Archive for October 10, 2014

A Follow Up To The Rogers Lag Spike Issue

Posted in Tips with tags on October 10, 2014 by itnerd

I just wanted to post a quick follow up to the story that I wrote about a Rogers user (and myself as I soon discovered) having lag spikes while playing video games. Out of interest, to do two things. The first was to check the stats of my modem and the customer (as the reader who contacted me has now hired me to help him solve this issue) as most if not all cable modems have the ability to display this information. Here’s my stats from my modem. Click to enlarge:

rogers

Now in my case, my modem stats are good. How do I know that? This is what I am looking for:

  • Signal power on the downstream or upstream should be between -10 to +10 dBmV
  • Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) should be 32dB or Greater

Values outside of that usually indicates a wiring issue that Rogers would have to send a tech out to fix or a modem issue. My new customer was also in spec. Thus we now know that this is not a wiring issue.

Next I decided to play Team Fortress 2 on a specific game server while running a utility called, WinMTR in one of my Windows virtual machines monitoring the same game server. One of the things that WinMTR does is it looks for packet loss as I was theorizing that this issue might be a packet loss issue. To my surprise, I discovered that the issue wasn’t packet loss whenever the issue manifested itself. Every packet made it to their destination. Instead, what I am finding is periods of time where there is extremely high latency where the packets were delayed and then delivered to their destination. That was further confirmed when I discovered that I could not surf the Internet on any computer while this was going on. Now this could imply any number of things, but congestion on the Rogers network is one possibility. Another is traffic management which is another word for throttling. After all, Rogers has been known to do that. Or it could be something else. Clearly, something related to something inside the Rogers Network seems to be contributing to this.

Now Rogers is looking into this and I am feeding what I am finding back to them. Hopefully this leads them to a root cause. In the meantime, I am continuing my investigation. More info as I get it.

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Review: IOGEAR GPSU21 1 Port USB 2.0 Print Server

Posted in Products with tags on October 10, 2014 by itnerd

I got a call from a customer who went out to a local computer store and bought the IOGEAR GPSU21 1 Port USB 2.0 Print Server under the idea that he could set it up and give himself and his kids access to a printer without networking ability. The problem was that he couldn’t get it working. Thus he called me. Before I get to how I got it working, let me describe the device. It’s a small device that fits into the palm of your hand that has one USB port and one Ethernet port. Power is provided by an external power adapter. Here’s how it should work:

  • Plug in the printer into the USB port. Just make sure that you check this list to make sure it will work (though it is dated having been last updated in 2012).
  • Plug in an Ethernet cable.
  • Plug in the power adapter. It should then use DHCP to pop up onto your network.
  • Follow the instructions  for your operating system in the manual to set the printer up on your computers.

This is exactly what this customer did. However, he could not get anything to print. Thus he called me.

When I first looked at it, I noted that I was able to ping the device. So it was on the network and I concluded that it might need a reset. The process to reset it as documented here is needlessly complicated, and it didn’t help me fix the issue. Now the print server does have a web interface, though it is not documented in the documentation that comes with the print server. But if you can figure out what the IP address is of the print server, you can log in. Logging into their router and listing the devices on their network allowed me to find out the IP that the print server was using. However when I tried the IP address using the Safari web browser, nothing popped up. On a hunch, I tried Firefox, the web interface appeared. It would have been nice if IOGEAR either documented that or updated the firmware to support a variety of browsers seeing as the firmware is upgradable. However there are no firmware updates available and the firmware on the device dates back to 2009. Clearly IOGEAR intended to make improvements to the firmware, but never got around to it. You can also see what jobs have been printed and put a password on the web interface. Being able to log into the device via the web interface was also valuable because I discovered that the print server supports a lot of industry standard protocols:

  • IPP– Internet Printing Protocol which allows you to print from the Internet assuming you’re willing to open up your firewall to do so. I wouldn’t do that personally.
  • LPR – Line Printer Remote protocol is one of the oldest methods of printing to a network printer. It’s supported by almost every operating system.
  • AppleTalk – Apple’s now defunct method for networking computers and printers. It hasn’t been supported in an Apple OS since OS X 10.6.
  • SMB – Server Message Block which is used by Microsoft OSes find the device and print to it.
  • NetWare print server support is present for those few people who still use Netware as their network OS. Of interest, it does support NDS.
  • SNMP – Simple Network Management Protocol is present to allow a network admin to manage the device using the network management tool of their choice.

The presence of so many industry standards is a plus for this print server. Though, if you run Windows, you need drivers as Windows doesn’t come with support for IPP and LPR printing. OS X and UNIX/LINUX don’t need drivers.

In any case, I used the web interface to reset the device back to factory defaults. After I did that, I found that the printer could be seen by the print server and I could now print. I can’t tell you if this is a fluke or this is a problem with this device as I only have a sample size of one to work from. But based on that sample size, this wasn’t a very easy device to set up and it should have been easy to set up. Thus it makes the IOGEAR GPSU21 print server difficult to recommend based on this one experience. I think it would be a good option to allow a printer without networking capabilities to be shared by multiple computers on a network. But if you have to call me to set it up, it may not be worth it.

File this review under “undecided.”

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