David Trebacz Blog

My cable area is one of the areas transitioning to more digital cable and cutting out many of the current analog channels. You can read about the digital conversion from Comcast at Digital Conversion I thought I would chronicle my experience receiving 2 of the small set top (or side top -or bottom mount) from our local cable office. I read about the conversion in a letter I got from Comcast. Essentially it sounded as if my old TV's without some sort of cable box, would no longer get most of the channels that I was paying for. If I ordered these DTA's I would get my existing channels and pick up a few extra. Understanding that to be the case I ordered two of the smallest boxes (Digital Transport Adapters and Comcast calls them) online and picked them up at the local office. It was a quick pickup at the local office for us, since they're around the corner from our house). Here are the pictures from the unboxing: The box was a very generic black cardboard box. ...

I just noticed that the majority of the machines on my home network started failing with "No Ping Response" back in November. My storage is pretty redundant for most of my network so it took me some time to get around to figuring out the issue. In my case the machine have been faithfully backed up by a linux machine running BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) going on several years. On November 23rd (between 10 pm and midnight) that all changed. All of my DHCP Windows machines failed with the "no ping response". I knew the machines were up, but why was BackupPC not seeing them -or at least reporting a ping failure. Turns out this was all caused by a change I had made to my Smoothwall 3.0 firewall . I had removed the Services > Static DNS entries from Smoothwall doing some routine maintenance -I think. I mean why would you have static DNS entries for machines that have their IP addresses dynamically assigned. Ultimately, I found a solution to keep my...