar to the early days before all networks adopting TCP/IP, the booming of broadband connection faced numerous problems in compatibility, from modem to router to computer to networking software. We need more than technical support that only performs routine 5-layer check-up, but some genius and diligent scientists to integrate uniform protocols to all subject of matters. Maybe we need deeper corporations among all manufacturers, who are expected to provide one-step installation of home-networking. We consider ourself among the Elite group of the society (although poor): Bin is a to-be Dr. in CSE, and I was even teaching undergraduate students about Internet in past 4 months; but still we are so frustrated by handling this new connection. We belive the frustration will be even deeper for average population who expect easy, safe and reasonable networking at home. posted by lmeimei @12:09 PM| permanent link| | |
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