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Virtual insanity

True to Jamiroquai’s lyrics, it seems that I’ve been on an OS installation frenzy.

Virtualization has made it so easy to test different OSes. Right now I got 2 variations of each of the three OSes – namely Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu. Each having a working image, and an image from when I first installed them (base installation). This should make it easier for when I bollocks any of them up and need to “reformat.”

Add the default OS (OSX) and that’s seven OS variations to play with all in all. Here’s what my Parallels folder looks like as of the moment.

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WRT54G P2P problems?

I noticed that I’ve been getting erratic behaviour with my router whenever I had bittorrent running. After a while it would always slow down to a crawl – where I had to reboot the router to get things back to normal. While rebooting the router manually (or via GUI, after much waiting) solves this. The problem always returned, which suggests that there’s something wrong with how the router handles P2P connections. I decided to look around for cases of the same problem.

The default firmware for Linksys and most routers track old connections for five days, then start to clear dead connections – which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections which the router can’t take. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.

Linksys has yet to address this issue, but there is a fix. If you use alternative WRT54G firmware, you can put in a start-up script to fix this problem.

I just applied the fix they mention down this post, only time will tell if it actually worked. Read More