Have you ever noticed

that most people pronounce the name of this month as if the first "r" were not there, viz. "Feb-you-air-e" rather than "Feb-roo-air-e"? That's on the level of the ads one hears on radio stations from third mortgage loan sharks saying "our criteria is less strict", or the habit of our neighbours in the terra incognita to the south of our frozen north failing to distinguish between "metre" (an international standard unit of length) and "meter" (an instrument for measuring stuff). Colour the Spy peckish.

The Spy's home network

has been giving him grief the last year or so. Seems his older Asus 3200 router cannot cope well with significant home automation. There are simply too many devices on the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band. Why not have them on the 5GHz band? It's a Humpty-Dumpty issue. Impenetrability! That's what I say! 5G does not play well with walls and floors. Apparently if one is to make the router do a lot of work one has to pay it extra. Concluding the obvious solution therefore lay in switching (sic) to a combination of a more skookum pure router and switches paired with one or more access points (to divide and conquer the work so to speak) he began researching the matter.

To future proof the setup, he ultimately determined to get a somewhat office-industrial router with 10G ports, including some optical ones for down links to switches and what will eventually be one or two WI-FI access points. Also, after discussing the matter with oldest son, who is more knowledgeable about such matters, he decided to go with open source router OS software. The most common OS seemed to be pfsense, but the one with the best reviews (once a fork of the former) was OPNSense. Careful perusal of Amazon offerings turned up a series of HUNSN branded boxes, some with variations on the desired theme. One at the top of their line was the model described this way: "1U Firewall Appliance 10GbE, OPNsense, VPN, Network Rackmount, Intel Core I7 9700, HUNSN RZ05k, 6 x Intel 2.5GbE I226-V, 4 x SFP+ XL710 BM1 10000Mbps, 32G RAM, 512G SSD" and with a price tag that matched. OK he knows. That be spelled o-v-e-r-k-i-l-l.

He ordered one, and it came, rather expeditiously no less, except for a DHL shipping fiasco (who is home in the middle of the day to sign? Two strikes and it had to be delivered to a pickup point, which was of course closed for the weekend.) Well, they had it on the Monday afternoon, despite what the Amazon tracking said. So, he unpacked it and got the first surprise--no instructions. No manual, no paper saying where to look for one, indeed nothing at all by way of documentation, just a little box with the brackets for mounting in a standard rack. Well, the Spy hasn't for nothing been a geek since jailbreaking and escaping from his crib one night so he figured out how to connect it to a spare monitor and keyboard, plugged it in, connected the first port to the cable modem and turned it on. Imagine his astonishment when it promptly booted into...not OPNSense as advertised (and still so) but pfsense.

He will say one positive thing about HUNSN. Their people do respond quickly to messages left on Amazon, albeit in broken English and communicating in an uncommunicative way. Their suggestion for a solution to their false advertising problem was that I either return it or do them the "favour" of installing OPNSense myself. Well, the documentation for that is online, so the Spy gave it a go. However, although it had a step-by-step of sorts, many of the instructions appeared to have been written by someone who had done such installs numerous times, and was talking to himself in shortmouth (the verbal equivalent to shorthand.) It took several tries to get the correct install image (descriptions clear as mud), verify it, and burn it to a memory stick. And yes, he had to find the right key combo to get a boot menu--turned out that rather then the common F12, HUNSN's box was using F11. However, there was no way that stick image was going to boot. Despite the USB slot being prioritized, it saw, but steadfastly refused to boot its image.

