2023 Router tweaks

So time for the quarterly set of tweaks to see if I can improve my speeds, reliability etc. This time I’m trying to sort out an issue with Wi-Fi which is causing a server, located in my garage, to be unresponsive on the network.

The first set of changes were nothing to do with the router but to qBittorent, in my aim to maximise the upload speed I’d allowed the software to swamp the local network so the Server wasn’t actually able to connect to the network and get an IP address! Some of these tweaks are unique to the Billion BiPAC 8900AX I use while others are standard and so relate to all, I’ll try and identify which is which.

MMM  DD HH:MM:SS kern warn kernel: Missed Membership report from 169.254.149.241 for 224.0.0.252 1 times. Waiting..

So in the router logs I frequently saw the above warning. The 169.254.149.xxx means the Server hasn’t actually been assigned an IP address yet, have a search for that range to find out more details. Once I’d reduced the number of connections allowed for all torrents and active seeding torrents I started to see less of those issues, they still occur but at least the Server does get assigned a local IP address during the day now. For the Billion router you can set QoS rules, under Configuration->Quality of Service. For these to work for torrents I had to pre-configure the port to use on inbound and outbound connections, I don’t use UPNP which isn’t a bad thing it seems, again search for security issues round that and generally it seems turning it off is favoured. So my torrent connections are now set to a low priority on the outbound (upload/LAN to WAN) side and limited, on the inbound (download/WAN to LAN), side to 67% of the available bandwidth, these rules also only apply to the torrent server, which has a fixed IP address (This server has an ethernet connection to the network and so always got an IP address). This allows Streaming and browser to continue quite happily with no interruptions whereas before this stuttering, on streaming was common.

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Now onto the generic Wi-Fi changes…

Bizzarely this involved reducing the bandwidth settings in the 2.4GHz/5GHz ranges. For the 2.4GHz I now have a bandwidth of 20MHz, previously I tried to use 40MHz but the local area just couldn’t sustain that because of neighbours networks, while the 5GHz is currently set to 40MHz. The result is that the 2.4GHz has greater stability, as does the 5GHz, but the range of the 5GHz has actually increased into more rooms in the house! This seems to be down to collisions with neighbouring networks, not many four at the worse case, but by trying to use the full bandwidth it was frequently causing issues. Now I’m using less of the bandwidth the quality of the connection, and range, has improved. Seems strange? Yes but I did find many sites that explain this in detail and why it can improve the quality of the connection.

I did also enable “MLD Multicast Proxy”, this is the IP6 version of “IGMP Multicast Proxy” it turns out, I wasn’t aware until I started searching for improvements. But has it made a difference? I can’t tell but it hasn’t made it worse and I do know that enabling IGMP solved our initial issues, when I first started using the Billion, when trying to use Youview and the online TV catchup services.

Lastly I reduced the “RTS Threshold” from the maximum 2347 down to 2040. Again no noticeable improvement but it’s not worse. This is my current focus though, so does it need to go lower? I’ve seen recommendations to drop it to 500 but these are accompanied with the caution to do so gradually as that doesn’t suit all. So, hopefully, I’ll get some updates to this later.

A tale of two drives

So just happened to spot, when running HWiNFO64 to check motherboard version, that my 250GB Crucial MX500 is down to 8% life remaining! What? Couple of months of go when I was checking that value it had 28% life remaining, so all good and plenty of time to plan my next upgrade. Now I’m in panic mode and ordering a new 500GB Crucial MX500 for £43, which is a good price as the 250GB cost me £63 just over four years ago.

SMART Status from HWiNFO64 v7.26

So what happened? Seems that the Crucial drives have a potential with many small packet writes, this may just be on the model made all those years ago and not on the current models, Crucial have always had a good reputation from reviews. So in the SMART details we can see it has written a lot of data, compared to the other MX500. The failing drive is my boot disk so has the pagefile, core programs (Anit-virus, VirtualBox, Browsers) and applications (Office, VLC, Notepad++) on it.while the other SSD, only a couple of months newer and running the same firmware version, has all the games, documents, photographs and BOINC application.

So the failure drive presumably has all the small packet writes (temporary files, browser cache & cookies, pagefile) while the still okay SSD has the larger writes (photographs, documents).

So just about to install the new 500GB Crucial MX500 replacement drive, and we’ll see how that goes over the coming month. After that the PC will probably be passed on as I should have my new one built and moved into the world of NVMe drives.

10-Sep-22:
Quick update to this. The machine, Treacle, has now been retired and relegated to a hardware test role, admittedly old hardware. The new Crucial MX500 drive is at 100% life remaining while the old 1TB MX500 has only 64% life remaining, so still pretty good.

