Running BT HomeHub 5 with Apple Airport Extreme

A technical post today. I seem to remember that one of the very early uses for blogging was as a sort of technical diary, and that's why I drop occasional posts about technical setups into the flow.

I've already mentioned that I'm now using a BT-installed Home Hub 5, which introduced a couple of challenges to the previous setup. The most obvious was that the master phone socket wasn't the one in the office. It was another one downstairs and close to the front door.

BT's Infinity 2 is actually FTTC VDSL (Fibre to the cabinet, Very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line) - which means it is still delivering the 'last mile' over copper wires.

The change to a filtered master socket meant that the router now needed to be closer to that socket rather than upstairs in the office, which would have needed a, say, 30 metre ethernet cable run along walls etc. The same style police that administer Christmas Tree inspections would have embargoed stapling that to the walls.

So, was the HomeHub wi-fi signal powerful enough to be used alone? Short answer, No. It would work 'downstairs' in the general neighbourhood of the phone line, but didn't reach to the upper floor well enough.

Finding the signal strength
I use the Mac's own wifi tool to check the signal strengths. Simply 'Option-Click' on the wifi signal in the top bar on a Mac and another little App called Wireless Diagnostics starts up.

Go to it's menu list, select Scan, and it will fire up the wifi network scanner. Jolly useful on a laptop for some quick signal strength checking.

The utility will give suggestions about the best wifi channels but, importantly, will also give the signal strengths, specified as RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator).

As a guide anything better than -70db is good, although feeble signals will be as poor as -90db. Remember a 10db drop is ten times weaker. The screenshot above is an anonymised replica of part of my indoor scan, which has even more channels listed in the full version, created by overspill from neighbours etc.

I scrolled down to find the BT Hub's own wi-fi signal hovering at -70db (borderline) and -83db (intermittent) when upstairs in the office. Not good enough for reliable service.

Adding the Airport Extremes
I have some Airport Extremes and Time Capsules, so I thought I'd use them to create a stronger wifi signal. I also decided to keep the HomeHub 5 wi-fi signal separate as a kind of backup, especially when setting it up.

The biggest single lesson I remember from using Airport Extremes and Time Capsules is to reset them before creating a new network. Push a paperclip into the reset for about 15 seconds and sure enough we'e back on factory wifi settings (data on the time capsules is preserved, however).

1) Create a network master
I selected an Airport Extreme to have as the master. I connected it to the router via an Ethernet cable, into one of the LAN connectors (i.e. not the WAN connector). This would extend the router's capability into the Airport Extreme.

Then access the Airport Extreme via its temporary wifi network (something like 'Airport Extreme ab123'). It'll ask how you want to configure it, and I followed the step by step guide, which set it up as a master, with its IP address allocated by the BT HomeHub Router. This is important, because I'm using the router as the main DHCP server for the whole network.

2) Extend the network
Then it was a case of plugging in the other Airport Extremes where they were required and performing a similar operation, connect via temporary wifi, follow the configuration instructions but set them up as 'extend network' instead of 'create network'.

3) Measure the difference
The wi-fi signal difference was incredible. In the office it jumped from a best of borderline -70db to -23db, which is generally classified as exceptional. Even on the generally weaker 5Ghz signal jumped from -87db to -33db (also classed as exceptional).


Simplified version of the final configuration
Schematically the configuration is:

Home Hub 5, including DHCP and its own wi-fi
[ethernet connection to]
Airport Extreme 1, set as Create wifi Network - (lounge/dowstairs) nothing else ethernet attached. Used for laptops etc.
[airgap]
Airport Extreme 2, set as Extend wifi Network - (office/upstairs) also includes ethernet attached wired 1Gb ethernet 24 way switch
[airgap]
Airport Extreme 3, set as Extend wifi Network - (entertainment) includes TV related things like Sky+ and Onkyo sound system

There's a few additional airport expresses and apple TVs sprinkled around, but they are set up as 'join' to the main wifi. Everything gets its IP address nominally from the BT HomeHub.

As a useful tip to reduce latency, I added the DNS server addresses to the Extremes and hard coded their IP addresses, as served from the DHCP in the BT HomeHub.

I seem to now have the place bathed in high performance wifi, as well as a 24-way gigabit switch for the office and its various bits and pieces.

Excuse me if I glow a bit from all the Gigahertz.

all your base are belong to us

I'm back in business after the great switch of the broadband. Here's the before speed...

And here's the after...

I wish I could say it was a smooth transition.

After the engineer left, it worked well for a few hours.

Then, suddenly a big orange light started flashing.

I knew the big orange light could only mean trouble. Although, come to think of it, the similar sized blue light that meant everything was fine was a bit counterintuitive.

