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Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a number of Cisco customers began reporting problems with three specific Linksys-branded routers. When owners of the E2700, E3500, are E4500 attempted to log in to their devices, they were asked to login/register using their 'Cisco Connect Cloud' account information. The story that's emerged from this unexpected "upgrade" is a perfect example of how buzzword fixation can lead to extremely poor decisions."
Don't you worry about Planet Express, let me worry about Blank.
The version numbers are the EA-prefixed ones, not the solely E-prefixed ones.
My PC-as-a-router draws about 50 watts under load and 40 watts idle, so using your calculation above. Let's assume it's always under load, so that's 438 kwh. My last electric bill was about 11 cents per kwh, which comes to $48/yr to run it or about 13 cents a day. Considering it gives better performance than any dedicated consumer-grade router I've ever used, I'll glad shell out a dime a day for the upgrade. And that doesn't even account for the fact that I can set up my PC-as-a-router to go to sleep while I'm at work and at night, which drops its power usage lower than the dedicated consumer router. In the end, the energy cost increase is negligible as long as you're not using something horribly overpowered.
My latest builds were three Mini-ITX VIA boards; two are 1ghz VIA Centaurs and one is a 1.2ghz VIA Nano (the latter because I need to run a couple of KVM guests). They're fanless and I'm using 60gb SSD drives, because the idea is not only relatively low power, but no moving parts, as two of them are located about 60 miles away over some pretty nasty roads, so I want to reduce the likelihood of having to go out there to swap out power supplies or drives.
I did set up a WAN with three Tomato-upgraded Asus routers, and that worked very well, but because I'm running servers, I think they'd be a little under-powered for that purpose.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This "upgrade" that they performed for me last Tuesday, prompted me to perform an upgrade myself -I installed DD-WRT on my router.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.
http://www.zotacusa.com/
The zbox makes a great, ridiculously overpowered mythtv frontend.
http://soekris.com/
This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.
You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.
Only on /. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Dd-wrt and tomato-USB firmware builds run on several buffalo and asus brand routers.
Buffalo even ships dd-wrt on select units.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
They're called embedded systems. Maybe you've heard of them? Not free, but when you load a Linux distribution tailed for embedded systems (like this one) they're MUCH more stable than anything you can buy at any big-box store (even if you're flashing the firmware with something less retarded).
Not that it will matter, but here's a contrary anecdote about Asus. I purchased a refurb M70 from Newegg, wiped the OS, and used it for ~6 months before something started preventing boot. Probably bad ram, maybe a faulty mobo, don't know. I sent it to Asus' processing facility 900+ mi. away, and received the system back 4 or 5 days later with a brand new motherboard. They also replaced my screen because apparently it had a broken pixel or something I never noticed.
Here is another embedded system vendor with pfsense. Their products have intrigued me but I have never got around to trying one myself, although I have used soekris with monowall.
http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Kits-C82.aspx
876.581277 kilowatt hours for your debian router.
Minus
150 kilowatt hours for your consumer router
726 kilowatt hours times $0.11 dollars per kwh = $80 per year as your cost delta.
If you go with a standard intel atom platform, you can get that unit down to 50 watts, or $48 per year as your total operating cost.
At slightly hardware cost, you can buy a fanless nano-itx Atom pc that runs at about 13 watts. That's about $12 per YEAR. Make sure you use a USB flash drive as your storage media, for optimal energy usage.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I've purchased a decent amount of hardware from Netgate, including the ALIX.2D2 embedded system (manufactured by PC Engines..one of the links I provided above), which I'm currently using as my home router. I would highly recommend them. My previous router was running on a Soekris Net4521 box, which while good, wasn't quite fast enough for my 20+ Mbit Internet connection. For anything over 10 MBit, you really need something faster than a 486-class CPU.
Buy wifi hardware carefully. I learned the hard way that there is such thing as wifi hardware that "sort of works" with Linux, in that it's just fine to put in your workstation to connect to the AP, but can't be used to build an AP. Hostapd requires some kind of functionality that not all drivers have.
