Category Archives: Internet

Working as Designed

My ~3 month follow up to Installing Bell Fibre Internet is due and there’s not really a whole lot to say.

My observations:

I’ve had no outages and no technical issues between Bell’s CO and my own router.
Latency and bandwidth seem stable and consistent with what I’ve paid for, when measured. I plan on gathering data and publishing some analysis in the future.
The price is about the same as what I paid TSI for a lower bandwidth cable service.
The hardware is aimed primarily at bundling Internet and entertainment, but it works.
There is an acceptable method of configuring the modem to act as a pass through device so I can manage my home network using my Turris Omnia router.
Bell is difficult to deal with and likes to obfuscate their billing details.

So, I suppose this is to say that I’ve gotten more or less what I expected in the best case scenario.

In summary: It’s great to have a highly reliable fibre service into my home. It’s also a shame that Canada’s telecommunications industry is so moribund that Bell isn’t forced to do a better job. I have no complaints, just laments!

Installing Bell Fibre Internet

Unfortunately it appears that TSI is throwing in the towel as a truly independent ISP. So for this and some technical reasons (it’s the only way I can get FTTH where I live), I’ve decided to go back to being a Bell Canada Internet customer.

It’s the first time I’ve been with Bell for home Internet service since my original DSL connection! Though to be fair, in general, I’ve never had any big problems with their technology, just their business practices.

So I now have a Bell HH4000, a Bell branded Sagemcom F@st 5689, on my shelf. The hardware itself seems fairly well made, though it’s definitely intended for Bell’s average customer, and out-of-the-box it is configured as a combined modem/gateway/wifi-router.

I’ve been reading through the various forum and blog posts from people who have successfully configured the HH4000 to act effectively as a PPPoE passthrough device, but I’m not totally satisfied with the results I’ve had based on this advice.

That said, in my limited usage, the service seems fast and stable. I’ve not seen any evidence of packet loss and the general performance and latency seems good when tested directly from the modem. (I seem to have some overhead on the link between my modem and router in the current config, possibly due to PPPoE in openwrt, possibly due to the physical topology of my old network devices).

I’m going to be making some changes on my router when I get around to upgrading my first-gen Turris Omina to my new third rev model that supports WiFi 6 and uses a 2.5Gbps SFP+ for its WAN link to the modem. At that point I’ll worry about refining the configuration. Once I’ve sorted out these details, I’ll be documenting my configuration in the wiki.

Note: A very short 3 month follow up can be found here.

Managing a TLS Certificate Authority with OpenSSL

I’ve updated my old notes on managing a certificate authority and turned my current usage into a GitLab project. If you are looking at using TLS certificates on a private network, this is a good starting point to learn more about the process and best practices.

Go by Example

I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.

Password Best Practices

I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.

This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.

I’m Inactive on Mastodon

I’m not much for social media, but on the off chance you want to connect with me, I do have a fairly inactive Mastodon account.

I may not reply immediately, but I do check in from time to time.

Don’t use ETS

The EFF has just published an article about why nobody should be using ETS. This is particularly timely given the recent finalization of TLS 1.3.

Using Certbot with Route 53 in Manual Mode

I’ve just written a quick and dirty guide on how to use Certbot on Debian 9 with Route 53. This is useful if you are trying to manage wildcard certificates and don’t want to, or can’t, screw around with managing the current state of the Route 53 plugin on Debian 9.

Without further ado: quay:wiki – Let’s Encrypt Usage Notes

ImageGlass Image Viewer

I just finished upgrading my old PC, Hrothgar. I’ve been using IrfanView since my university days as an image viewer, and while it’s still more than adequate, I decided that I’d use this as an opportunity to see if there’s anything else out there that I like.

Enter ImageGlass. I’ve only been using it for a day or so, but thus far there’s a lot to like and nothing that I don’t like. I’m not 100% certain if I’ll completely replace IrfanView, but I’m definitely leaning in that direction. I particularly like the customization options and the UI is clean and simple and it only uses about 12MB of memory on Windows 10.

Check it out if on the lookout for a simple, fast image viewer on Windows.

NHK World On Demand Sumo

Starting with this month’s tournament in Nagoya there is now an English language official web broadcast courtesy of NHK. This seems to be an experiment, so I’m hoping that they decide it’s successful. The quality of the programme is fantastic and as much as I’d like to see a bit more of the ring entering ceremonies and so on, I’m pretty impressed nonetheless.

You can check it out here, and if you’re a sumo fan who speaks English I really encourage you to!

Also, if you’re interested in more coverage, I suggest you to check out Jason’s All-Sumo channel on YouTube. He’s got great coverage of the domestic broadcasts in Japan and is just doing it because he loves the sport not to mention he seems like a nice guy!