I'd have checked the help diagnostics, but they were only accessible with an internet connection, which now wasn't working.

Then a kind of space invaders sensation as I battled through various devices not working.

Now it's approaching 3 o'clock in the morning and I'm again bathed in the good blue light.

zzzz.

creating a hard hat zone for engineering work

I'll be trapped indoors on Monday waiting for The Engineer to Fix The Internet.

They will be doing a broadband update and have to do things indoors between 0800 and 1300 (but please allow an additional four hours after 1300, in case the engineer arrives at the end of the allotted time period).

At some time I'll tell the story of the broadband update, which started in about last August. This should be the final iteration, but I won't tempt fate and say too much until it has been completed.

The engineering connection with today's picture is tenuous, except that I may use some of the waiting-in time to collect a few pictures of politicians wearing hard hats. I've decided that there should be some sort of scoring in the run up to the election. Some starter categories:

Predicted:
- Economy : politicians in Hard Hats (5 points)
- Workforce : politicians in High Visibility jackets talking to workers (5 points)
- Education : politicians in classrooms with school children (5 points)
- Health Service : Politicians in a medical setting (5 points)
- Healthcare : Politicians with a patient/patients (5 points)
- Rural : Wellington boots (green 3, black 5)

Dubious:
- Banking and related : Politicians with bankers, in suits and ties in office setting (-3 points)
- Well heeled people : Politicians playing golf, drinking red wine or champagne (white wine not included) (- 3 points)
- Expected : Politicians drinking cocktails, explaining sleaze or expenses problems (-10 points)
- Everyman : Politicians drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, or eating chips/fast food (-1 point)
- Sporting : Politicians in lycra, with knee pads, at rugby, polo or similar events (-5 points)

All scoring can be cumulative, except when in bad taste (smoking in a hospital for example).

I may need a tumblr site for this...

unusually quiet in these parts of town?

It's supposed to be back to normal this week, with full commuter trains, busy tubes and plenty of traffic jams. I'm slightly suspicious that there's a stillness in some of the central area.

There's space on usually busy platforms, and even parts of the normally bustling areas around the South Bank and the London Eye are surprisingly quiet.

These are parts of London that don't usually have seasonal effects, but maybe, just for once, everyone is over-travelled and shopped- out?

Subliminal photo taken after reading The Humans by @matthaig1

I was staring out of the window towards the emerging daylight. I could see a trace across the sky, probably a plane inbound to Heathrow. The moon lurked below the tree-line and some kind of satellite was twinkling towards me. Kind of "that's all you'll get with this amount of street lighting around".

I took a picture anyway, and then later I noted a similarity with the cover of a book I've just been reading. Just finished actually. The Humans, by Matt Haig.

It's an enjoyable and humorously written narrative about a killer alien sent to earth to tidy up some loose ends associated with recent prime number theory discoveries. They are the sort of discoveries that could give the earth extra powers.

If it sounds too much like a Doctor Who and the Daleks plotline, it is much more a story of alienation and then the discovery of love.

Our narrator, who assumes we are also from another world, gives us his perceptions of the strange planet earth, whilst he matter-of-factly goes about his amoral mission to remove the solution of the Riemann Hypothesis. He's been made into a surrogate of a Cambridge Professor - the one who'd originally solved the Riemann Hypothesis. If you are wondering, Riemann came up with the zeta function for predicting the incidence of primes in a defined integer number space. Something we all need, apparently.

As well as the moon and stars, the book's cover has a picture of a dog and a squirrel. If the math above sounds like dog-speak, the story still works with many discoveries relayed to the reader as simple observations:

An early one:

“I picked up these books and realised they both said ‘£8.99’ on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop."

A little later:

“Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.”

Of course, things develop as our narrator becomes fascinated with the human condition - no more or I'll start to spoil it.

And I'm still wondering how the cover art became something I emulated in a photograph the next day, without realising the connection?

throwing dice along the wharf

The New Year has more or less resumed its normal rotation this week, with work restarted, traffic jams re-instigated in the usual places, TV schedules back to normal and an early start to the 2015 UK election featuring in every single news broadcast.

Like summer holiday adverts which start on Boxing Day, there's probably been a popular agreement that broadcasters get their spinometers out at the first hint of a new year speech.

The old colour coding won't hack it for the next time around, that's for sure.

Nowadays, there'll probably be talk of big data and deep dive analytics.

It'll be interesting to see how the pundits dance along the coloured wind without dangling from a rope of sand.

Meantime, here's an aerial view of Nathalie Miebach's transformation of some big data.

Weave away, boys, weave away.

In which I bung a heap of extra SSD into my MacBook Air

My day-to-day laptop is a MacBook Air, which I've had since 2010. For crunchier Mac processing I use an iMac and all my main files etc. are all backed up to the rashbre LAN. The amount of storage used in the MacBook Air has casually crept up over the years and although I'll probably replace it one day with a MacBook Pro, now isn't the right time based upon what is anticipated from Apple in the next twist of their product cycle.

Instead, I thought I'd try a simple update to the existing machine, moving it from 256Gb storage to 960Gb (about a terabyte). That should keep the machine current for a lot longer, well past when the predicted 12 inch Airs appear and MacBooks go extra long on battery life.

Apple advise that Airs are preconfigured and can't be changed. I must admit I was expecting to find that things had been soldered inside, but actually the SSD is slotted in.

I soon found a couple of places to get replacement SSDs and ordered one to see what would happen. My machine is quite an old generation although cosmetically it looks almost identical to the sleekest modern ones. This update would make the innards about twice the capacity of the latest Apple machine and well-capable of all its regular tasks.

So what to do? I used a Transcend memory kit. It's well packaged, includes all the tools, an enclosure for the old SSD and is boxed in a manner similar to Apple's own products. I should mention that the shape/configuration of the SSD is specific to the individual MacBook model and needs to be carefully selected. There's also very simplified instructions included and a youtube installation video (which I haven't watched).

The box includes the two screwdrivers for the back of the MacBook Air case and for the internal SSD. Weirdly I'd never really looked at the back of the case to spot the 8 or so screws needing removal.

Before I started to dismantle the machine, I made a copy of its existing disk to the new SSD. I used Carbon Copy Cloner for this, instead if the recommended Disk Utility. That's mainly because CCC handles any errors along the way whereas the Apple-supplied Disk Utility just stops. I then had a cloned copy of the original disk.

I decided to boot the still unopened MacBook Air from the clone attached to USB to check everything had worked. Reboot the machine with the Option key held down, select the USB-attached SSD and yes - it worked. I was moderately surprised that it was a relatively quick boot considering it was across the USB connected drive.

Then to open the case. I arranged the removed screws in a square copying the shape of the MacBook - to ensure I put them back in the right places.

Inside, the vast majority of the MacBook Air is taken up with battery. The processor, memory and SSD are a strip along the top quarter of the innards.

Carefully removing the single screw hooding in the SSD, I swapped in the new one and reassembled everything.

Then a reboot, holding down the Option+R so I could reset the startup disk to the new one.

And Yes- everything works.

Total time - 10 minutes to read instructions and assemble the initial SSD in to a small enclosure. A couple of hours to clone the disk. Ten minutes to test the replacement clone. Fifteen minutes to replace the SSD and reconfigure.

My old free space was around 50Gb. The new free space is around 830Gb. The new speed of the disk is fine. It's slower than a modern machine, partly because of the slower electronics of the 2010 version of the MacBook Air (3Gbit bus being used with 6Gbit SSD) but it is still respectably fast for its expected use.

Even more technical bit, stop here if it is already starting to read like Martian

There's a facility on SSDs called TRIM which is an adjunct to the garbage collection of deleted data. SSDs work differently from hard disks. Some say to switch on TRIM, although with Apple's latest Yosemite OS/X, it is disabled for third party SSDs. Part of the kernel extension signing to prevent rogue changes to OS/X's most sensitive components.

I decided I don't care and won't use TRIM. There is anyway a small utility called TRIM enabler, which can get around the Yosemite restriction, and I do have a copy which I could use for a short time if TRIM recovery was ever needed. Pragmatically, I don't think use of TRIM is really an issue though. I've so much more space than I'm likely to need on this machine that running with/without TRIM is rather academic. Purist tekkies may disagree, but I'll take a slow 2-3 per cent degradation over a few years in preference to twiddling around with the inner protection layers of OS/X.

So all in all, a good and simple upgrade for the MacBook Air.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (II)

Part of the view from The Shard for New Year included a vista towards Tower Bridge and The Tower of London. Last time I walked past the Tower, it still was still surrounded by the bright red ceramic poppies, which have now been removed.

Apposite then, at the weekend, when the poppy I requested from the original installation arrived at home.

It's one of the 888,246 poppies used in the Tower of London installation 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' which ran from 5th August to 11th November 2014, as a commemoration of the centenary of the start of the First World War.

rooks, buzzards, red kites, a little owl and a black cat

We were out and about around the country lanes.

Already fuelled from a stop in Alresford the spin through Preston Candover and Farleigh Wallop yielded plenty of unexpected wildlife spotting opportunities.

Long shadowed late afternoon sunshine silhouetted livestock as well as a few birds of prey including red kites lazily circling for easy pickings.

Not too difficult as the road edges had their share of the carnage from smaller animals. We stopped to let some moorhens cross at one point and silly pheasants could well have been on borrowed time.

