Know How... 110 (Transcript)

Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is Twit! Bandwidth for Know How is brought to you by cachefly.com.

This episode of Know-How is brought to you by SquareSpace. The all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two-week trial and 10% off go to squarespace.com and use the offer code know-how.

And by lynda.com. lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn. Instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on business, software, web development, graphic design and more. For a free trial visit lynda.com/knowhow.

Father Robert Ballecer: This week on Know-How we are going to take you with a Mouse without Borders, Bryan is going to show you how to fix them busted screen and then I am going to teach you how to fix a congested network.

Fr. Robert: Welcome to Know How. It is the Twit show where we build, bend, break and upgrade. I’m Father Robert Ballecer. Oh and there is no Bryan today. Bryan Has abandoned the show just to do some sort of honeymoon thing or whatever it is. I’ve never understood that. Evidently we are not important enough, he doesn’t care about the know-how audience enough to power through it. But that’s okay. We will welcome him back with open arms next week. Seriously, we wish Brian well on his honeymoon and hope everything is working out okay with him in Florida. We wish his wife all the best of luck.

Bryan Burnett: And some of those places out on the coast there isn’t a WiFi connection that you can connect too.

Fr. Robert: That’s right Bryan. That is a big problem in Florida. Now speaking of problems, we had a lot of people comment in the Google plus group about the episode we did on 3-2-1 super backup. Essentially I showed you how you could take an old net book and turn it into your central backup station. Taking in everything from dropbox and one drive any cloud storage solutions and then pushing it along with the data on your computer and your NAS into Amazon’s glacier. It was a cool solution but it did spark quite a bit of discussion, which we are always happy to see. I want to bring up some of the questions and posts that we had from the G plus group. Starting with Ed. Who posted, “I have one of these with an AMD Hudson that would be perfect for the 1-2-3 backup project. They run Windows and Linux fine and they are low power. I’m using it with an Ubuntu server 12.04, after I upgraded that I ran Windows on it. If you don’t have a netbook or can’t find one, this works fine”. Actually that is a great one, that is a fox.com Nano PC. The idea of course is that you could use any computer. It doesn’t have to be a netbook. The one thing that I would suggest, and I think Ed nails this, is that you want something low power. This is going to be running all the time. If it is your desktop that is using 300 or 400 W, that is not good. But if this is a netbook or one of these it is using 5 or 6 W, I think you can manage that. We also had a comment here from Brent, who suggested: “One of the things to consider in the 3-2-1 backup as shown, would be an older netbook which has met most cloud storage clients for windows and will sync all content after it is installed. Therefore reducing the overall storage on the net book itself, if you have a ton of data on different cloud storage solutions you could run out of local storage.” Thank you very much Brent, that is an excellent point. On that particular netbook I was not all that worried. Because it had a 500 GB rotating hard drive which I don’t want or need it to be fast because it it is just doing backup in the background. But, if you do have more than 500 GB in your collective cloud, in your dropbox, in your one drive, your Google Drive, whatever you are using to sync to the cloud, that could be an issue. Now what I would suggest, at least for my set up, is that if you do start to run out of space on the local drive as long as you’ve got that NAS mounted, why not store the cloud storage on the NAS. Then this same job that I created to back up the NAS would also backup your cloud storage. that is not ideal because it does make for a major point of failure if your NAS gets disconnected it is going to stop backing up. But that is something to consider if you do have a crazy amount of storage in the cloud. Finally, we’ve got a comment here from John who says, “I just watched Know-How 108 and I think I missed something in the super backup portion of the show. Where did the versioning come in? I don’t remember glacier having any versioning that it has been a few years so I could be wrong. Everything else just seems to be basic backup.” Well John, you didn’t miss anything. That is actually right. You see, glacier isn’t really a service. It is not a backup service the way you would think Carbonite or another commercial business. Glacier is big, dumb storage. That is all it does. There are no bells or whistles. The files you put up gets stored, the files you take down get copied. That is it. Now the versioning comes through the software. You could buy some really sweet software that does the versioning in the background and gives you a nice menu system based on what it sees in Amazon glacier. But we used vast glacier and fast glacier is free. So there is only so much you are going to get out of a free client. Now the way that we did versioning is that we set those switches. Remember we had the switches that we could add at the end of the command line? That did things like make sure you delete files or don’t delete files that have been cleaned out of the sync. Make Sure you keep all versions of the file. So let’s say that I have a file named test and I saved it 15 times, it will save all 15 different versions of test. It will just have a different date on each file. That is versioning. And I know it is messy. It is really messy when you consider that you might have 8000 files of the same thing on glacier, it is not all that attractive. But that is a versioning and ultimately that is what is going to save your butt if you find out that the document you were working on was messed up 32 versions ago. So, does it have versioning the way we would want it? No. Does it have versioning in the way that it will work? Yes. Could you get something better for Amazon glacier? Probably. But you would have to pay for it. Now keep your questions coming, because I do want to answer more questions about the 3-2-1 backup. It is vitally important for geeks to make sure that they’ve got their data in a safe place. And I am firmly convinced that 3-2-1 super backup is the way to go.

