Front of the Vonaq Quicktest 500

Quicktest 500 is reviewed by Brendan Mulvaney of Sentinel Information Systems. Brendan also blogs as Sentinel – the fix is out there.

For a busy technician out in the field the Quicktest 500 is a great tool for the quick and detailed testing of adsl lines. Without resorting to a laptop with adsl modem attached you can use it to get the results that really matter – is the adsl service in a healthy state?

Opening the box was a bit of a revelation. All the connectors (LAN, ADSL) and chargers (mains, car and battery) are there as is a small shoulder bag to hold it all. It is a well built sturdy tester – slipping on its protecting orange jacket makes it non slip and stops knocks damaging the unit. I liked the stand that pops out the back of the unit to allow you to safely prop it up when testing. I had my first test done 3 minutes after opening the box!

The unit can be used as a point and shoot device – plug in the adsl connection and power on. The process then is that the unit runs its diagnostics against the configurable pass/fail thresholds you set on the unit – and gives an instant visual display of the stats for several of key indicators.

• In service,
• Is ADSL2+ or adls on the line
• Line voltage present ? The rates and values for Line speed,  Snr margin and line attenuation (bearing in mind you can set the thresholds to suit the geographical area you work in many of my lines are rural and at a greater distance from the local exchange)

As in my case when testing,  the indicators variously indicated – pass / fail – across a range of lines where the key values differed quite extensively but it is a great time saver before having to dig into internal communications and routers to get a definitive answer. The actual detailed values found during the tests can be viewed on the LCD two line panel on the front of the unit using the cursor pad.

The more expansive tests available after checking the line and service status, all relate to DNS / Ping / FTP and HTTP tests, with a tracert facility thrown in for good measure.

I didn’t get a chance to test the IPTV and VOIP checking features but know that these will save me time when diagnosing these more esoteric tests. The transfer of test data is facilitated through a usb connector on the unit and through a whizzy web interface when the unit is plugged in to a LAN via the inbuilt ethernet connection.

All in all the unit is pretty much on the nose as to what an adsl tester should be – compact – sturdy – accurate – fast and easy to use. The speed of the tests will encourage me to use the unit to test when I’m on each site I visit to ensure that the ADSL service is performing as expected!!! Definitely one for the toolkit!! And I may have to disguise it since I think it will be coveted by other engineers who see the power of it.

Further information is available at Quicktest 500 ADSL Tester.

Loris Degioanni over at CACE Technologies has produced an uber geeky animation showing the 11 year history of the Wireshark project.

The video was produced with the aid of Codeswarm.

I was interested to see a blog post discussing the benefits of the new 4G wireless standards currently in development. It struck me just how long it really takes for a technology to be in use by the majority of people. Here we are at the dawn of the 4G world and yet 3G isn’t widely deployed. The 3G licences were auctioned in the UK around ten years ago.

I’ve had an Apple iPhone 3G for a few months now and I am able to use a 3G signal for a small fraction of the time. In fact, outside of major cities, you’ve very little chance of getting a decent 3G signal. Most of the time I’m stuck on GPRS speeds or worse. If 3G hasn’t spread outside of the main metropolitan areas ten years after the original spectrum auctions, then it seems likely that there is no business case for ever doing so. If it isn’t commercially viable to implement 3G then what hope is there for 4G?

I wonder if the auction process itself could be to blame for the patchy deployment? Whilst the government in the UK did very nicely out of the auction, the bidders did pay very handsomely for their spectrum. Perhaps a better solution would have been to cap the auction price but place a service guarantee onto the bidders to ensure a more even deployment.

A broader implementation of 3G technology I’m sure would be a boon to the hi tech sector in the UK and would have had the effect of increasing economic activity. Whether the increased economic activity would have made up for the shortfall in the spectrum auction revenue is hard to say. But, the auctions were one off events and the increased economic activity would keep paying year after year.

Will the areas that don’t already have 3G never benefit from high speed wireless internet access? It isn’t looking promising…

Doug McClure has done a very good round up on the Business Service Management market in 2009.

