The work trip to Nashville was partially successful on the Internet in a Box front. Speeds were great when I arrived Sunday afternoon then proceeded to tank over the next two days, which made zero sense. By Monday morning download speeds were seemingly stuck at 1.5 Mbps while uploads were 30 Mbps+. I left my personal laptop in the room casting AGDQ to the Chromecast I’d plugged into the TV that day hoping that things would improve: well, they didn’t. I returned to my hotel room around 4:30p local time and things were still slow. Opted to just live with it, took a short power nap, headed across the street to get wings from Pizza Hut, then headed back to watch AGDQ and crashed relatively early.
I woke up the next morning and speeds were still slow. I powered the SonicWall down and threw the aircard in my work backpack and headed out. I was going about 20 miles east of Nashville that day, and I needed to use the aircard to get online once I got to the site, so of course I ran a speedtest. 25 down, 10 or so up. Maybe the tower I was connected at the hotel to was super overloaded? It was very close to Vanderbilt University after all.
Went back to the hotel once I was done and worked out of there rest of the day: speeds still were slow on the aircard there but usable for AGDQ only. I put both my personal and work laptops on the hotel’s WiFi which wasn’t that much faster but was usable.
When I got home Wednesday afternoon I hooked the SonicWall back up here and was getting similar speeds. Had the idea the next day to rebuild the APU2 on CentOS 7 with the latest kernel which failed. I moved the aircard back to the SonicWall after this and it’s been inconsistent. I swapped the SIM to the M1, which I have now working similar to the old AF23 dock, and speeds were fine. Moved it back to the aircard and speeds have been fine since. Still thoroughly confused, but I’ve got some new plans.
First off I have a Fortinet FortiWiFi on the way, and since we’re moving to this platform at work having my own device to work with could be helpful. Also, it should work to isolate the SonicWall’s USB port, assuming the USB800 is supported. If not I’ll give the M1 a go with this.
Secondly, I’ve got my Gen7 HP Microserver set up as a test ESXi host that holds 5 VMs: a management VM that has ScreenConnect on it, and 4 VMs on a separate vSwitch connected to the SonicWall that are presently downloading 10GB test files from OVH and speeds are looking fine. Once these are done in a few hours, I’ll fire up the browser and use the Azure demo streams for more traffic.
Thirdly, I’ve got a Gen8 HP Microserver on the way as well: this will be another test host to supplement the Gen7. Microservers are nice and small so one could be used for an “in-room server” at a con.
Until next time!