NCF DSL Review

[May 2014 – I can no longer recommend NCF as an ISP, please see the comments on the post for a link to an updated article]

The National Captial Freenet (NCF) is the 3rd ISP I’ve had high speed service from.  Originally not having cable, I chose the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) solution and went with Bell who provided my phone service.  I might still be with them had it not been for Magma changing the rules on their dial up email account causing my @magma.ca address to expire, so switching to Magma (which was bought by Primus) for highspeed allowed me to keep my email address active.  I don’t have much good to say about Primus.

With Bell, I was stuck on the 1Meg Nortel modem for a long time.  My neighbourhood had been upgraded to use the newer higher speeds, but due to my ignorance (and Bell’s lack of information) I kept paying the same premium cost and getting low speed.  Until I found out things had been better for many of my friends on DSL and called Bell to upgrade.  It was a free upgrade, but annoying that it took me calling to get it to happen – I also had some interruption in service in the switch-over.

Calling Bell customer service was always frustrating, you had to run through the standard script – only to get yourself passed along to the next level where you might get someone more informed.  I had an intermittent problem on the line and it was impossible to get help from them.

When I moved to Magma, the switch was smooth on their end.  Bell continued to charge me for my DSL line for a couple of extra months, even though I wasn’t using their services.  A huge thumbs down on Bell’s billing department.

Magma was a great company, and using their technical support I was able to get my intermittent line issues sorted out and fixed.  Sadly, now owned by Primus there is in my experience terrible customer support.  As a Magma customer I was grandfathered over to Primus, but apparently didn’t have full rights as a Primus customers (my customer ID wasn’t even a real Primus one).  After a 20+ minute wait on hold just to talk to someone, I ended up in a frustrating conversation which took at least another 20 minutes to determine they couldn’t give me the service I wanted (DSL + static IP) at a competitive price.

Ages ago, my Dad had pointed me at NCF offering high speed at a very reasonable rate.  I probably should have made the switch a long time ago, but I convinced myself into thinking that maintaining my email identity @magma was worth the extra cost.  Ken had also had some success with Magma as an ISP, but I suspect my recent success moving away from them will help convince him to make the leap too.

Signing up with NCF is done online, similar to many ISPs today.  They do support switching from another ISP and their website recommends a week or two of overlap to avoid losing service.  I cut things a bit fine, but the switch-over looks like it has gone ok (knock on wood).  There was a small mess up with the start of service date, to which I got a fairly detailed email reply promptly – included in that note was the line “any further questions, just give us a call” followed by the office number.  On a whim, I dialed it up to check on one more detail – and was astounded to hit “0” and almost immediately talk to someone.  Better still, they knew what they were doing – and could answer my question right then and there.

As I already own a DSL modem and line filters etc.  The only thing I needed from them was service.  I was able to switch over before my Primus account had expired, and today marks the official start of my NCF service.  When I initially switched (June 25th) I did some speedtests to see how things were.  On Primus/Magma my speeds were consistently 2500kb/s down and 650kb/s up.  On the 26th, switching to my new DSL login on NCF – I wasn’t surprised to see the same numbers.  Today I checked my speed again.  WOW!  4400kb/s down and 650kb/s up.  Maybe its a fluke, but I’m hoping it isn’t.

Summary – NCF offers DSL service for $29.95 a month, no contract.  There is no speed cap, so up to 5 Mb/s down, 800 Kb/s up (max).  They offer static IPs for additional cost.  It is run by people who know what they are doing.  This not-for-profit organization deserves your business.

Puppy Linux 4.00 with VMWare Player

Even if you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years you’ve probably heard about virtualization, but you may not have taken the plunge quite yet.  LiveCD images are a great way to toy around with new operating systems, but using virtualization can make it an even nicer experience.  The VMWare Player is free, and allows you to run pre-configured virtual images (appliances).

After my recent experience installing Puppy Linux on an old laptop, I wanted to experiment a bit more using my desktop but didn’t want to give up my normal Ubuntu desktop experience.  Being able to run two operating systems at the same time is useful.

Google will help you discover how to do this, however my goal is to provide specific Puppy 4.00 instructions, and possibly inspire someone to try out virtualization if they haven’t done so yet.

Continue reading “Puppy Linux 4.00 with VMWare Player”

DIY Solid State Drive

Now with the CF to 2.5 IDE adapter in hand, I’ve basically got a solid state drive for my laptop.  The trick of course is making it all work.  The first step is to get it physically installed in place of the failed hard drive.  The only tricky part here was determining where pin 1 was.

The adapter I bought has a little white triangle that identifies pin 1 (in the picture above, this is the left most pin).  The existing drive was a Hitachi DK227A-41.  Google helped turn up a useful diagram which helped me identify pin 1.

HITACHI DK227A SPECIFICATIONS REV. 1, K6601560 97/11/08

The second bit I stumbled a bit on was getting the laptop to identify this as a drive.  The CMOS auto setting didn’t detect it as a drive – so I needed to use the USER setting to punch in the right values.  I ended up using the values I found in this SanDisk document, but I’m certain others will work.  I also needed to dumb down the BIOS settings to allow me to boot from this drive, this meant turning off some of the fancy read pre-fetch and DMA modes.

As this is an old laptop – 233MHz with 64MB of RAM, I run Puppy Linux on it.  My previous experience installing Puppy on this particular laptop was painful, as it only has a floppy drive (no CDROM) and at the time I failed to find a boot floppy that enables USB support such that I could boot Puppy from it.  The route I took at the time was to format half of the 4Gig drive as DOS and make it bootable, then find an old Linux distro that had a floppy based install, borrow a wired PCMCIA network card from work and download the DOS based Puppy install over the network to the DOS partition.  Once there, I could reboot and install Puppy natively.  That was the story for Puppy 2.01.

Puppy 4.00 is an improvement in a number of areas.  WakePup is now something that comes as part of the LiveCD allowing me to create a boot floppy using my desktop system.  This boot floppy knows how to boot a USB key version of Puppy on this old laptop.  It just works.

Other nice features of Puppy 4.00 is the battery indicator now knows how to talk to the hardware in the laptop, supplying charge remaining information.  Additionally, the power off sequence works to actually shut the laptop off (2.01 didn’t).

With the laptop 1024×768 screen matching the LCD monitor Jenn uses on her Mac Mini – TightVNC on Puppy makes it this old laptop into a really nice wireless Mac terminal.  The default browser is SeaMonkey, but Firefox 2 is available in the package repository.

Using the DIY SSD is weird, the laptop is almost totally silent and for whatever reasons the drive light indicator doesn’t blink at all – so you have no way of knowing that you’re waiting on disk activity.  The performance seems to be about the same as it used to be, but no direct comparison is possible with the old drive making grinding sounds.  I’m running with a swap partition on the CF card, but even with only 64MB of RAM – running the common application load on this laptop I’m using zero swap. (hooray Puppy)

Some folk get worked up about reducing the number of writes to a CF card, I’ve decided not to worry and see how this works out.  The number of write cycles is fairly high on modern cards (1 or 2 million), I believe they have built in wear-levelling, and they are cheap.  I know my puppy powered laptop isn’t making that many writes to the filesystem, so I suspect the DIY SSD will last longer than the laptop.