Finally, there's decent tv service in our area.
The incumbent provider's service in this portion of Montgomery County, MD was very poor -- static/poor picture on some channels, often unwatchable video-on-demand despite a couple service visits and more than a couple new cable runs from the curb to my house. It got to a point where I just wasn't willing to invest any more time into working with them to solve the problem.
I never made the jump to satellite. There's too many trees in the south-facing sky on our property, and after having FIOS internet installed about a year ago now, I knew the tv service was around the corner. I kept checking the threads in the broadband reports forum for updates on the status of the local verizon cable franchise agreement and rollout of installs across the county.
Enter Verizon's FIOS tv service, delivered to the house via fiber. The poor picture is gone, video-on-demand works well, all together a much better experience. I still have to deal with IR Blasters from my Tivo's to the Verizon supplied Motorola STB's but that annoyance is nothing new. Apparently the serial controls are working for some areas, but I haven't gotten around to trying that here yet.
Getting the new hardware that comes with the service working with my home network just the way I wanted was a bit tricky. I don't really have what you'd call a typical network setup and plus, I like to fiddle around to see what's possible.
With the install came 2 motorola set top boxes and a brand new ActionTec MI424-WR router. The thing that sets this router apart from your run-of-the mill hardware is that it hooks up to both the ethernet and coax drop from the FIOS ONT and provides a 4 port switch to hook your home network into. The set top boxes provided for TV service get their TV signal directly from the ONT, but get guide information and video-on-demand over the IP network via the router, which serves as a bridge between the wan ethernet connection and the coax running through my house. Data over coax is really referred to as MoCA, a spec from the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance (new to me). Apparently, some new FIOS installs get their internet connectivity over a wan coax connection, and the router can handle bridging between that and a lan ethernet connection as well. Pretty cool. Finally, the router also acts as a wireless access point, supporting the G standard. I've got to give kudos to Verizon/ActionTec for having wireless security configured out of the box with the default wep keys printed on the bottom of the router. It's WEP 64, but better than nothing.
By default this thing is set up to run your network -- assign full on dhcp addresses to your machines, dns, etc you name it. Perfect for the person who wants an easy network install and doesn't want to worry about configuring a thing.
If you dig around on the net for information about this router, you'll see alot of hate tossed in its general direction. There's been some discussion that the ActionTec has a puny NAT table that ruins the performance of some P2P apps. Also, people love their Linksys WRT54G's. The level of customization you can perform on these really makes them your 'own' router. I recently discovered the incredible Tomato Firmware and I was pretty dismayed at having to move the thing behind this new ActionTec thing as the FIOS installer required, that and the quick and dirty setup I had in place to make sure everything was working before the installer left was doing double NAT. ugh. As soon as the guy had left the house, I was switching things around to get that WRT54G out in front again.
Getting everything configured properly to do that was a breeze. Initially, the WRT54G was connected to the WAN via PPPoE and doing NAT for everything behind it. The wan port of the ActionTech was plugged into a LAN port on the WRT54G and getting an IP using dhcp. The STB's were connected to the ActionTech and had no problem getting IP addresses and guide data, but video-on-demand was hosed. Changing the ActionTech into a bridge (I roughly followed that guide) was trivial as well but didn't solve the video-on-demand problem either. I found a posts reporting that video-on-demand works with certain firmware on the WRT54G v5, but others that suggested it might be a that video-on-demand doesn't work with the Tomato Firmware. I suspect it has something to do with the QoS support in that firmware -- in the ActionTech's default config, specific QoS settings that are specified for the Verizon STB's.
So, I'm back to having the ActionTech out in front, handling pppoe, nat and bridging the ethernet and coax connection. The wrt54g is still behind this, acting more as a simple router than anything else right now -- it's still the default route for most of the machines on my network (other than the STB's a voip phone, tivos and a couple other devices). DHCP, DNS, VPN connections, among other tings, are still handled via my trusty linux box -- that's not going away any time soon.
[UPDATE: I flashed my wrt54g with DD-WRT and I have been running fine with the ActionTech in bridged mode for a couple years. I've added the Verizon DVR and continue to receive all services without the need to reconfigure or any problems. YMMV as my install was performed a long time ago and Verizon may install things differently these days.]
I use vncserver / vncviewer for more than you can imagine, mostly as a reasonable replacement for screen when working off of spotty wireless networks. I was pretty bummed out after upgrading a number of machines to Centos 5, that the fonts in gnome-terminal weren't anti-aliased anymore. I'm a sucker for a smooth-edged Bitsteam Vera Sans Mono.
After digging around a bit, and following a couple red herrings in the form of ~/.fonts.config, or /etc/fonts/.., I found a couple references to anti-aliasing being slow only with xservers that supported XRender, of course vncserver doesn't implement this extension, so that was a potential clue that something along these lines was the issue. Hmm, I never noticed gnome-terminal being slow unless I was tail -f'ing a webserver log or something else spouting prodigious amounts of output.
Finally, I remembered the gconf tree and finally the tool gconf-editor, which hadn't been installed by default on any of my Centos 5 installs. One invocation of yum later, I had gconf-editor installed and was poking around in the apps/gnome-terminal folder. It turns out that under there, in the profiles/default folder there's the no_aa_without_render option, which was enabled by default. Unchecking this fixed the problem -- ahh, a nice smooth Bitstream Vera Mono in my gnome-terminal again.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised to see the number of people asking how to turn off anti-aliasing instead of turning it on -- I can understand a certain affection for Misc-fixed, but fonts without jagged edges are just so much easier on my eyes. I guess all things being equal, this would probably work on Redhat Enterprise Linux / rhel 5 as well.
After digging around a bit, and following a couple red herrings in the form of ~/.fonts.config, or /etc/fonts/.., I found a couple references to anti-aliasing being slow only with xservers that supported XRender, of course vncserver doesn't implement this extension, so that was a potential clue that something along these lines was the issue. Hmm, I never noticed gnome-terminal being slow unless I was tail -f'ing a webserver log or something else spouting prodigious amounts of output.
Finally, I remembered the gconf tree and finally the tool gconf-editor, which hadn't been installed by default on any of my Centos 5 installs. One invocation of yum later, I had gconf-editor installed and was poking around in the apps/gnome-terminal folder. It turns out that under there, in the profiles/default folder there's the no_aa_without_render option, which was enabled by default. Unchecking this fixed the problem -- ahh, a nice smooth Bitstream Vera Mono in my gnome-terminal again.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised to see the number of people asking how to turn off anti-aliasing instead of turning it on -- I can understand a certain affection for Misc-fixed, but fonts without jagged edges are just so much easier on my eyes. I guess all things being equal, this would probably work on Redhat Enterprise Linux / rhel 5 as well.
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