NTP66's thread of IT

[meow]

Ok IT nerds folks. My home WiFi is spotty in one room and damn near nonexistent in an adjacent room. What is the preferred method to remedy this IT problem?

What router do you currently have? You can relocate the router to a central location, though that's rarely an option. Depending on your current gear, you'll likely want to upgrade the router to something significantly better. Or, as some have been doing lately, upgrade to a 'wi-fi system', which most are referring to a mesh network. You basically replace your current router with the new mesh router, and install satellite routers around your house to get more coverage. These satellites don't need to be hardwired to the main router.

My current router is somewhat centrally located, but on the second floor. The bad reception rooms are on the first floor and in a corner of the house. It is from like 2012, which I assume is bad...?

2012 is ancient technology at this point. I'd still be interested to know the exact model router you have, out of curiosity alone. I'm a big supporter of ASUS routers, personally. I refuse to run anything but them, and use Merlin's custom firmware (likely overkill for you). Some options:

My current router, which is great for just about anyone:
ASUS RT-AC68U

Of, if you want to splurge on a more recent model with all the bells and whistles:
ASUS RT-AC88U

My AC-68U is located in my master bedroom (2nd floor corner), and I have zero issues with range. Full signal @ 2.4GHz in my basement, slightly less on 5GHz (because that band doesn't do as good a job penetrating walls/floors as 2.4GHz).

Going strictly off of google image searches, I have a linksys N900

[NTP66]

Linksys? Throw it into a trash can and light it on fire. If anything, having external antennas will help, allowing you to direct them any way you'd like. If you do replace the router, use the opportunity to fine tune settings. You'll definitely want to make sure that you use WPA2-Personal with AES encryption if you aren't already. If you've got a laptop, you can use inSSIDer 3.1.2.1 Home to figure out which wireless channel to use on each band by walking around your house and seeing how many other wireless networks are in the area, and where they overlap. That could really come in handy if you're in a densely populated area.

[meow]

Ok. I’ll have Santa bring this new fangled router and try to monkey my way through this set up

[Silentom]

Get a stronger router.

[NTP66]

Configuring an ASUS router is stupid easy. They really did a phenomenal job on the UI.

[DigitalGypsy66]

Configuring an ASUS router is stupid easy. They really did a phenomenal job on the UI.

I concur. I bought a ASUS RT-AC68U as per NTP66's recommendations in this thread. Great router, easy to use UI. I do a lot of port forwarding for games and static IP stuff, and it is much easier to do than on our old Netgear modem (which I turned into a wireless access point).

[meow]

I know some of those words

[NTP66]

If you want to get adventurous, you can run Merlin's firmware on these routers (just have to validate that you install the correct version). I use a number of the features, including Stealth mode, which disables the blue LEDs on the router itself, since it's in my bedroom.

[columbia]

I concur. I bought a ASUS RT-AC68U as per NTP66's recommendations in this thread. Great router, easy to use UI. I do a lot of port forwarding for games and static IP stuff, and it is much easier to do than on our old Netgear modem (which I turned into a wireless access point).

I know some of those words

Port forwarding = passing
Static IP = Hall Gill
UI = Over the should coaching during breaks
Access point = bench door

[NTP66]

I know some of those words

UI = User Interface

When you first plug in the router and access the console, a first-run wizard appears and guides you through configuring the router. Super simple. Once inside, you can change other stuff that I mentioned. The user interface is very well organized.

[shmenguin]

Get a stronger router.

Or run cat 5 to the 2nd floor and hook up a new access point there.

[NTP66]

I would still trash the current router, even if a second router were brought to the party.

[meow]

If I added a second router, wouldn’t I need to disconnect from the weak one and connect to the strong depending where I was in the house?

[meow]

I concur. I bought a ASUS RT-AC68U as per NTP66's recommendations in this thread. Great router, easy to use UI. I do a lot of port forwarding for games and static IP stuff, and it is much easier to do than on our old Netgear modem (which I turned into a wireless access point).

I know some of those words

Port forwarding = passing
Static IP = Hall Gill
UI = Over the should coaching during breaks
Access point = bench door

Now this I get.

