The amount of work-related traffic on my home (Comcast Cable) internet connection had risen to the point that Elaine would come into the office daily and ask if I was “messing up the internet” when things slowed to a crawl :) What has happened is that since I do a lot of testing of builds, the computers were pulling large amounts of data and also pushing results to work – so much that often the average download rate would slow to under 100kb/sec. And this is on a 9mb/sec connection!

I’ve always known that work would pay for network connectivity (up to a set amount) so I’ve had been noodling over the idea of getting DSL once it was available in my area and earlier this month I found out that it was!

So now I have DSL and Cable coming to the house. I setup the DSL modem/firewall and plugged it into the hub I have in the office and then proceeded to change the various work-related computers to the DSL subnet. Since my internal network runs at 1gig I wasn’t worried about the extra traffic and keeping both subnets available internally really simplifies my setup – I just need to research how good is the internal firewall that comes with the DSL modem. If it’s not up to snuff I’ll get another firewall to put in front of it.

While deciding what computer will go on what subnet I realized that my laptop still needed to connect to my internal mail server and I wasn’t planning on switching that to the DSL subnet as I didn’t want to change port-forwarding and the associated DNS settings. At first I thought I would just keep the laptop on the home subnet but then I realized that would prevent synergy from doing it’s wonderful magic and to be honest I would turn off mail before stopping synergy ;)

After a couple minutes of panic I then remembered that the laptop has Airport! Some quick setting changes and voila! I had the laptop listening to both subnets :) With only local traffic going over the wi-fi (i.e. synergy, mail and some ssh work) I shouldn’t see any issues, especially since the wi-fi base station is connected to the hub that the mail server uses in the basement.

Anywho, not to bore anyone with my internal network details – I’m just a happy camper now that my work activity will have it’s own pipe and isn’t slowed down by our home usage, and vice-versa :)

One of the things I’ve been really enjoying lately is the increase in the number of emails that I get from people around the world asking for information on one of the projects I’ve helped with. Sometimes it’s just a request for a routine or bit of code that I have done (like the Bonsai SVN code) and other times it’s for help with something I struggled with myself and they are wondering if I’ve solved it yet.

One email was from a person who had discovered via Google a previous blog posting of mine about the subprocess module in Python and was wanting some help. Another was from someone who had seen a mailing list posting of mine dealing with pyOpenSSL and had a question.

Back in the day when I was on CompuServ even more than I’m on IRC now I used to get asked all kinds of questions, so for me this is a pleasant return to doing the thing I love to do: answering questions :)