Bryan: It’s neat.

Fr. Robert: Thank you Bryan. It is very, very neat. Any hearing it from cranky hippo, ain’t no better way to put it. Now, let’s get into the first segment of the show. I want to talk a little bit about something that I have been using the last couple of years. If you are an old hand at building your own computers, you probably played with a KVM. That was a keyboard video mouse switch. Back in the day before we had Internet, and networks and stuff the KVM was the way that you would save desktop space. Remember we didn’t use laptops. Everything was on desktop. What we would do is that in order to save the desk space, rather than having a monitor for five different desktops that you might be running behind your desk, you had a single monitor, a single keyboard and a single mouse that used a switch, either mechanical or electrical to switch between the desktops. Super simple solution and it worked. It was one of these things that people just got used to. If you had to work with multiple computers, a KVM was one of the easiest ways to make sure that you didn't have to have an explosion of keyboards, mice and monitors sitting in your workspace. That kind of changed when we got into the laptop/mobile/tablet era. KVM's are still out there. In fact I still use them. But the utility is not so great. With a laptop you've got the screen built in to the computer so it is not like I can share the screen with the other computers. Or can I? I have been playing with a piece of software that Microsoft created in their garage. If you don’t know about the garage, it is sort of Microsoft subversion of the skunk Works. It is based in building four on the Redmond campus for Microsoft headquarters. It is a place where employees can come in their off hours and tinker. Or invent, or innovate. What they found is that sometimes the projects that people work on inside the garage becomes so valuable, so cool that they release it into the wild. And that is what happened with the program called mouse without Borders. Now what is Mouse without Borders? Imagine a KVM for laptops. And here is how you install it.

Fr. Robert: To Set up mouse without Borders you first need to download the program from the Microsoft download Center. The program will work with 32 and 64-bit versions of windows XP, service pack three. Vista, server 2003 and up. Windows 7 and Windows 8. Any of those can be added to the unified desktop. Once downloaded, install it first on the computer that will act as the master of your mouse without Borders set up. Each computer will bear the load of the program running on it scream, the master will coordinate all the other computers participating in the mouse without Borders network unify desktop. Click through the standard prompts and when you get to the let’s get started window, you will be asked if you’ve already installed mouse without Borders on another computer. Click no, and you will get the security code and computer name. Make sure to write it down or leave the window open so that you can copy it into the other installations. Now move to the next computer that you want to use in your unified desktop. In our case, I’m using an Acer Ultrabook, but you can mix and match computers and screen resolutions as long as they are running one of the supported versions of Windows. Download and install the program as you did with the master station. This time, when you get to the let’s get started window and it asks you if you have already installed mouse without Borders on another computer, click yes. Then enter the security code and computer name that you have received from the installation on the master computer. Assuming that your computers are all on the same network and connected properly, mouse without Borders should automatically connect to the master station and establish a unified desktop session. If you click on the mouse without borders try icon you will be brought to the screen where you can configure the orientation of the computers inside the unified desktop. You can change that word are just as you would with multiple monitors and the Windows desktop and you can choose to place the screens enter rows. Quick note, mouse without Borders will work with multiple display desktops so if you connect two or more computers and each have multiple monitors, the cursor will flow off the border of each desktop adage on to the next desktop.

