Rants, raves and stuff from this dude's brain

I’m trying to share some large files with a friend all the way on the other side of the continent. Her computer was telling her it was going to take about 20 hours to download 551 MB of data. That’s about 7 KBps which sounds great except for the 20 hour wait time.

Instead I burned all the files she wanted to a DVD and sent it over-night. It was about 4.3 GB on the disk and it’ll take about 28 hours to get there. That’s 44 KBps!

I still find it crazy that shipping data clear across the country, maybe even the world, is a faster way to send large amounts of data.  Maybe it’s time for some of the data warehouses (NCBI, EMBL) to have a “Send me a BluRay disk” or “Send SolidState disk” option when dealing with large databases.

I have one of the Wireless-N Gigabit routers from Linksys. More specifically the WRT310N. For weeks I’ve been trying to get the QOS feature to work for me. I have a computer in the diningroom attached to a boatload of drives. That’s where all my data lives.  I do backups for friends, get data from the internet and even now again datasets for my thesis. Anyway, this box is always sucking down or uploading information taking up my internet pipe. So much so that it was getting in the way of my web surfing and Netflix watching.

I turned to QOS on the Linksys thinking it would help. I set the priority for the machine by MAC address to lowest and I increased the priority of port 80 (the web port) to highest. I couldn’t notice a difference at all.  Didn’t help at all.

Then I saw there is another little tweak-able setting “Upstream-bandwidth.” It can either be set manually or the default “auto.” All this time it was set to “auto” thinking this machine was smart enough to know about my cable modem. I’ve been wrong. From what I can tell it just sees a 10/100 Mbit connection and that’s the upstream bandwidth. Very wrong!

Now I’ve set it to 1.5Mbit (my upstream bandwidth says a bunch of bandwidth test websites). Does QOS work now? Yes! The web experience is so much better now and it doesn’t seem like it’s impacted my data machine much at all.  Glad that was an easy fix.