Host a speed test on your website

Want to know what your internet speed is from my perspective? Going to dedicated sites like Speedtest.net and others to test our connection speed is great for the best case scenario but those are dedicated servers and usually geographically ideal.

Want a sample of what your (somewhat) real-world speed is form my servers perspective? Ok, well its not my server, it’s a Dreamhost server but you get the point. This is an interesting idea, I might make this a widget.

Provided compliments of Speedtest mini (http://www.speedtest.net/mini.php)




Speedtest.net Mini Bandwidth Speed Test


Speedtest.net Mini requires at least version 8 of Flash. Please update your client.




Automatic Wi-Fi connectivity checker & reconnect script

I often find myself using various remote access tools to control kiosk and digital signage displays around the country, many of these devices are connected via wireless cards. Assuming the router is up, it can, from time to time be necessary to restart the wireless NIC, not an easy task to do if you’ve already lost connectivity. I first used this on Windows XP using the DevCon command-line utility, the script just pings Google and if the ping is successful nothing happens, if not it disconnects the WiFi connection, waits 5 seconds and attempts to reconnect.

This set of instructions is for Windows 7, I believe this would work in Windows 8 but I haven’t tested that, Windows XP instructions can be found in the comments, along with a URL to for the required files.

What you need to complete this:

For starters, you need a WiFi card, if you don’t have one integrated into your CPU here is a cheap wireless N card that’s compatible with more Windows flavors and works well, Medialink- 150Mbps Wireless N USB Adapter – XP / Vista / Windows 7 & 8 Compatible

1) SSID of Wireless Network (CaSe Sensitive)

C:\>;netsh wlan show networks

2) Wireless Profile Name (CaSe Sensitive)

C:\>;netsh wlan show profile

3) Name of Wireless Interface (CaSe Sensitive)
C:\>;netsh wlan show interfaces

Now with those three pieces of information you should be able to run the following command (remember these are CaSe Sensitive) my assumptions are:

1) your SSID name is: My Wireless Network

2) Your profile name is: My Wireless Network

3) Your interface is: Wireless Network Connection

C:\>;netsh wlan connect ssid=”My Wireless Network” Name=”My Wireless Network” Interface=”Wireless Network Connection”

If that works, move on to test the disconnect, if it doesn’t work you probably missed my four previous comments about these Interface/profile and SSID names being case sensitive.

C:\>;netsh wlan disconnect interface=”Wireless Network Connection”

Next you need to create the script, open notepad and add this text to the document

REM Restart Wireless Connection
REM Don’t restart if ping works.
ping -n 1 google.com
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
netsh wlan disconnect interface=”Wireless Network Connection”
TIMEOUT 5
netsh wlan connect ssid=”My Wireless Network” Name=”My Wireless Network” Interface=”Wireless Network Connection”
:end

Save the document as restartwireless.bat (make sure you put the .bat otherwise you are just saving it as a text file and we need a batch)

It’s probably not a bad idea to open the command prompt, navigate to where you saved the new batch file and run it by typing

restartwireless.bat

Make sure you test this both with you WLAN connected and disconnected to make sure it works both ways. Provided that works, all you need to do is schedule the script to run periodically using Windows Task Scheduler. You could have the script run every hour, or once a day, lots of settings you could tweak there, might want to make sure you run the task with elevated privileges in the task scheduler.

Cancelling Postini to use Google Apps

** Update 12/3/2012 **

It only took a few days, the domain was released from Postini and we were up and running on GApps in no time. Some things to I learned when we migrated from Exchange to Google Apps….

  1. You cannot attach documents from outlook on meeting notices
  2. Group emails do not get sent to to the sender, even if they are on the distribution list
  3. Not having to maintain an Exchange server is worth it

** End Update **

 

After trying to signup for Google Apps and being denied because of an existing Postini account we use on this domain for message filtering I began to do some homework.  It turns out, if you have a Postini account you need to cancel that account before you can sign up the domain for Google Apps, lets not forget though, Postini is a Google product.

I completed the online support ticket to cancel the account and then searched around for some more information on how long this takes.

Which lead me to the Google Postini product forum (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/postini/UqpJ5rB9GOA[1-25]) some users are claiming this process can take 60+ days…

Despite being contacted by a Google representative to send in a Letter of Authorization (which I did) shortly after my online support request, I’m not convinced this will be an expeditious process, which is surprising because we don’t get a refund (message filtering is already built into Google Apps) and we are signing up for additional services, it’s a win-win for Google.

Hopefully we will be pleasantly surprised and our domain will be released this week.  Exchange 2010 is a great improvement from 2007/2003 but without a dedicated Exchange admin and an IT staff already taxed to capacity, moving this service to the cloud is long overdue.