Network | The Webernets

Fix Connectivity Problems by Power Cycling your Home Network and Computers

May 22, 2013May 22, 2013 The Webernets0 comment

Power Cycling sounds like riding a bike really fast up a hill, but in the technology field it refers to a way to get everything back online when things aren’t working right, or you have to recover from a failure or freeze.

A Power Cycle is achieved by turning everything off safely, disconnecting the power sources, and leaving everything to sit for a in-determined amount of time (some say 30 seconds, some say 30 minutes).

I find Power Cycling makes all my devices talk to each other quicker. As I have a somewhat sophisticated home network, yanking the cord on everything from time to time allows new routing tables to be created, and old machines that are no longer connected to the network (That may have been a Master Browser (Machine that tells other machines where everything is located)) to be removed from the environment.

We’ll use my network as an example to go through the procedure, as things do need to be done in a specific order. Using a IP Scanner (There’s lots of free ones available – just Google IP Scanner) I generated this view of my home network.

To begin a Power Cycle, I turn all off the Computers and my Server off. Once they are safely and completely shut down I yank the power cords from the sockets (This is important, if it is still plugged in, there is still power going in, keeping things in memory – So YANK IT!). With my Laptops, I take the batteries out. Next, I shut down and unplug my WD TV media machines and the “Elements” hard drives attached to them. My iPhone and iPad are now shut down by Pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button (Power Button on top right side of device) for a few seconds until the red “slide to power off” slider appears, and then slide the slider. Lastly, My Airport Extreme Router, D-Link Switch, and ADSL Modem are all disconnected from the outlets.

Now I go throw a tennis ball with my Dog Benson for about 10 minutes. This allows plenty of time for any power left in the devices to drain away, and all caches and memory to clear.

After playtime I get ready to restart everything. First, I plug the modem back in and let it initialize and connect to the internet. Then I turn on my Switch, and my Airport Extreme Router is next. When they are all operational and happy, I turn my computers on one at a time, beginning with the one I use most, first (So it can become the Master Browser). Once it is up and connected to the internet, I turn the next one in my usage order on, and let it connect, then the next, etc, etc. Then, I boot up my WD TV Live Hub and reconnect the “Elements” storage drives, and lastly, I power on my iPhone and iPad by holding down the Sleep/Wake (Power Button on top right side) for a few seconds until I see the silver Apple logo appear.

Everything should be back up, running, and happy!

Some people will tell you there is no advantage to power cycling. I personally, do believe it helps, and if you are undecided, Try it for Yourself and make up your own mind! What have you got to loose?

Keep your network drives and servers clean of DS_Store, AppleDouble, apdisk and even Thumbs.db files with BlueHarvest

May 15, 2013December 31, 2020 The Webernets0 comment

Lately, My WDTV Live Hub has been REALLY slow. In an effort to see what was going on, I mounted the drive in my FAV Linux distro PUPPY LINUX. What Puppy Linux showed me, was ALL of the thousands of files that my Windows and Mac OS X computers had been creating and hiding on my drive without my knowledge. When I have accessed my shared drive with my Mac, it had been creating DS-Store files and .AppleDouble files in each folder, and my Windows machines have been creating Thumbs.db files.

It was pretty easy to delete these files, but my question was “How can I stop this Madness from happening again?”. After a little Googling I found a program called BlueHarvest. I downloaded the trial version, and I have to say, within 15 minutes, I had paid my $15 US and had a license key that was good for 3 different Macs. If You are sharing drives or a server in a Mac/Windows/Linux environment, YOU NEED THIS PROGRAM!

After installing, you tell BlueHarvest which drives and folders you want it to monitor, and the file types you want it to clear, and it deletes them as soon as they are created.

BlueHarvest not only prevents these files, it is also the quickest and easiest way there is to clean up a drive of existing files. I have a 8TB server running FREENAS, and to clean it up, all I did was click the BlueHarvest icon in my menu bar and select “Clean Using BlueHarvest”

Then I selected my server…

And then BlueHarvest went to work – check out the result!

It cleaned out 173144 files from the drive!

And at $15, BlueHarvest is a gift! Download the 30 day trial HERE.

**UPDATE** – Ive been using this program for a few days now, and it has been really cool watching it delete these annoying files as soon as they are created. That part has been working great. However, I have been playing around with a program called Total Finder today, and it shows Hidden/Invisible files. I ran it on my Freenas server and to my surprise, it turned up nearly 45000 .AppleDouble files.

I opened up BlueHarvest and initiated another clean on the drive, and after it scanned it reported it had cleaned 4 files. I ran Total Finder again, and it still came back with almost 45000 files.

Mac OSX Lion broke my Gigabit Network!

August 11, 2011October 22, 2011 The Webernets4 Comments

I have just been trying to shift some large files around my home network, and found the transfer speeds to be down on what I am used to.So I set about finding out what the problem was. I started by opening the system preferences, and clicked the Network icon.In the left side window I had to highlight the connected Ethernet port (the one with the green circle next to it), as my machine has two ports, and the one that wasn’t connected was selected when I opened the window as shown below. Once I selected the connected port, I clicked the Advanced button to open up all the good stuff.

From here, I clicked the Hardware button to see what was going on. As expected, my machine had auto-negotiated a 100MBPS connection, instead of the much faster 1000MBPS Gigabit connection I have come to love so much.So once I changed Automatic, to Manual, and selected 1000MBPS with Full Duplex, flow control, and set my MTU to Jumbo 9000 (Where it has always been), I saved the settings, rebooted and was ready to enjoy my super-fast network!

Huh? What? Why? – Then the expletives came! Why wasn’t my Gigabit connection working? – I went back in and found the Green circle was gone – Replaced with a very unattractive and disheartening RED circle! A desperate flurry of disconnections, reconnection and more expletives occurred. Sitting helplessly on the floor next to my Gigabit switch, head in hands, my attention was drawn to the pretty color cables…….

This post is dedicated to that gorgeous yellow ethernet cable. Oh yellow ethernet cable, how I love you! It turns out that for some reason, Lion doesnt recognise the 33 miles of blue Cat 5(e) cable I have running around the house as Gigabit capable like Snow Leopard used to! I removed the blue cable, and plugged a black CAT 6 cable I had (Which I never really understood why it was different until today) and beautiful Green lights lit up everywhere! In my connections window, on the switch, it was SUCH a relief!

After a bit of Googling, I learned quiet a few people are having this problem, and not all cables are created equal.

The short solution to the problem is change your cables to Cat 6, and for the reason why (if you are interested in the nuts and bolts) can be found in THIS article on Answers.com.

**UPDATE**

22OCT11 – Apple appear to have rectified this issue in the latest update to OSX Lion (10.7.2) – I have been using my Macbook Pro at Gigabit speed using blue cat 5 cable for a few days now. Can anybody else confirm?

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