So is it aceptable to sell an SSD that has only 8% life remaining? It will need a secure erase, which presumably will reduce that further, cue another addition to this post.

18-Nov-22:
The secure erase, three passes using “British HMG IS5” via Eraser an overnight job, didn’t reduce the disk life any. So I put the drive on eBay with full disclosure of the remaining drive life, including screen grabs from HWInfo SMART data, and a starting price of £3 + £3 p&p. One week later it sold for £26 inc p&p, when you can buy a brand new one for £38.08 inc p&p! The buyer, one of two bidding, was happy with the drive and condition. So why pay, what I consider, over the odds? Did they expect to be able to retrieve data from the drive? I have had a close friend, computer illiterate it now seems, sell a computer after physically destroying the drive only to be contacted by the buyer to say they have his personal data now (The buyer did send the drive back).

So is there a market in second hand drives purely for what data you can retrieve from them? I know it’s possible to get data from incorrectly erased drives, I’ve had to recover said data for friends in the past, so is that data of use to someone? You’d need some serious time and software to be able to make use of any account/password data on the drive.

Remote Desktop – Custom screen size

Sometimes you don’t want to run an RDP session full screen but you do want to want to make use of the real estate more than the default RDP settings allow you to choose. Using the RDP panel you can only select set values from the slider control, there isn’t the ability to be fully flexible.

So you have to customise your RDP session but this time using notepad instead. Generally your RDP session will load its default values from the Default.rdp file, held in your “My Documents” folder. So edit this and change the following two lines to whatever value you want, from the 1920×1080 defaults, in my case.

desktopwidth:i:1600
desktopheight:i:1100

Windows 10 restarts after shutdown

Currently have an issue where most of the time shutting down the PC just performs a restart, annoying to say the least, been going on since late 2018.
I’m currently trying out this solution to see if it can be resolved.

6-Dec-19: A couple of test shutdowns later and it seems to be working, one to monitor.

Remote Desktop: Map a local drive on the remote host

If you repeatedly use a Remote Desktop session and that session needs access to files on the machine you’re connecting from then you’d normally set up a network drive, possibly mapped as follows:

net use z: \\yourmachine\c$ /persistent:Yes

But, depending on how Draconian your network security is then mapping folders on user machines may actually be blocked. Strange one as this ability is mostly essential when working on a remote machine, especially if a developer. Fortunately you can map using the built in sharing of RDP. Same format as earlier just the machine name changes and effectively becomes a constant, so the mapping is now:

net use z: \\tsclient\c /persistent:Yes

And job done, until the next group policy is introduced blocking that…

 

Search an MS-SQL database for a specific named column

Need to find a column in a database? The following SQL will return the tables, and columns, that contain a wildcard value

SELECT c.name AS ColumnName,
       t.name AS TableName
FROM sys.columns c
JOIN sys.tables t
 ON c.object_id = t.object_id
WHERE c.name LIKE '%column_name%'
ORDER BY TableName,
         ColumnName;

Jump lists in Windows 10 not working?

Try this solution, posted as a fix for Windows 7 but worked for me under Windows 10.

 

Windows PC not auto-booting?

Since I installed the “Windows 10 Fall Creators Update”, build 16299, the desktop has stopped auto-starting, to it’s BIOS configured schedule. It’s scheduled for a 5:01am start, but every morning I’ve come into the room, since the update, it’s sitting there switched off.

A couple of Google’s later and here’s the answer, well I hope it is as I haven’t verified it yet, something for tomorrow morning. So the suggestion is to disable Windows “fast startup” mode, details on doing that can be found over at TechAdvisor.co.uk, and a more detailed explaination of why is at HowToGeek.com.

29th October 2017: Seems to have resolved the issue.

Setting update proxy in Notepad++

Having problems setting, and retaining, the Updater Proxy in the Notepad++ UI?

Then resort to the command line. Open a cmd prompt, with administrator privileges.
At the prompt go to the Notepad++ updater directory, the following works for default installations:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\updater

From here run this command:

gup -options

This brings up the same dialog as the UI but this time the values you enter will be saved.

 

Repairing Windows

Just some random jottings on tools to repair Windows, release 10 and maybe 7 and 8 as well.

DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management)

Some of the options for this tool are not available depending on Windows version (Enterprise, Professional or Home) and also release.

Sample commands

• DISM.exe /Online /cleanup-image /scanhealth
• DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

SFC (System File Checker)

Tries to repair any file corruption in Windows files.

• sfc /scannow
• sfc /verifyonly