Fr Robert: Now one of the things that people are going to know about this product is they are always going to be comparing it to other products that they are using. Like for example, synergy. Synergy is a fantastic program and it does work across platforms. So if you do work in a cross-platform environment that may be the way to go. Me, I work almost exclusively in a Windows environment and all of the workstations that I may want to share my desktop across our windows, so it doesn’t make sense for me to pray for another product when mouse without Borders is absolutely, positively free. And it is also incredibly lightweight. I have never had a problem with mouse without Borders. I know some people that had issues with some of the earlier versions. But they have really matured the software. A couple of hits. The first thing is this. Make sure you are running a wired connection. If you have an ultra-book you may be tempted to run it over wireless. It will work as long as you are on the same network you will be able to add a desktop to the unified desktop. The problem is, wireless is inherently unstable. All it takes is for you to have a slightly wonky connection, or a little bit of lag and especially if you are sharing more than two desktop the experience is less than optimal. Just don’t do that. Make sure that you are using a wired connection. The other thing to remember is that it is not just moving across a mouse on the desktop. Both of these computers on my desktop right now you can see I can move my mouse in between them. Which is cool. That is nice, but it is not just that I’m controlling this computer and then this computer. I actually can copy and paste between desktops. For example, here is the mouse without Borders installation and I am going to go ahead and copied this and then onto this desktop I am going to go ahead and paste it. When I do that it will move it over. So this is a really nice way to move files between computers if you don’t want to have to use an intermediate step, or if you don't want to open up a share on different computers. The other thing you can do, is you can copy and paste text, which is nice if you are doing multiple things with creative workstations. Something that it cannot do, that some other products can do, is this. If I have a window and I am dealing with a multiple desktop I am kind of use to being able to spread the window across, or move the window between my screens. You cannot do that and mouse without Borders. When you get to this border it is just going to say no. Now, that is kind of annoying and I wish it would do that, but it would require a level of interaction that I don't think they are willing to do for mouse without Borders. One of the things I really like about this product is the ability to leverage fully the power of each workstation. When we were using a KVM you have the ability to run a process on this computer, then run a process on this computer, and then run a process on this computer etc. which allowed you to maximize the amount to every sources you were running on each workstation. That kind of faded with some of the screen sharing program because you would only be using the processing power of the master station. As I move between desktops in my unified desktop, I can do that old school using the full power of that workstation. Which means, I could expand my desktop workstation that I use for rendering videos and have it next to the desktop that I use for word processing, next to the desktop I have for my email. It is just kind of a nice way to be able to fully use the gear that I have already bought. That is Windows without Borders. I am going to make sure the notes are in the show notes and you will have the link to download it. What I have to say is this, give it a try. You may go with something like synergy, which the people are big fans of it is a good program. But this is free. It might fit all your mouse without Borders needs. Now when we come back we are going to be going into a segment about how to fix the screen on your phone. We gave Bryan Snubb’s old broken phone and we said, “This thing is busted, see what you can do with it”.

Bryan: I was sitting in my bedroom with my laptop and I was playing TitanFall….

Fr. Robert: Actually that happens a lot. I think he’s lost it.

