July 2022 Rogers outage

A total of 16 hours with no cell phone, no internet and no TV with little to no information on Rogers on what happened.  In my not-so-humble opinion that is not acceptable as this is the second outage in about 15 months for Rogers.  The start of the outage should have triggered an near immediate BR/DR response and seeing the first update at around 09:00 indicates that someone was sleeping at the switch or hoping things would get better.

Being fair? Hell no! They are supposed to be a national provider and provide critical telecommunications and any failure should be short and not this long.  First update was around 09:00 and just the standard tweet with absolutely no information.  Updates (what few there were) regurgitated the same marketing drivel.

Hopefully our elected representatives and  or the CRTC will demand an report on:

• What happened?  Was this a failed upgrade, failed major piece of infrastructure or a nation state attack on our systems (not likely)?
• Who knew the system was failing or failed and when?
• What was the timeline before invoking the BR/DR plans (if it was)?
• Who was supposed to be informed and when were they?  Don't need names, just roles.
• What plans are being made to minimize what happened so it doesn't happen in the future?
• Will those of us who paid for service get a credit for the loss of service?

This isn't an isolated incident just for Rogers, last week KDDI in Japan was offline for 86 hours.  The government there is asking questions as our government should do with Rogers.  

Too much is now dependent on cell and internet service to be offline (ATM, 911, government services, medical services to name just a few).  Fortunately I was able to commute to work and complete my work there (they use Bell), but, too many cannot do so and at night I had to depend on a co-worker acting as the on-call person instead of me as I had no internet.

Update 2022/07/15:

Looks like the CRTC and others are looking at this outage.  I hope they do a real job and have recommendations to minimize this happening in the future.  Once that is out of the way they should be doing the same for all other telecommunication providers.

Two years of COVID

It has been two years now since we started working at home due to COVID.   A few notes on what worked for me.

● A separate office area is a must so you can concentrate on work.

● A good phone with handsfree.  There are conference calls and not having to hold/cradle the phone is a must.

● A good network setup.  I have a router where I can set up multiple SSID.  I have one for work and only work.  Nothing else in the home network can see that.  It also helps to have decent high-speed internet. 

● A comfortable chair.  If you work all day then a comfortable chair is a must.

● A proper desk with keyboard tray.  It helps having the keyboard (and mouse) at the right height so your hands, wrists and arms aren't stressed.

● Taking regular breaks.  Get up, walk at least a few minutes every 20-30.

● Have your lunch outside of your 'office'.  Take a break away from work and unwind.

● At the end of day shut it all down.  Take 'me' time away from work.

A simple change to DLINK router if it feels a bit slow

With everyone at home and online working and playing during COVID you may have noticed that your network connection may feel a bit sluggish.  I know at times it is slow for me when I have my personal laptop, tablet, phone, work laptop running.  Wife is online too with her tablet and Chromebook.  Most days it isn't a problem for me as the connection to work is fast enough.  However there are days I have to do a lot of file transfers that slow to a crawl.  

I remember when I got the DLINK-878 router that I did an initial QoS (Quality of Service) setup for the machines, however, what the hardware we have has changed and I didn't update the QoS.  I will show where to make the change and test before and after.  The changes are not major as I have the machines running and not doing downloads (or playing games) so it doesn't impact the testing speed very much.  When I did the change on Saturday the work machine downloaded files in half the time while I was playing a MMORPG on my main laptop.

 Background:

I added the D-Link router to the Rogers modem as I needed to break up my internal network into several groups.

• Main SSID is for myself and the wife and all of our personal devices, printers and scanners;
  
• Guest SSID for anyone visiting;
• Work SSID.  This is so that I can isolate the work machine from all other devices that are on the network and NO ONE can see the work machine;
• All SSIDs have their own unique name and password and I scan the Rogers modem and DLINK router weekly using FING using my Android tablet.
  

The instructions are specific to DLINK-878, but, other models and routers should have the QoS setting.

 

Login Screen

 

 Speed test

 

I ran the speed test before making changes to the QoS.

 

 

 

QoS Screen

 

For this I have my MX-Linux machine on Medium setting and when I rerun the test there is a minor speed improvement.

 

 

Second speed test

 I then moved the machine to the highest setting and ran the speed test for a third time.  It showed an improvement in speed.

 

 

Laptop set to QoS Highest 

Speed Test 3

Your settings will probably be different, but, you can prioritize which machine gets its share of the internet connection.