NetEqualizer News Blog

By Art Reisman

CTO http://www.netequalizer.com

A few weekends a year I spend time at our rural retreat out in the middle of high plains of Kansas.  My internet options are very limited.  We have Wild Blue as a Satellite provider. Their service is on average worse than dial-up when it is working, and there are many reasons for it to randomly go out. Including heavy rain, woodpeckers destroying the plastic cap on the center of the dish, and just random congestion that can occur at any time of the day.  There was also the time I accidentally used up my data quota after leaving the Internet radio on for a week.  In response, they shut off my service without any notification.

As a back up to the wild blue, I have a 40 foot repeater antenna on the roof that picks up a 3g signal from the local wireless provider. If I sit right under the repeater, in a closet, I can get a data signal on my phone for those emergencies when I must respond to an e-mail, so technically I am not completely off grid.

When the Internet goes down , I will  fight for hours resetting routers and checking cables, just like my  1-year-old grandson screaming for hours when overtired. I will not give up my Internet access without a fight.

But then it happens. At some point I give up.  The Internet is unusable or completely gone.  With great relief, I look over at my night stand, where I have a stack of unread nature books that sits for months at a time. Much like the island of misfit toys, these books just need to be read.  My favorite nature  writer Richard Coniff  lulls  me into  a wonderful world without politics, without doomsday weather events for which I have no control, no angry customer e-mails :) For several hours I can enjoy nature and the glorious rhythm of life without the Internet.

By Art Reisman

CTO http://www.netequalizer.com

I often get asked if our NetEqualizer Technology is Patented. And the answer is NO.  The Netequalizer secret sauce is buried deep within our code , and is protected by copy right law.

As for patents, I have a disdain for software patents which was exemplified in this 2007 article that I wrote for Extreme Tech Magazine which explains my position.  Here is an excerpt

The problem with this patent, like many others in a misguided flood of new filings, is that it describes an obvious process to solve a naturally occurring problem.

For the full article click here “Analysis  Confessions of a Patent Holder“

I have been involved with supporting thousands of wireless networks over the past 14 years. From large professional sports arena’s to small home networks, I have seen successes and failures alike.  What follows are my learnings from living  with the pain and the success of these networks.

1. Do not cut corners on coverage. The biggest and most egregious mistake that our customers have made over the years is shopping price over coverage.   The fewer access points installed the lower the net cost of the install. You may not realize  this mistake during initial trials.  Once your network is at full capacity coverage issues can be a nightmare for both customer and vendor.
2. Use the best available  technology.  There are many different flavors of technology when installing a wireless network.  Note, the best technology may not be the most expensive, and the newest technology may not be the most reliable. As for specific recommendations on technology , I will include information in the comments section as information becomes available.
3. Don’t let the advertised SPEED of  access point specifications overly influence your decision.  There are many factors that ultimately affect the end-user connection speed. In many cases the top advertised speed of an access point is unattainable. For an analogy would you pay an extra $50,000 for a car that could go 200 MPH when the speed limit is 75?    I have seen buildings with a 100 megabit  link to the Internet , purchasing 20 1 G access points.  Even for future expansion purposes this is way too much overkill,
4. When choosing an IT company to help with the install, The midsize or small company in your area is likely a better bet than the large IT company.   I have personal experience working with a company that went from a great company to work with to a nightmare over a period of years. The reason was as they got bigger and hired more employees,  their talent pool become more diluted ,their prices got higher, while their work quality become a sore point with their customers.
5. For large complex installations think about paying for a simulation. A company like Candelatech , specializes in simulating various loads on wireless networks and is well worth the up front investment prior to build out.
6. Congestion control. Disclaimer: Yes we make a bandwidth controller and yes we are biased toward this technology. On many networks the best design and best wireless equipment are rendered irrelevant if there is not enough bandwidth to feed the animals.  A wide open heavily used network will come to  a halt without  some form of intelligent bandwidth control.

Below is a little routine I wrote to encrypt and decrypt a file.

This script is meant for encrypting text files and sending them privately through e-mail as an attachment.

Note: The author makes no claims about whether this encryption technique can be broken. It would not be easy.

Here is what you need to use this program.

1. Mac or other computer that can run a perl script from the command line
2. very basic knowledge of how to create and edit a file from the command line

Step One , cut and paste the code below into a file in your  (MAC) computer

You’ll also need this same program on any receiving computer where  you expect to be able to decrypt the file.

Create the text file you want to encrypt. I used the following and saved it off.

Dear  Mom,

I really hate my boss he is a real jerk, and I even think he reads my private out going e-mails by intercepting them. So I am using this encryption device to send you this message.

Dave the Paranoid

Here is how the process to encrypt and decrypt looks from my command line

I saved off my text to a file aptly named “file” into my working directory

I saved off the perl code below and put it  into an executable file called “test”

I then ran the encryption program.

MacBook-Air:~ root# ./test ./file ./n encrypt “you live in a tree”

./test is the perl program

./file is the input file with the text I want to encrypt

./n is the output file for the encrypted message, I could send this text file as an attachment to an e-mail , and the receiving users would need the same perl program and “key” to encrypt

encrypt is the directive to  the program to encrypt, the other option is decrypt to reverse the process

“you live in a tree”  

is my key. You can make it any text string of characters you want as long as you include it in quotes, the more random and the longer,  the harder it will be for somebody to break

I then reversed the process to decrypt the file ./n and store the results in file “x”

MacBook-Air:~ root# ./test ./n x decrypt “you live in a tree”

the cat command below prints the contents of the newly decrypted file x
MacBook-Air:~ root# cat x
Dear Mom,

I really hate my boss he is a real jerk, and I even think he reads my private out going e-mails, by intercepting them. So I am using this encryption device to send you this message.

Dave the Paranoid
MacBook-Air:~ root#

————–code starts below this line do not include this line————–

#! /usr/bin/perl
# encryption tool ARG1 input file name, ARG2 key,ARG3 output file name
$key=$ARGV[3];
if ( ! defined $ARGV[3] )
{
print ” encode infile outfile [encrypt|descrypt] key\n”;
exit 1;
}
open (INFILE, $ARGV[0] ) || die “open whitelist file $ARGV[0]”;
open( OUTFILE, ‘>’, $ARGV[1]) or die “Could not open file ‘$ARGV[1]”;
while ($string= )
{
chomp($string);
if ($ARGV[2] eq “encrypt”)
{
my @chars = split(“”, $string);
my @keychars=split(“”,$key);
$charsize= @chars;
$keysize=@keychars;
$n=0;
for ($i=0; $i < $charsize; $i++) { $num1=ord($chars[$i]); $num2 = ord ($keychars[$n]); $chars[$i] = ord($chars[$i]) + $num2; print OUTFILE “$chars[$i],”; $n=$n+1; if ( $n > ( $keysize -1) )
{
$n=0;
}
}
my ($str) = join “”,@chars;
print OUTFILE “\n”;
}
if ( $ARGV[2] eq “decrypt”)
{
#decrypt
$n=0;
my @chars = split(“,”, $string);
my @keychars=split(“”,$key);
$charsize= @chars;
$keysize=@keychars;
for ($i=0; $i < $charsize; $i++) { $num1=$chars[$i]; $num2=ord($keychars[$n]); $num3 = ($num1 – $num2); $chars[$i] = chr($num3); $n=$n+1; if ( $n > ( $keysize -1) )
{
$n=0;
}
}
my ($str) = join “”,@chars;
print OUTFILE “$str\n” ;
} # end decrypt

} # end while input line