Fr. Robert: But first let’s take a pause and thank the first sponsor of Know It Alls everywhere. That is right, it is SquareSpace. Now, ideas are great and you want to get your ideas out into the world. The problem is that sometimes people get caught up on the website. They get caught up on registering the domain, the perfect domain, the name that gets you the attention that you want. Making sure that the backend is set up and at the front end is good what server are you going to use? What frame work? What sort of content management system? You can worry about all of that, or you just go to SquareSpace. SquareSpace is the one stop shop on the Internet for getting your idea, your project, up and running and out into the world. If you have used SquareSpace in the past then you know what I’m talking about. It is so easy to get everything. Your content, your writing, your photos, your videos already to display to the public. It is a great way to share a weekend blog or provide the ability to jumpstart a side startup project. With a professional looking site that has the ability to be quickly and easily tailored to your exact needs. Now some of the reasons why people have come back to SquareSpace year after year is that they are constantly improving their platform. They have always got new features, they have new designs, and they always have better support. They are always striving for the better way to help you when you make your project. It doesn’t help SquareSpace if they sell you something and then you don’t do anything with it because then you are just going to cancel your subscription. And you are going to go elsewhere. So they understand the attention to customer service is as important as their first sale. They are also incredibly flexible. This is great for DIYers. there is a set of tools to create your own website without any code knowledge. It is from design tools like the layout engine to the logo Creator you get to create your brand online and the SquareSpace helps you to do it. They have also got beautiful designs. They’ve got 25 beautiful templates to start with and without logo creator, that tool for tailoring your website, you can take that template and turn it into something that truly is unique. It is also easy to use. It is just drag and drop, it is click. But if you do need help, help is always available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Plus there is a completely redesigned customer help site for easier access to self-help articles and video workshops. They also provide e-commerce for those sites that support it. So it is easy for you to accept payments especially for nonprofits like the one that I set up, a way to get donations. It is also only eight dollars a month. We are talking about something that is inexpensive and high quality and it is so rare to get those two things together. SquareSpace is also mobile ready which you are going to appreciate if you have ever tried to create a work plan press blog and it doesn’t look as good on a phone as it does on a tablet or a desktop. SquareSpace backend will automatically adjust your content so that no matter what your user is looking at it with, it is going to look beautiful. Speaking of beautiful even their code is beautiful. I also host Coding 101 here on the Twit TV network and I love it when the code is just neat. It is simple and yet elegant. That is what you see when you look at the source for SquareSpace. Now SquareSpace takes care of all that stuff. All that stuff in the backend, the front end, the hosting, the domain. They take care of that so you can just worry about your content. So here is what we want you to do. We want you to start a free two week trial, with no credit card required, and start building your website today. When you decide to sign up for a SquareSpace account, make sure to use the offer code know how to get 10% off and to show your support of know-how. We thank SquareSpace for their support of Know-How, a better Web awaits and it starts with your new SquareSpace.

Fr. Robert: Now it is time for you to figure out how you fix your busted phone.

Bryan: We’ve all known someone who has dropped were shattered their phone screen. My someone happens to be a coworker named Shannon Morris. She was ever so lucky to have dropped her Nexus five from a very short distance, cracking her screen. Well, seeing that I am just an all-around awesome guy I offered to fix it for the knowledge. I will go through the steps on how to fix and replace the screen on a Nexus five, but the procedure is very similar to any other mobile device with a cracked screen. First you are going to need the parts. I purchased the screen replacement from Amazon for about $100. Unfortunately you can’t just replace the glass from the digitizer as glass and digitizer are fused together with an unholy bond, frustrating any do-it-yourselfer. If you have got some tweezers, a guitar pick and some time, you are in luck. Does, and a heat gun are the tools that you need for this job. Fortunately for me, I have some iFixit tools to help me along with this project. Step one is going to be powering off the device. We don't want it to be on one we are removing all these parts. Next, remove the symbol card tray. Opening the back is simple enough if you have a guitar pick or for me, a plastic sponger. Starting at the bottom of the case and work your way along the edge, popping the little rivets as you go. Step two, with a Phillips screwdriver there will be six screws holding on the back plate at the top of the phone. Once you have those removed, gently pry off the plate and set it aside. Then at the bottom of the phone, there are four more screws that you need to remove. And then you can remove that plate at the bottom. Along the side of the phone is a long connector and gently release that from the board of the phone and also the tiny connector that goes to the battery. On the left and the right of the battery are the 4G and 3G antennas. Be sure to unplug both of those from the port as well. You can gently use a plastic tool to pry the battery up. At the bottom of the phone, release a connector that is connected to the bottom board. Then gently pry, with a plastic tool, because this bottom board is going to be glued to the bottom of the case. If you break this, you are in trouble. So take your time and slowly left it up. It is time to release the connectors for both the front and rear facing cameras. Again, be careful while you lift these up because they are delicate. Now that you have the connectors disconnected you can pry the board up from the chassis of the phone. With the board out of the way, you can remove from right to left black tape gasket, the front can, the headphone Jack, the ear speaker, and a rubber gasket, and the rear camera. Down at the bottom of the phone, peel back the board just a little bit so you can slide it through once we are ready to remove the screen. Now that we have removed most of the components from the chassis we can go ahead and get our heat gun out and sense this screen is pretty badly cracked at the bottom of the phone I am going to apply some tape to try to hold it together. Carefully go over the phone with a heat gun. You want to get it warm enough to heat up the adhesive and then it you can gently push from behind to see if it will come apart. Now with the majority of the screen removed, I will heat up the last bits of glass at the bottom of the frame to remove them. And once the frame is cleaned of any more glass I can insert the new one. Now it is time to add a bit of glue to the screen edges. As I was in a hurry to finish up this project for Shannon said she was going to DefCon, and needed the phone for that, I used super glue. There is glue out there that you can get that will come apart when heated but I didn’t have the time. Let’s just hope that Shannon doesn’t break the phone again. Slide the connector through the chassis and place the screen into the frame, making sure to apply pressure to the edges for a good seal. Now it is time to work in reverse. But the cameras back in place along with the head Jack, the microphone. Reconnect the tabs as you go along with the antennas and make sure to screw the plate end before putting the back protector on. Turn on the phone and make sure that everything is plugged in properly. Clean the screen, and you are good to go. All in all this project took me about three hours. If I were to do it again I could probably do it in about a quarter of that time. Now all that is left to do is to return the phone to Shannon and we are good to go.