You...you get me c-dawg

[NTP66]

If I added a second router, wouldn’t I need to disconnect from the weak one and connect to the strong depending where I was in the house?

You would need a Linksys extender in order to accomplish this, as you would not be able to extend the wireless network from your N900 to another actual router. ASUS routers allow you to put them into Wireless AP mode to extend the range, but I don't think you need two routers unless your house is massive and/or you have crazy internal walls/floors that block a significant amount of signal.

Plus, Linksys is garbage. Don't bother with an extender.

[meow]

The delivery of the spaceship router has been delayed and meow is not happy.

[Miami Vice]

If anyone is ever considering building a home server to store family media, Plex, etc I can't recommend unRAID enough.

I put my system together right around the 2016 Stanley Cup Finals and it was extremely easy to do. It was working great ever since until recently when it was randomly freezing/shutting off. Lead me to believe the older motherboard I was using in it had fried. While trying to diagnose it I also stumbled onto the fact one of the hard drives failed - the parity works so well I had no idea. No data was missing at all.

I ordered an embedded combo A8 CPU/motherboard, swapped out the bad drive, and it started right up. Rebuilt the data from the failed drive on the new one and kept right on ticking.

[DigitalGypsy66]

I'll be doing something like this early next year: give me some details of what components you used, when you get a chance.

I'd like a small form factor "quiet" media server that can hide in my son's room near the router, no monitor or keyboard/mouse, just something I can remote into from another PC or iPad.

[Miami Vice]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... -_-Product

Thats my new mobo/cpu combo. It seems to be powerful enough to transcode one Plex stream to very high quality (I haven't tested more than one, but CPU usage was rather high).

The CPU I had been using was a monster for the task - I'd like to get a new motherboard soon and use it as my home office pc. I almost never need transcoding, so this was literally just wasting power and creating heat.

This is the sata card I'm using. Probably won't need it if you're doing something smaller. https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-SI-PEX4 ... +raid+card

unRAID costs about $80 if I remember correctly. You load it onto a thumb drive and you boot from that. The thumb drive holds the "table of contents" for the server.

Another great unRAID feature is the ability to create SMB shares. Instead of having each hard drive show on your network, each share shows up. That way you don't have to worry about which drive and which folder is full. Create one for "Movies," "Home Movies," "Family Documents," "Music," etc.

You can run a selection of apps and plugins directly on the server, such as Plex. If you're so inclined you can set up a VPN on it too and run something like Sickrage to continuously acquire new programming.

[Silentom]

My work PC is really bugging me. I have the wallpaper set to rotate pictures every 30 seconds, and while that part works fine; the picture position doesn't. Every time I log out/log in, it automatically changes it from 'fit' to 'tiled'.

[NTP66]

My work PC is really bugging me. I have the wallpaper set to rotate pictures every 30 seconds, and while that part works fine; the picture position doesn't. Every time I log out/log in, it automatically changes it from 'fit' to 'tiled'.

Any chance you've got a GPO applied that's forcing that initial setting? I don't actually use Windows' built-in screensaver. I use an older version of Google Picasa (v3), which is much more powerful and works flawlessly.

[NTP66]

Apple intentionally slowing down older phones

A Reddit post from last week has sparked a discussion regarding iPhone performance as a function of battery age. While we expect battery capacity to decrease as batteries age, we expect processor performance to stay the same. However, users with older iPhones with lower-than-expected Geekbench 4 scores have reported that replacing the battery increases their score (as well as the performance of the phone).

Older, as in anything older than the 7, which really isn't that old. Batteries should last longer, and I'm already on my second battery on my 6S thanks to a faulty one initially. Just ran the benchmark on my own phone, and sure enough, performance is about 86% of what it should be. Nice.

[Miami Vice]

I've been interested in setting up a Raspberry Pi to run Pi Hole for a while, and I just found out that it can be run on unRAID. I will definitely be trying that out this weekend.

Pi Hole was designed to route all internet traffic in a home through the device running it. It then acts as an ad gateway to the entire home.

[Shyster]

I'm thinking this is a pretty big deal:

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/0 ... sign_flaw/

A 5% to 30% slowdown is pretty significant.

[NTP66]

It is, yes. That said, their chips are still going to outperform AMD’s garbage.