Focus on Productivity !.

It's almost 6 years after, I'm coming back to blog. Feels weird !! I almost feel compelled to write a line or two about about the way I find employees in my organization handle their work. I don't want to overly generalize it. But I'm sure, this one does exist in other organizations too. I get a feeling that most of us link our efficiency at work with

• No.of e-mails that we exchange 
• No.of spreadsheets we update/spew out
• No.of lines of code that we bang out
• No.of meetings that we participate and most of all
• No.of hours we spend at work

I'm not sure, if each of us is as focused on  -

1. Clear actionable e-mails and address them to people who really need to work on them. We're just happy to copy the whole world or the ones who don't need to read them at all. Do we even realize the amount of e-mail litter we create when we do that? What a waste of resources !.

2. Clearly defined outcomes(what are we trying to achieve)? Stop being a Shakespeare(no offense to the poet, I admire his creativity :-) ). Be brief and convey your POINT.

3.Well defined agenda for a meeting and clearly set expectations on the outcome of the meeting. What are we trying to get out of the meeting, let's talk about that for a min please ! - decision, concurrence, action plan, status check...and please invite ONLY the people needed for it.

4. And what did you set out to achieve during the day. Please spend a few minutes in the morning to plan your day and get something DONE !. And it better have some semblance of quality.

TIME for one is an important commodity. Please be respectful of others time and yours too.

Constant effort to utilize time better in doing something better...that to me is Productivity !. 1-4 will go a long way in helping the cause.

And, if I make this blog any bit longer, I'd be wasting your time. Hope you got the idea of my blog. Have fun, till my cynical side returns ;-) !.

~M

BSNL has changed its DNS Servers

Tonight I discovered that BSNL has changed its DNS servers. Do they care to put it up on their website?!....no way. The fact that I use my D-Link modem as DHCP server and use it for DNS relay, mis-led me for sometime. I suspected that my laptop was hit by a virus/spyware coz I was getting redirected to a strange website when I typed

www.google.com

But, thankfully when I did the samething on my desktop(via BSNL modem which gets the DNS servers automatically), it connected fine. So, it was obvious that DNS servers were the culprit.

I found this nice URL -

http://private.dnsstuff.com/tools/aboutyou.ch

that gave me the DNS servers that BSNL is using now. Another way out would have been to do a packet trace using tcpdump or ethereal(hardway). I may have learnt a few more things along the way. But, I'll keep it for another day. So, here are the new IPs of the DNS servers -

218.248.240.180
218.248.240.78

Different from the earlier ones !(refer to my earlier post). For those loyal BSNL customers who haven't noted the change, please do it now. Update your DNS settings, if you have set a primary and secondary DNS server, in case you are using a switch/hub/router at home.

Happy surfing.

~M

Huawei MT841 and D-Link Wireless Router - WiFi & LAN @ home !!

Ok Folks, I'm back again. This post is a sequel to my earlier one. Network buffs, please excuse if you think this is waste of time. But I just wanted to put it out there for benefit of those who want to know how !.

Like I mentioned in my earlier blog, I have a BSNL broadband connection at home. Modem - Type 3(Huawei MT841) on which I setup LAN. But what I also wanted was a Wireless LAN. Sadly the Type 3 doesn't have PCMCIA wireless card. People at the nearest BSNL office were equally clueless and advised me to upgrade from Type3 to Type4 which, incidentally comes with a wireless card by default. However, I chose to spend Rs.1500/- more to get a D-Link wireless router over BSNL modem upgrade for a couple of reasons(contact me if you're really interested to know). Let's get to the point now -

My requirements pretty much remained the same, with just one addition i.e. turn my home into a WiFi hotspot.

1. So I started with D-Link Wireless Router, which -

a. ofcourse is good for WiFi setup
b. and has 4 LAN ports. So it's good for LAN setup as well.

Besides, It comes with a default IP address i.e. 192.168.0.1, just to make life a bit more easy to configure LAN.

2. So powered on the D-Link modem. Connected the MT841 internet connection from LAN port 1 to the internet port on D-Link. One way to configure the wireless modem is to use the wizard CD given with the modem. But, for some weird reason, I kept getting an error message that said that multiple network adapters were active. Only one needs to be active. I couldn't get rid of it, so I tried accessing the device from the browser directly using the URL -

http://192.168.0.1

However, since I had configured my PC to work in MT841 LAN, I had setup it's IP address to 192.168.1.3 - which would never allow me detect D-Link router. So, I changed TCP/IP network settings to obtain IP and DNS server addresses automatically. With that, I was able to get to the above URL.