Fr. Robert: Now there were a couple of things that Brian did that I know people in the chat room or kind of cringing. Using gaffer’s tape not the best, much better than duct tape, but First tape combined with the heat gun can leave some nasty residue all over the place. Now luckily he was just going to throw away the screen anyway. But if you got any on the sites that stuff is so hard to clean off. The other thing is the crazy glue. I always assume that it is going to break again. So I would never use Krazy glue. But, this is cranky hippo’s project and if he wants to mess up his gear do it might argue?

Bryan: No, it’s neat.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. It is pretty neat. We also want to take a moment here to thank the second sponsor of know-how. And of course, as being the purveyors of knowledge that goes into your knowledge hole it has got to be lynda.com. Now what is lynda? Lynda is the source on Internet for filling that knowledgeable. It is not just about tech stuff. It is about anything that you may need to learn. Do you want to know about business? They got courses for that. Do you want to know how to publicly present? They've got courses for that. Do you want to be able to fix your computer or learn a new computer software suite? lynda.com has Courses for pretty much everything under the sun. Which is what makes them such a good complement for know-how. Now, lynda is easy and affordable. It is a way to help you learn on the Internet at your own pace. You can instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design and more. lynda.com Works directly with industry experts and soft word companies to provide timely training. Which means that it is often the same day with the new software release that they will have courses ready for you to learn that new software. It is a great way to keep up to date and to update your skills. All courses are produced at the highest quality. These are not homemade videos on YouTube, which I love because that is where I came from, but there is something a bout a professional shot, good lighting, good audio. You don’t want anything to get in the way of you and your learning and lynda knows that. That is why they make the videos the way they do. They also include tools that let you learn at your own pace. Things like search transcripts or play lists and certificates of course completion which you can publish to your LinkedIn account, which is great if you are professional in the field and you want your prospective employers to know what you’re trained in. Whether you are a beginner or advanced, lynda.com has courses for all experience levels. You get to learn while you were on the go with lynda.com app for the phone, iphone, or android. Or you can learn at home with your laptop and your desktop. you get to choose. It is one low monthly price of $29 and then gives you unlimited access to over want hundreds of thousands video tutorials. For me, I have been using premiere Pro a lot and I’ve been going to lynda.com to learn all the things that I had forgotten over the years. Sometimes when you add it for a living you forget do it is more than just copy and paste transition. Sometimes you need a refresher course on how to make things work. That is what lynda is best that. Premium members with an annual plan can also download courses to their iPhone, iPad or android and watch them off-line. Which is perfect if you want something for reference in the field when you are going to be away from an Internet connection. It is an incredible resource for those people who just need to fix things and go. So here is what we want you to do. We want you to try lynda.com. We want you to check out their courses on simple android development comma, on practical cyber security, on Monday productivity pointers, and songwriting in logic Pro. We want you to stay current with all software updates and learn the ends and outs to be more effective and productive. And that is where lynda can help. We’ve got a special offer for you to access all of those courses free, for seven days. Visit lynda.com/knowhow to try lynda free for seven days. And we thank lynda for their support of Know How.