After several failed experiments, in exasperation he decided to pack the box up and return it. He even had a civil but rather uncomplimentary message composed to the clerk (not IT tech) answering his messages on Amazon (a little garbled from what her tech people were telling her, one thinks). But then he noticed that the internal image actually being persistently booted owned up the moniker "Kingston"--evidently from having been installed from a memory device by that manufacturer. His stick was also a Kingston. Could the boot system simply be confused by the ambiguity? He tried burning the same failed image to an old Transcend SSD he had long since obsoleted in favour of a SanDisk with much greater capacity. Amazingly, this ridiculous long shot paid off, it worked, and the install went well, so after all this investment of time and energy, he decided to keep the box, though at his consulting rate, he ought to have both his money back and two more (free) routers to boot. (sic)

So, he is gradually putting the new electrical plumbing in order, and for now will hang the old router off the new one as access point while he considers whether to wait for WI-FI7 devices to come available for the purpose, or spring for 6e, or go mesh (which is more reliable for wandering about the house.) However, the setup is already far more stable than it was, which is at least promising. He also has a couple of 2.5G switches with optical connection upstream for replacing two of the current three 8-port 1G switches, but will save recounting that adventure until it happens. Early experimentation did indicate much faster internet downloads this way, though.

Oh, and one more thing. Once the Spy got the router to spill its guts fully, (no logo or branding on the outside of the unit) he discovered it is an American Megatrends product. Either HUNSN is an affiliate of AMI or just a retailer buying from them--likely the latter, as Amazon is not their only store platform. Who knows where and when the OS was installed, and/or why it was mis-advertised, but at this writing, the misinformation is still on the Amazon site (unless this box was a unique anomaly and other instances do have the advertised OS installed.

In another tech adventure,

the Spy decided to reduce his desktop cable clutter. See, he does have an old 2010/2012 MacPro tower in both his work and office setup, as well as a desktop spot to run a portable instead (can be either a 2022 M2 or a 2019 Intel). Since he uses three external monitors in both setups, he had two docks, with manual switching for an Apple branded monitor (TB1 in one case and DP mini in the other) plus switches to pick the right inputs for the two HDMI monitors and USB switches to connect keyboard, trackpad, trackball, camera, microphone, network, external backups, printer, etc.

Since he wanted both HDMI and USB functions in one switch, he went for an item described as "ATLAHET 8K KVM Switch HDMI 2 Monitors 2 Computers Support 8K@60Hz 4K@1on AmazonAS 20Hz PC Display Share 2 Monitors and 4 USB 3.0 Support Copy and Extend Mode Includes Desktop Control and Power Adapter…"

Setup at the office was straightforward, and it achieves the desired result. One of the four USB3 outlets goes to a 9-port USB-3 dock. Some experimentation did reveal, however, that when the M2 MacBook drives a TB monitor, it does not want also to drive another HDMI one either on the dock or on an adapter via another TB port on the portable. It has to go through the machine's own HDMI port, or the monitor either flickers or burns in. Perhaps the little electrons are just a bit too uncertain where they are. Also, the radio receiver device for his Logitach wireless keyboard can be none too consistently reliable, depending on exactly where in the chain it is plugged.

The home setup, though similar, has the tower with the DP connector on a two-way switch for the Apple monitor, and two different TB docks, because the portable may either be the M2 brought home to rest for the night and be awoken for work before dawn, or the Spy's old but trusty 2015 MacBook Pro, meaning the setup is more complex to cover more disparate options at the portable location. The tower, like the one at the office, has a TB3 card in the backplane and in both cases, its own dock, so three at home rather than two. That one 's not set up yet. There's other fish to fry, such as writing this column.

Money talks--or buys silence.

Perhaps a jury finally got through with a message that was heard, for a certain politician has apparently stopped defaming the woman he was convicted of assaulting. Evidently the price of silence and sense was an $83M whacking rather than a mere $5M tap on the knuckles. Once the fraud penalties are calculated, it will be interesting to see whether he can afford even the quality of lawyers he's had, or if indeed any of them will risk trashing their own reputation, or being disbarred by repeating his arguments before a judge.

Quite enough done, and more to be

as marking homework, budget, timetable, and university meeting await attention, not to mention two grandchildren's orchestra presentation and possibly another's soccer game.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-third year as a high school and university teacher in 2023. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations, and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the now defunct Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect project. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

Specifically Cited here:

HUNSN store on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/stores/HUNSN/page/173D0981-7A9C-445A-B227-25A0F16DF643?ref_=ast_bln

ATLAHET Switch on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CFQFVKL4?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1