A friend in need means triple the profit?
Are you pulling yor hair out helping friends fix supposedly simple computer problems?
If you're a nerd like me, you'll put in quite a few hours this year helping friends with their tech dilemmas. The first step is often buying advice, followed by purchasing and then the dreaded installation. That's where things can get ugly.
I've wasted hours in the last week trying to knock over two supposedly five minute jobs for friends - installing a home gateway and setting up a network storage drive. They're the kind of tasks any self-respecting techie could do with his eyes closed, but each went well into overtime thanks to stupid bugs in vendor equipment and software.
Laura's network drive was a D-Link DNS-313, a one-bay network storage enclosure which merely requires you to drop in a hard drive and then run the installation CD. Simple right? Not when the installer can't find the drive on the network due to firmware issues and an undocumented quirk which requires the drive to be attached to a 192.168.0.x network during the initial setup. I got there eventually, but a job that should have taken minutes took hours.
The second task seemed even easier, dropping in a home gateway for Shaun so he could temporarily run a computer and a TiVo at the same time. Shaun is on Optus cable, which I had at my last house, so I figured it would be an easy job.
I tried three different routers but none of them would play nicely and I even had trouble getting into their configuration pages. To make matters worse the Optus cable internet link seemed to keep dropping out and, even at its best it was only offering 512 kbps on what should be a 10 Mbps cable connection. Shaun's computer runs Vista Home Business with all kinds of junk running in the background, including a net nanny and quite possibly a dollop of spyware for good measure. The Motorola SB5101 cable modem was also giving me grief and wouldn't let me into its configuration pages.
Faced with a multiple problems, I threw up my hands after several hours. Not wanting to leave Shaun in the lurch, I called in a mutual friend who happens to be a network engineer.
At first we suspected the routers weren't compatible with Optus (which seemed unlikely), but then we got it up and running using a Netgear router and my ThinkPad running XP Pro. The problem was obviously with Shaun's PC. At first we thought Vista Service Pack 1 might be to blame but uninstalling it didn't solve the networking issues. We were seriously considering nuking Vista and installing XP when we turned our attention to the net nanny Integard - one of the free internet filtering applications offered by the Federal government.
Now at the very start of the process I'd noticed Integard running in the background and said "it's crap, get rid of it". Shaun has three teenage boys and is trying to be to a responsible dad, so I decided not to push the issue even though he admitted it wasn't stopping his kids from accessing some "unwanted" content. As an experiment we temporarily disabled Integard and the download speeds rose from 512 kbps to 2 Mbps. Uninstaling Integard saw the download speeds jump to the full 10 Mbps you'd expect from Optus cable. All of the networking problems also disappeared.
Shaun had always assumed his slow connection was due to other cable users in the street, oblivious to the fact Integard was slowing his connection to 5 percent of its full potential. "But isn't this what the government wants to do to everyone's internet access?" was Shaun's first question. He's now reevaluating his approach to content filtering, and hopefully the Federal government is doing the same over the summer break.
These two simple jobs consumed more than a day of my Christmas break. Is it time to evoke Ferengi Rule of Acquisition number 87; "A friend in need means triple the profit"? I don't think so. Shaun is a mechanic and, a few weeks ago, he spent about the same amount of time helping me buy a new car. I know as much about cars as he does about computers, so we make a good pair.
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