Fr. Robert: We’ve got a bit of a question. This is actually a really good question that we had from a member of the audience who is having some issues with his network and he hoped that we could help. In fact to this question came to us from Timothy in Los Angeles writes, “I have a 24 port, TP link, TLSG102D Gb Ethernet switch. Connected to it is my router, 12 network cameras, 3 dual gig NAS and 5 work stations. Two of the NAS are dedicated to storing the HD video streams of the cameras. Three camera over each gigabit Ethernet port. The third NAS is connected via iSkuzzy to the work stations where we edit video. For some reason we are getting heavy network congestion. I have tried turning jumbo frames on but even then we can’t to edit video from the NAS unless I disable half of the security cameras. The specs say it should work. This switch has a 48 Gb per second capacity at 35.7 million packets per second. Even with the HD streams from the cameras I should be way under the maximum. I tried swapping out the switch with my spare but the problem persisted. Please help”. Well, Timothy from Los Angeles, first of all great job. Seriously this is a really good job. You did all the things you should have done. All the things that were the low hanging fruit on the trouble shooting tree. You tried swapping out the switch to make sure that it wasn’t a problem with the switch and you found out get the problem persisted no matter which switch you were using. You also tried turning jumbo frames on and off, which is a good way to push more data over your networks with fewer packets. Even with those jumbo frames on you found out that it didn’t decrease the network congestion problem. And, you also fixed the problem by disabling several of the cameras in your security camera network. Now right there that gives me all the information I need to help you fix the network you have. And here is the best part. You are not going to have to pay a dime. Unless you want to. You can always send something to me. But, seriously let’s talk a little about falling victim to the speck fiction. We are going to start with this. This is really, really ugly representation of what your network looks like. You’ve got 12 cameras, two NAS that are dedicated to receiving the high definition streams from those cameras, you’ve got a 24 port switch from TP Link, you’ve got a router sitting up top, and you've got five workstations and the NAS that does nothing but serve those workstations so that they can edit video. What you are telling me is that with all of these on you can’t get enough throughput from that NAS to your workstation to edit properly. But when you disable half of them, then this works just fine. Now, I know that the specs say that this should work just fine. I know the specs tell you that this should be great. But unfortunately, the specs live. Let me go ahead and pull it up on my screen. This is what the TP link specs tell you. It tells you that it has 48 Gb per second of switching capacity, which sounds like a tremendous amount. 48 Gb are you kidding me? It is only a 24 port switch. It also tells you that it has a 35.7 million packet per second forwarding rate. Now those two are important because it tells you what kind of fabric you have in your switch. How much data can you push through. And it also tells you how many packets you can forward at any given time. Switches, like these, work on store and forward. The frame comes into the memory, the processor says where you going, it checks the table to see where it should go and then forwards it. That is the store and forward. If you luck at most of these consumer level switches you are going to see that they have those exact same specs. 48 Gb per second, 35.7 million packets per second that can forward. The problem is, even though it is there, it lies. And I can prove it. Let’s start with that 48 Gb per second. I know why they say 48 Gb per second because you’ve got 24 ports of gigabit and each port has two directions in and out, so each port is technically 2 Gb. So it has a switching capacity of 48 Gb. But that is not how it works. If you’ve got a 24 port switch, if you’ve got traffic coming in, it also has to go out somewhere. So basically half the ports are listening and half the ports are receiving. Now you can have traffic going both ways so that basically means you max out at about 24 Gb per second. There is no magic port inside the switch this somehow stores all that data and then regurgitates it. You have to have a constant throughput and the maximum constant throughput is 24 Gb per second. So right there you know that the specs are lying to you. It is a PR trick. That is not how it actually works. That is not the problem. Because I am sure your switch is more than capable of forwarding all the data it needs to. The problem is in the packet switching, the packet forwarding. It tells you that you have 35.7 million packets per second. But if I already know that my switch tops out at 24 Gb per second it means, at max, even at the smallest packet length possible I am only pushing about 23. And that 23 is a theoretical maximum. What you tell me with your troubleshooting, you are getting nowhere near that. Now I am not saying that TP link is crap. Actually it is pretty good. But, they do over’s back a lot of their gear. You could go this route. You could go ahead and buy something like this, as Aterrasis D2. This is an enterprise class switch. This will definitely work, it has all those extra features because it is a managed switch. But this 12 port POE is going to run you about $1000 you are probably not going to want to do that. Especially if you bought a TP link you probably want something that is a bit more budget conscious. so, here is the good news. You don’t have to buy anything. You already have all the gear that you need to make this work. Because you told me you tried your backup switch and it didn’t work what this means is that you can segment your network. If you look at this, right now the problem is that you have all of this going into one switch and when these cameras are running, this switch is too busy so it can’t forward fast enough to let this NAS work. So all you have to do, is go ahead and take that spare switch that you’ve got and it divide your network. You are going to put all your cameras on one switch, you are going to put all the workstations and the second NAS on the other switch and then you are going to Them to the router. Here is the beauty of the way that modern switching works. Because it is a store and forward, because it figures out where the packet is going before it actually sends it off, unless these cameras are doing a broadcast, as long as they are only talking to those NAS’s, none of the traffic from this switch will make it to this switch and vice a versa. That means that it doesn’t matter how fast and how busy these cameras get, it is not going to affect your performance when you try to use your workstations. Best part of all, you have already got that switch. Just plug it in and you will be good to go. Now this is not going to work for everything. Of course you are going to have problems with devices that you have to access. For example, there will be some of these workstations that will want to access cameras over here or access information on the NAS and it will have to go through the router. So if that starts being a problem, all you have to do is instead of going to the router just directly connected to so that you can bypass what was probably also a week switch build into your router. That is how we do it. Because switches don’t work like hubs, they don’t just broadcast frames and packets everywhere, most of the time network congestion can be fixed just by putting in an extra switch.