3. The home page of D-Link URL has many menus- one for setup, advanced settings, status...etc.
Click on setup. On the left side, you'll see menu items to setup LAN, Wireless Network. Click on LAN. The resulting page will give you options to setup internet
a. using wizard
b. manually
I went for the latter(manual). All I had to do was specify that IP address be automatically assigned. Ofcourse then, configure the DHCP to assign IP address to my home PC which is 192.168.0.100. Well, you could add 3 more PCs/Laptops via DHCP settings. Actually, you could scale it out to 25 hosts, if only you had a 24 port LAN switch...probably I'll do that as well, someday.

So, that took care of the LAN. Now it's WiFi turn - pretty simple stuff actually. Again, click on setup, Wireless connection.

1. Setup the SSID - Any favorite name to identify your WiFi network
2. Secure your network - There're a bunch of options available viz WEP, WPA, WPA2. I chose WPA & WPA2. Configured the same network key on my laptop's wireless client adapter and viola....my home WiFi hotspot is all set. 25 more hosts can access it, securely, but I don't guarantee the same speed ;-).

Not sure, if my blog has all the details you're looking for. But it would atleast, get you started in the right direction. So, until next time, take care....happy surfing.

~M

LAN at home finally on SmartAX MT841 !

It's amazing how sarcasm can push your limits. While my work on cloud computing continues, this would be a nice aside, since I haven't blogged for a while. Ever since, I became a broadband customer of BSNL, I had wondered a few times about the Huawei's SmartAX MT841 modem that was installed at home. It has 4 LAN ports and a WiFi slot(which I discovered only yesterday..you'll know how in a bit).

Since I was already running on WinXP on home PC, it came with a built in PPPoE dialer which the BSNL guy was happy to use and setup the connection real quick, some 3 years back. Although I was curious about features of the equipment, I never bothered to explore it all that much. My purpose was basically to hook onto internet/use VPN over it, which was served quite well.

Last couple of days changed all this. My wife's been pretty loaded with work and wanted to work from home using her VPN. Like all innocent husbands, I too confessed to her a while back that our broadband modem had the capability to allow multiple computers to be connected to net at the sametime(although I didn't exactly know how. Even if I did and explained to her, she wouldn't understand it). So, she wanted to connect from her laptop to the VPN while I was connected to the internet using my home PC or office laptop.As always, due to my laziness, I acted generous and told her that I'd disconnect and offered her to use the connection instead. That seemed have sent her a wrong message . (Holy cow!!!). She thought I couldn't configure the modem and looked down on me as if I was technically incompetent. That's all it took to trigger me off !.

I spent the next few hours to discover that SmartAX MT841 is not only a modem, but it could be used as a router, firewall, DHCP server, WiFi modem, hub, bridge, switch...boy this was some piece of under utilized equipment lying at my home for quite some time.So, back to the requirement -

"Connect multiple computers to SmartAX MT841"...so here's what I did,

1. Logged into the SmartAX MT841 using the URL http://192.168.1.1(browser firefox)
2. It would throw up an authentication screen. Enter the username and password
username: admin
password: admin

That would take you to the homepage of the device(In case you're wondering why and how, you should read a bit about SNMP). It'll list out all basic settings, advanced settings and device config settings(you can actually upload a config file, if you really understand the format and create one for the device)
3. Go to Basic settings, click on connections menu item to view all the enabled connections on the modem. Incidentally I found only bridged connections. First off, I had to create a PPPoE connection, to get rid of PPPoE dialers that I used from PC or other computers.
4. So, I deleted the PVC0 channel where VPI=0,VCI=35
5. Create a new entry, PVC6, type PPPoE, VPI=0, VCI=35
6. Enter the BSNL broadband username and password.
7.Click on "Apply"
8.Click on "Save All"

Step 8 is going to save the settings and reboot the device. The LED for link, which was till now glowing in bright yellow, after reboot starts glowing in dull orange. At first, I thought that I screwed up the settings. Gladly, I did not. Now just a few steps away from setting up the LAN.

Go back to your PC's network connections. Select the LAN connection(Ethernet). General tab, select Internet Protocol(TCP) and click on "Properties". Generally, it's configured to get the IP address automatically. Select the option "Use this specific IP address".

