Oct 8 - why is the internet slow ?

I was browsing through some pictures from a site click-through from CNN, amazed at the number of adverts that were surrounding the pictures and the time to load the complete page.  I flipped over to my open session with the Fortigate routers and noted that I had 872 tcp sessions at that time and that it had run well over 1,000.  This is a killer on a satellite connection.

This router has provided me all sorts of entertainment as I get a deeper understanding of the internet traffic.  Unfortunately many of the features such as logging only work with higher end models that have a built in hard disk (SSD).  Other features which would actually speed up the connection, like WAN Caching and Local DNS server, also depend on a hard drive.  If I knew how much difference it would make, it might be worth the money.

Once upon a time, when I used my Linux machine as a router, I had DNS caching and it worked nicely.  That was back in the days when I had dial-up access from the cottage.  Any traffic reduction was a good thing.  I could setup a DNS server on the linux box again, and might try that out in Florida -- not because I need faster speeds there but because I'll have the time to play with it. 

Work on the roads continued yesterday.  The major work on Smiths Bay has been completed and the road simply needs a full grading, which will take place today, Friday.  I went over and talked to Steve early yesterday as they were completing work on the hill; he was expecting to get to Osprey road today ... however, by the end of the day they were already working here, adding material and grading at Bain's corner.

It's not quite what I expected but it will have to do for now.  When we did the road tour, Dean talked about moving the road right over to the trees on the inside of the corner, in fact taking down a couple more trees.  Steve didn't have enough material to do that.  At the point the road at that corner is about the same width as Highway 400 with an on-ramp.  We'll have to do something on the outside of the corner, perhaps do some ditching, to better define the intended course of the road.  At this point we can place some cones so that the snowplow stays to the inside.

David arrived last night; was intending to go out duck hunting this a.m. but it's wet out there so he's going to skip this outing.  The rest of the day and the weekend are supposed to be great weather, so we should be able to get a lot done and he should be able to do some hunting.

Alex is coming up with a friend on Sunday and staying in town, bow hunting for deer.  I'm going to leave him access to the 4-wheeler in case they get something and he'll lock up the barn when he leaves end of the week.  At this point it looks like he will come over for dinner on Sunday, but that could change.

I didn't do any more leave-prep yesterday; there isn't much more that I can do until we tackle the major items -- wrap gazebo and deal with the docks.  I'll leave the gazebo open as long as possible in case people want to use it.

All of Jason's tapes have been copied onto the DVR now.  I'm part-way through copying them to DVD.  Unfortunately that takes two hours per file, the same as the initial copy.  It's not something that I have to tend, simply remember to kick another one off.  As each one is copied to DVD, I then copy it to PC, which takes place in parallel.  I'll be able to bring him the DVDs as well as the ripped versions to computer files.  They are big, ranging from 3.6 gb to 5.1 gb so far.  It's interesting that the sizes vary so much. 

I'll go through the DVD rip process in Florida for the ones that I created of my Dad's and load them onto the Plex Server.  There are a bunch of other tapes of his from their travels; I didn't copy those.  I'm sure that my Mom appears in them but don't expect that anyone will ever watch them. I'd have to transcribe to DVR and do some editing which would be hugely time consuming. 

Onward ...