 Fr. Robert: Now, that has been a lot for the day. We have actually covered a lot of material. We have gone over Windows without borders, we talked a little bit about 3-2-1 super backup, Bryan show you how to fix a broken screen and I just told you how to fix a network congestion. But I wanted to give you a little tease on what is coming in the future weeks of know-how. The first thing is this. This is an Acer predator desktop, we had this a few weeks back on Before You Buy. Cool desktop, very nice. That people asked us it is running 16 GB of memory, it is running with a hard drive instead of an SSD, it is running with a video card that I wouldn’t choose. What is my bang for buck? If I were to buy an Acer predator or desktop like this and then want to upgrade it, what parts should I replace? What parts should I upgrade? So in the next couple of weeks Bryan and I are actually going to tear this thing down. We are going to replace the hard drive, the memory, the video card and the CPU piece by piece to show you the performance gains that we are going to get from each component. Which will give you, after the end of the series, the ability to make an informed decision. That it is not all just desktops, laptops and performance. We are also doing this. We have project lunchbox and we love Project lunchbox. There is still a few episodes left in Project lunchbox because we’re going to be modifying the suspension, we are going to be adding cameras and I am trying to add an autopilot. But I think it is time to start playing with areal remote-controlled vehicles. This is a really cheap drone. It’s not that expensive. It is kind of a crowd device, it does have a camera and it tends to crash into things a lot, but, we are going to be using this as sort of a jumping off point to talk about building your own drones. We have seen DJI and we’ve seen a few of the others that are a little on the pricey side, but with this we are going to be able to build something without spending a lot of cash.

Bryan: Because the show is out of control.

Fr. Robert: Absolutely out of control. Now remember you can always find our show notes at twit.tv/KH if you have a question about mouse without borders, if you have a question about the procedures that Bryan use to replace the screen, if you have questions about how I fixed network congestion, be sure to drop by. As long as you are there go ahead and check the little drop-down menus that show you how you can subscribe automatically to know how. So you can get each and every single episode into your device of choice. If you wanted in your iPad, your iPhone, your android phone, your tablet, your Mac or PC, your desktop or laptop, no matter what it may be we have something for you and a way to get Know-How into your Know Hole. Also don’t forget that you can find us on Google plus. You will find a group of 7600 members strong. The cool thing about that group as it is not just Bryan and I. In fact, most of the time it is going to be your fellow members to answer your questions. And a lot of those amateurs are going to need your help when they are putting together their projects. So drop on by, see what we are working on, and maybe if you post a project, maybe if you post a question we will use it on the show. Also, I want to thank everyone here at the brick house who makes this possible. Specifically Alex. Alex if you could tell the folks where they could find you on twitter?

Alex: I’ll be in the Know Hole.

Fr. Robert: Alex will be in the Know Hole but you can also find him @anelf3. You can find me @PadreSJ. And until next time, I’m Father Robert Ballecer and over here is Cranky Hippo. Did you see anything? Now that you know, go do it!