IP Address: 192.168.1.3
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1

Primary DNS:61.1.96.69
Alternate DNS:61.1.96.71

Well the DNS addresses may change sometime in the future, but for now these are the IP addresses I got. Click OK and you should all be set. When I connected my wife's laptop to the second LAN port, she was able to connect to internet, with IP address as 192.168.1.1. There were 2 more LAN ports, so test the 3rd LAN port I used my office laptop(you must be wondering, why I haven't tried it before...didn't I tell you I was lazy ;-) ??!). When I did, my laptop was also ready to rock-n-roll.

Ofcourse, when there're 3 computers connected to one gateway and are accessing the net simultaneously, the bandwidth per computer will effectively be reduced to a third on each comp(no brainer, simple math), but performance wasn't too bad after all. I ran youtube videos on all 3 computers and guess what they all streamed pretty well, without a hiccup even once. So, finally folks, I was able to setup LAN at home on my broadband Huawei SmartAX MT841 modem. Sort of a weekend gift to my wife, more importantly to prove a point that she's got a techie husband who hasn't still lost touch with his concepts! ;-) .

Hope to return to this blog space next time on Clound Computing. Peace to All !!!.

~M

Cloud Computing

Last few days, I've been digging into concepts of cloud computing. Ton's of information on the net. But I'm still searching for that "aha" moment, where it all adds up and makes perfect sense for my organization either

a. to use a cloud(Saas, PaaS or IaaS)
b. or to become a cloud aggregator !.

I've come across a couple of interesting articles that distinguish clouds as seen/required by startups and those as seen/required by big enterprises. "Enterprise Cloud Computing"(if I can term it that way ;-) ), is certainly my focus area. On to more digging..and I'll keep you posted of my findings.

Do let me know if you can point me to some good source on this topic. Greatly appreciated.

~M

Much better being an animal !

When somebody jokingly commented on me "you're such an animal", I thought for a moment...well what a compliment !!. Animals are so much better than we human beings !. Look what we've done to our mother nature. "Humans" are supposed to be the most "intelligent" race on the planet Earth !. But look what we've done to it. Smoked it, polluted it, plundered it, bombed it, charred it.

Words like "intelligence", "progress","development" scare me now more than ever. Does being intelligent give us the right to damage our planet the way we have? Does progress mean suffocate mother nature? Does development mean that we torch the planet more than ever?

I think animals are so much better. Wish I could travel back in time to see how life was a 1000 years ago !. Yes, there were no machines. Yes, there was not so much modernization. Yes, there were not so many "conveniences", no good roads, no hospitals. But life probably was so much better. Food chain, climate, seasons, fresh air, clean water, everything was in such harmony. Animals knew how to live in harmony with nature, they still do even today...and look at us. What have we "humans" evolved into? Corrupt, mean, selfish, unpredictable creatures who have little or no respect for nature and the planet.So, how are we then better than animals ?!.

So, next time my friends, when some calls you a donkey, monkey, dog or even a bitch...don't be offended. Thank that person and be happy. Not being "human" is so much better !.

Time's running out my friends. Mother Nature's patience is running out. It's about time we did something to restore the balance...before "humans" face nature's ultimate fury and be wiped out from face of the earth forever. Scary isn't it !!.

~M

What a roller coaster !

Phew !. What a turn of events. I'm just amazed, overwhelmed, appalled, shocked, excited, nervous...wish I can remember more words to describe my emotions. Last two months have been a roller coaster ride of emotions for me. First, arrival of the little angel "Sahasra" into our lives. I just don't have words to explain the feeling and excitement that ran through me. And then as if God didn't want to overload me with happiness, came Dad's heart stroke. It was frustrating and helpless 2 weeks I had spent away from him than with him while he was struggling to live on. And then his bypass surgery. Thankfully, it's all over now and he's back on to path of recovery. It's not over yet though.

One thing I learnt the hard way from all of this is - "Man Proposes, God Disposes". You may plan a million things to perfection, but there're a zillion things that aren't still under your control. They're just waiting to happen and mock at your unpreparedness for them. Moral of the story !....

Do what you got to do !. Be brave to face the odds...stay cool..stay balanced..have patience, things will fall in place...don't ever...ever lose hope...coz that's one thing that'll always keep you going.

Good bye until my next blog.

Cheers
~M