Category Archives: The Quay

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.

Migration to Debian 10 complete

The servers that host this website have been successfully migrated from Debian 9 to a fresh installation of Debian 10. As part of this migration quay.net now resolves to 99.79.1.85 and is no longer available on the old server, hal9000.

This upgrade means that the website now supports TLSv1.3 and a number of other improvements. If you come across any missing content or bugs, please let me know.

An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG

If you’re loooking for a bit of light reading before bed, this might be just the answer: An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG.

Sleep tight!

On a mostly related note, I’m going to move all of my (admittedly trivial) secure e-mail to my ProtonMail account. If you have any reason to contact me securely, I advise you e-mail with GPG at gmobrien at protonmail dot com as of December 2018.