The bare branches of trees at both ends of one village were filled with rooks beginning to settle for the evening.

I noticed a little owl sunlit high in a tree. Later a large buzzard swooped and accompanied us along the road for several hundred yards, branching off when it decided that an approaching black cat was perhaps somewhat ambitious.

spiky start to 2015

We welcomed the New Year from neo-futuristic Shard, which is the tall spiky building in Central London. It's still the tallest building in the European Union and was designed by Renzo Piano.

I should have read the instructions about how to get inside. Forget breweries, I can't find my way to a party in a skyscraper. I took us confidently to what I consider the front door (which is the entrance on the concourse at London Bridge).

Wrong.

It turns out that another entrance on the other side by Joiner Street is the main one for revellers whereas the one I'd gone to was more or less the 'business' entrance.

Into the second entrance, which also turned out to be wrong. There's another one right next to it which houses the express lifts to the right floor and its panoramic views across London.

A useful tip to remember is that there's also a bar area which at other times should be easier to access and for the price of a London cocktail gives fabulous views across London.

And not something I'd normally mention, but the loos have an exceptional outlook too. In my case right across to the Houses of Parliament...

But, of course, we were there to celebrate the start of the year.

Here's to a fine 2015.

Happy New Year.

end of 2014 photo recap

Bike ridden for the last time in 2014 this afternoon. Can see the back of the fridge again in places. Video snapshots created. Now to start the 2015 prep.

frozen end of year chirped pulse amplification of petawatt beams

A few end of year reflections on the state we're in. I know, it will all be on t'internet, where everyone can read and gasp over these comments for years to come.

Except, in general, even privately authored public blogs only get a generally small readership.

When I first started this blog thing, I deliberately kept the name away from my own as a sort of air gap. Actually, various systems are able to rejoin the broken links nowadays, probably by following the IP breadcrumbs as well as the larger cookies. All so they can try to sell me a lawnmower/telescope/wine subscription and confusingly sparkly jewellery,

It leads nicely to the lazy journalism stories of social media being hacked and secrets of all kinds being spilled. Yes, if you are famous and put a selfie of something embarrassing about yourself onto a public forum, it will probably get re-tweeted. And if you are a big corporation, expect people to want to dig into your secrets. Take the Orion project's laser performance at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, for example.

And yes, if you reply to one of those chain mail get rich quick things, you will certainly get more. No surprises there, nor with the Russian bride and other scam letters.

Still internetting, narcissism accelerates with the continued rise of the selfie. I used to take self portraits as a kind of test or to use up the last frame of a roll of film. Nowadays there's a special stick for a cameraphone (it has a rude name sometimes which I won't repeat here) and it's used to take 'better' selfies. It's commonplace to see theses sticks brandished around certain parts of London, like Traf Square.

A similar effect also extends to videos, with the celebrity buckets of ice tipping and a curious lack of information about the amount actually donated to related charities.

Of course, donations to charity by phone and online continue, although the next twist of the Search Engine Optimisation scams create interesting dilemmas. The winner of The Apprentice has a derivative business idea based upon SEO although I assume it won't be the guerrilla format increasingly used. Take the new Dart Charge - the regular 'Dart Charge' search can be disabled and a substitute result applied. The parasitic substitute 0903 phone number site then charges £1.53 per minute to connect to the real call centre site.

Disappointing to me is the lack of political satire now available as we watch destabilisation politics from the main parties as they try to keep us guessing about what is really happening. The Beeb are probably scared because of their charter renewal and the commercial stations have to worry about the advertisers, so we are left to puzzle at daily conflicting information.

I can only watch George Osborne in so many colourful hard hats and high-via jackets and like many (but not - it would appear the deficit avoiding Opposition), I'm wondering about: (a) what happens to all that Quantatitive Easing money we keep printing? (b) why some of the dodgy bankers don't get put in prison? (c) who is getting fat eating all the pies? There's many more questions, but I'll save some for next year.

The Westminster villagers continue to have cosy expenses whilst idling and posturing for the next fixed term election - they find ever imaginative ways to look busy whilst doing little until next May.

I'm of a view that we need somehow to have an operating system upgrade for the U.K. It's hard to know what is possible given the lack of options? It can't include that dangerous cartoon character who has boasted of using his European expenses allowance to fund his 'get out' party.

It's probably a calculated positioning by the other parties to let it run because bizarrely they become the 'least unacceptable' choices instead of a genuinely good choice.

But that's probably enough for the moment.

I usually keep these blog posts to ten minutes and a picture, so this one is already something of an overrun. In the words of that frozen cartoon movie that I only just managed to watch: Let it go, let it go, let it go.