I have two PCI cards with two different chipsets, gathering dust because of this bullshit. Maybe these cards are cheap shit (I'll accept that criticism), but they are cheap shit that other newegg users said "works with Linux" or "has drivers in mainline kernel." Tread carefully, AP builders.
Time for the full story:
I used to be an Asus fan. I still have the parts from my M50 lying on my desk (it finally died after years of good service - I have no complaints about that one). The one time it broke under warranty (hard drive failure, probably actually my fault), I shipped it back no-questions-asked and got it fixed within a week.
So, when the time came to replace it, I figured I'd go Asus again. And I figured I'd upgrade to the G5x series (the "gamer" model, instead of the "notebook" model). However, around the time I was going to buy one (a G54), they were mysteriously discontinued. Ivy Bridge was just about to come out, so I figured they just stopped making the old ones in favor of a new model, and just sold out quicker than anticipated. No problem, really.
Well, Ivy Bridge got pushed back a few weeks. Still not Asus's fault, really. So it took a few more weeks for the G55 to come out.
So I found the first place to list them (a site called HIDEvolution, and I'm hating them more than Asus right now). They sold out pretty much immediately. Not that they told me, by the way - I didn't find out they were on backorder until the next week when *I* called them up.
Fine. "Good things come to those who wait" and all that. So I waited.
Four weeks later, I get an email. The customization I had ordered, putting an SSD in the secondary drive bay, was impossible, because apparently they don't *have* a second drive bay. Despite what the product info had said. So either HIDEvolution fucked up on listing the product, or Asus neglected to tell their resellers that they'd removed that option from the new model. Most likely both.
Well, I got things sorted out. Upgraded to the G75. A bit bigger than I'd like, but otherwise identical to the one I thought I'd ordered.
It took a week for them to process the order. Then another week for them to ship it, *by* *ground*, across the country. Who the fuck ships a laptop 2000 miles by truck?
Whatever. I finally have it, right? Very nice, a bit unprofessional-looking (this is technically my work laptop / signing bonus), but I don't care too much about that. I set aside a full weekend for setting everything up *just* *right*, maybe play some of those games I'd bought that don't run on my backup desktop. That night, though, all I do is run a couple benchmarks, then unplug it and surf the web a bit so I can see how long the battery lasts.
Half an hour later, it clicks off. Rather short battery life, I thought, but to be fair, it's a pretty powerful rig. I plug back in and try to boot again. Clicks on, lights flicker, it dies again. Nothing.
I let it charge a bit - maybe it just doesn't like booting from 0%. Five minutes later, the light shows it's fully charged. Still won't power on. Won't even hit BIOS.
FUCK
So I immediately shoot off a problem ticket, describe all the troubleshooting I did, every symptom I can notice. They promise to respond within 48 hours or the ticket will be immediately escalated.
I don't get a response to *that* ticket for a full week. By which time it was irrelevant, as I'd called them up on Tuesday. First Asus insisted it was HIDEvolution's problem. Then HIDEvolution insisted it was Asus's problem. After two hours or so, and not a small amount of profanity, I get Asus to issue an RMA. I ship it off immediately.
That was literally a month ago. June 6. I still have not heard even an ETA on the repair - it's still marked as "awaiting spare parts". Despite the fact that most retailers are still showing them as in stock - I could have gotten a refund and bought a brand-new one in the time it took them to do nothing.
I've emailed them, told them to just send me a new one - I have *nothing* on that particular machine that I want. They refuse. I ask for an ETA. Nothing. I ask at least for some sort of second-day air shipping when they send it back. I get a vague promise that it is *marked* for "expedited shipping".
Two weeks ago, I gave them an ultimatum - either I have
I can tell you from experience that an Atom D525, Core i3 550, and Core i7 2500 all idle under 20W at the wall when using solid state storage and a decent DC-DC power supply. The Atom tops out under 30W while the Cores obviously can go much higher.
A Soekris net5501 with SS storage and a PCI GBE card tops out around 17W, and an ASUS WL-520GU sits around 3-4W.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen