Streaming My Consciousness

She just built a large structure out of Lego, and it has a bell.

She was explaining that it’s a school, called "Zoo" (it has a piece above the door that says so, presumably from a zoo set), and that it was a high school.

Sounds like she has a pretty good grasp on what high school really is.

Given Kansas City’s central location on the IP backbones that traverse the US, it should be a heck of a lot easier than it is to get some semblance of decent bandwidth at the church (and other locations). Sadly, the best we can do is 1.5Mbit DSL (even if the line has been tested from our demarc to support 7.5Mbit, AT&T refuses to sell us any more than 1.5Mbit because their computers say that’s the best they can do) or bonded T1s.Even then, there’s a finite limit to what what we can achieve with that, because we have a finite amount of copper feeding the building.

Anything else involves construction costs in the $50K and up range. Even amortized over a 5-year contract, that still tacks on nearly $1000 to the monthly bill. Point-to-point wireless to somewhere with fiber would cost almost as much.

It amazes me that in one of the more affluent suburbs in the country, the best we can do is no better than what you get in and around most small towns in rural western Kansas.

Recently, we made some changes to the DNS infrastructure on our public wireless networks which has had the unintended consequence of breaking things when our laptop users are plugged into the LAN and have their wireless active. Brian and I have wrangled with this in the office, but we simply turned off the wireless as a workaround.

What’s happening is that when connected to both networks, the wireless has a higher priority by default, and so it resolves DNS via that interface. This is problematic when trying to access an internal resource, because our DNS is set to have a default resolution to our website for *.cor.org. To complicate matters further, Arena behaves differently when you’re on the guest network (sends to a forms-based auth portal instead of using IE integrated authentication).

After much digging, I found out how to change interface priority. Here’s the process in XP screenshots (the process is similar in Vista):

1. Open your network connection properties (XP: Via control panel or right-click on Network Places, then select Properties. Vista: Go to Network and Sharing Center and select “Manage Network Connections in the links on the left)

XP Network Properties

2. On the menu bar (press Alt to show it in Vista), Select Advanced, then “Advanced Settings”

Advanced Network Properties Dialog (XP)

3. Move the Wired LAN Connection (By Default, “Local Area Connection”) to the top, followed by the wireless connection. Make sure that any VPN virtual adapters come after these, otherwise the VPN will only use the ones above it. This tends to be problematic if you’re using split tunneling, as it will kill any network connection you have.

4. Hit OK, and you’re good to go.

Andrea just blogged about some fun stuff that happened with our eldest daughter. It’s so cool to see my little 5-year-old have such a huge heart.