The Tech Teapot is three years old today. Well, if you want to be pedantic, it was three years old last Thursday but I forgot all about it!

A selection of my favourite posts from the last year:

• Open source network management buzz comparison 2008
• Tivoli vs open source network management buzz 2008
• Open source network management activity comparison
• Vendor bloggers in Network Management; or

It has been a thin blogging year, mainly because my time has been squeezed by a combination of my regular work and TimeTag.

Many thanks for reading over the last year.

This may sound like an odd request but I’m going to make it anyway…

Does anybody have any photos of the dry contact status points on their server room air conditioning units that I could use as an illustration on a guide I am currently updating? A picture saves a thousand words as they say and I’ve got 40 pages already…

If you could contact me I’d appreciate it.

Great news for gadget fans in Europe. Bug Labs have announced the availability of their amazing gadget making kit in Europe with all of the appropriate approvals like RoHS and CE.

In addition Bug Labs have announced the availability of a WiFi and Bluetooth base module called BUGbase WiFi.

All you need is a Windows, Linux or Mac PC with the DragonFly SDK installed and buy a Bugbase module, which can now have WiFi and Bluetooth on board, and then choose the add-on modules you need like BUGbee, BUGsound, BUGvonHippel, BUGview, BUGlocate and BUGmotion.

Then get coding!

As we’ve just delivered a big lump of functionality onto our website using Drupal, in fact everything is now managed through Drupal except this blog, I thought that you might appreciate a heads up on the books we used during the development process. Getting hold of the right books early in your project will make things a lot easier.

Whenever I’m taking on a new programming language or some other technology it always seems to take three books to really get a good handle on it. Drupal is no exception, you will need a more user oriented book outlining the basic concepts, a more development oriented book to let you look underneath the covers, and finally a book for modifying the look of your site.

Using Drupal

Using Drual by Angela Byron et al is a book aimed at people with little or no experience of Drupal who want a leg up in implementing their first site. As such it delivers very well. It outlines the basic elements of Drupal, like what the basic content types are, simple navigation and, best of all, explores some of the many high quality modules available for Drupal.

The downside with all such beginner books is that things tend to be dealt with very quickly. Taxonomies are dealt with in just a few pages, which is a shame because taxonomies are absolutely key to organising all but the smallest Drupal site. In fact, I have yet to find any book or online documentation that outlines taxonomies well or provides a set of best practice for your use of taxonomies. I know that we’ve created a bit of a mess with ours that will need to be sorted out over the coming weeks. If anybody has any good suggestions for online or offline resources that can explain Drupal taxonomies clearly and succinctly with good real world examples I am all ears. Please leave a comment if you know of anything…

Pro Drupal Development

Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk is a more developer oriented book covering topics like developing modules, forms, the search system, working with the Drupal database and the like.

Whilst we’ve only scratched the surface of this book, I expect in time that it will become the most thumbed of our three tomes.

Pro Drupal Development really gets down to the nitty gritty detail needed to do the more tight integration or customisation that you may need. The book is chock full of PHP code so if you don’t have a pretty good handle on both PHP and Drupal I’d stay clear until you do. Recommended for the Drupal developer wanting to go to the next level.

Drupal 6 Themes

Drupal 6 Themes is the most recent book we acquired and we’ve yet to get the full benefit from it. I do expect that as we come to changing the look of our site that this book will be ideal. Drupal relies on content specific template files quite a lot and we had some problems figuring out exactly what variables Drupal passes into them. Fortunately, Drupal 6 Themes covers this area quite well so we expect to learn a lot more about this important area.

If you any recommendations for further reading drop me a line in the comments…

If you’ve ever hankered after writing a technical book then Michael Foord has some advice for you garnered from writing IronPython in Action.

Sounds like a shed load of work for no money… something I seem to be specialising in at the moment.

Update: Michael has done a post detailing his first quarter earning from IronPython in Action. Not a lot of money for two years work… the only thing worse paid than writing a book is writing open source software.

I was messing around inside top trying to diagnose a server slowdown and I noticed that my server has been up for 463 days. The server runs Linux Centos 4.4.

Want to share your server uptime?