Over the past days I’ve been experimenting a bit with SSD’s, traditional spinning hard disks and hybrid drives (SSHDs) to see how big the differences are between them when it comes to everyday tasks. To my surprise, the hybrid disk performed much better than I thought.
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Fiber In Bangalore
While in Germany the local incumbent continues dragging its feet it comes to deploying Fiber To The Home (FTTH), other countries are much more advanced. Take France for example. Or Bangalore in India… Here are some pictures and thoughts.
A Look at LTE in Bangalore, India
I’ve been in Bangalore for a week recently and was quite surprised about the huge number of networks shown when performing a manual network search. Over the weekend I had a closer look at the system parameters of some of the networks and was quite surprised that I didn’t quite find what I expected.
Is Switzerland Going Into Telecom Isolation? And How Would That Affect Tourism?
The date for the complete removal of roaming charges in the EU is coming closer and a number of network operators have already started offering tariffs that include EU roaming. While some of those offers do include non-EU countries like Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, others do not. So what will happen in 2017 when there are no more roaming charges wherever you go on the central continent for everyone and not only for those with a special tariff, but as soon as you set your foot into Switzerland, your mobile data connection suddenly drops dead, unless, of course you pay extra!?
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Second Mobile Network Operator In Germany Abolishes EU Roaming Charges In Some Tariffs
It’s good to see that the EU’s push to completely abolish roaming charges within the European Union by 2017 is showing positive effects even before this date. A few days ago, a second German mobile network operator has announced that they will abolish roaming charges to EU countries beginning this month for some of their tariffs. Let’s have a closer look.
DNS Decisions – Resolvconf – Dnsmasq And How They Play Together
Back in January I updated my Secure Hotel Wi-Fi Sharing Raspberry Pi solution to the new Debian Jessie build. Unfortunately the way in which the system decided which network interface to use for DNS lookups had changed and DNS lookups were no longer reliably sent through the VPN tunnel. As a quick fix I changed the DHCP settings in the Raspi Server to instruct all Wi-Fi clients to circumvent the Raspi’s DNS server and instead go to a public DNS server immediately. Not a pretty solution but it did it’s job. Recently, I had a bit of time to investigate a bit further and came up with a better solution.
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OpenVPN Tunnel Longevity
I use OpenVPN every day on the move for a number of purposes. Especially in open WiFi environments in hotels and other places it ensures that my data can’t be easily intercepted over the unencrypted WiFi interface. In most situations, however, setting up a VPN tunnel is only a temporary measure, usually for a couple of hours at most. As a consequence I didn’t really have a feeling for how stable an OpenVPN connection is over the long run. Up until now that is.
A Quick eCall Overview
Some things are so glacially slow that you almost don’t see them coming until they are there. eCall is probably such a thing and here’s a quick overview in case you go back to sleep again on the topic and need to refresh your memory quickly when it comes up again in a couple of years.
Keeping My Emergency Spare Backup Drive Up To Date In A Jiffy
In a previous post on the topic I’ve talked about the part of my backup strategy to keep an emergency spare hard drive up to date by copying data that has changed from a backup drive to it every now and then. This way I have a 1:1 copy of my system partition and all of my data at any time. A slight downside of this scheme is that in addition to a spare notebook and the emergency backup drive, I would have to take a backup drive with me when I travel to be prepared in case the unthinkable happens. After thinking about it a bit further I’ve now come up with a way to copy modified data directly from my notebook to the spare backup drive without the need for a separate backup disk in between.
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RAN Sharing – MOCN and MORAN
In a previous post I’ve been talking about the high number of UMTS and LTE networks I’ve been observing in Bangalore and that I had did not see the kind of network sharing in my traces that I was expecting. I didn’t go into the details of the different kinds of network sharing in this post so I’ll follow up with the details here.