New barn

I brought down the desktop and got it setup in the living space with the new network. It was reasonably straight forward. I quickly got my web sites up and the DNS updated to the new address. The problem was that I couldn't login. I kept getting an SQL failure. I finally found the problem. It was a fat-fingering of the port number for port forwarding SQL requests.

Everything is back up and running now so we're good to go!
 
Lucky! Wish they would run fiber to me, but being there are like 4 people who live on a 4 mile long road that loops around, I won’t hold my breath. No phone lines near me, the local phone company said they could run a line, but I am too far off the main line to. Get any internet, and they wouldnt even try. I am stuck with the ATT version of the jet pack.

I had signed up for Starlink last year, but my install date got pushed back again, saying mid 2022 now, do to chip shortage. You would think the richest man in the world could make his own, or bribe someone to get his made first.
 
Yes, we are clearly lucky. It was 6 months after we purchased the land that the local power coop announced the project. I has been several years in the making. It makes sense that the power company is doing it. They need the low latency coms for substation control and power balancing. They say one of the biggest issues for fiber is acquiring the right of ways. Since this is a sunken cost for the power company, it was simply a matter of adding the infrastructure to connect to the individual homes. I think the entire project is about 5 years. I think they were about 50% done when they got to me.

Thanks,

Jack
 
Big issue the electric companies are running into is that the R/W s were leased for electric so many times they have to get new leases and while running it in the air is cheaper it's it's alot more likely to be damaged.If you have no options from local provider which that means you usually have ATT or Cox and not a independent company which are usually way ahead of the big companies I would look at Hughs Net before I did Starlink.The box that the fiber goes into is the ONT {optical network terminal} that converts the light to a signal to go over copper then plugs into a router.Surprised they didn't provide everything so it was hot when they left.
 
ATT was able to drop their carrier of last resort but most of the other companies have to provide the construction for free to your location,now weather they offer a service that provides internet can be the an issue
 
Big issue the electric companies are running into is that the R/W s were leased for electric so many times they have to get new leases and while running it in the air is cheaper it's it's alot more likely to be damaged.If you have no options from local provider which that means you usually have ATT or Cox and not a independent company which are usually way ahead of the big companies I would look at Hughs Net before I did Starlink.The box that the fiber goes into is the ONT {optical network terminal} that converts the light to a signal to go over copper then plugs into a router.Surprised they didn't provide everything so it was hot when they left.

The ROWs are the big issue for other folks. That is one reason the power companies are getting into the game. They already have the ROW. Mine is an independent company that is provide the ISP for the power company. It is a joint venture subsidized by the rural internet incentive program. My fiber is underground. It runs almost a mile before it comes above ground and goes into one of their boxes installed on the telephone poles.

The problem with satellite, any brand, is the round trip time. It fine for applications that don't need response time. The biggest issue with RF, satellite or terrestrial, is the data limits. 5G may resolve the speed issue to a large degree, but you still have data limits. With wired internet, you have no data limits (for practical purposes).

I think the government incentives are beginning to change things. Most of the counties surrounding me have some broadband internet project underway.

The only thing that irks me a little bit about my new fiber setup is that they only have Business and Residential. With business you get full control of the router and with residential you only get basic controls. I'm only using a couple advanced router settings, but to get access them I had to get their Business service, even though I'm doing nothing commercial. The low end Business speed (100 mbs) is the same cost as the high end Residential speed (1 gbs).

As for the ONT (this company calls them an optical modem but Verizon did call them ONT), they did fine. The router was up and running when they left. and I could reach out to the internet. With Residential service, they manage the router and your only access is to some basic router settings. I'm running a couple personal web sites that are accessed from outside the router. With Business service, they give you full control of the router, but it is your responsibility to manage it. Every router is different even though they all have similar controls. The router they provide is a Calix router. Calix only sells to ISPs, not retail, so I have not been able to find any detailed documentation on the router on-line. I did find a few evaluation videos, but no configuration manual for my model. So, I had to muddle my way through. I took screen shots of my router settings at home before I brought the computer down. So, I had to find the right controls to replicate them.

My first issue was that the routers handle DHCP and Static IPs differently. They also have different ways to handle the firewall and port forwarding approaches. It took me a while to make the translation, but I did get 95% of it right on the first try. Of course, it is always that last 5% that takes forever to diagnose and fix. I finally called tech support and as I was walking through the issue with them, I found the problem myself. It turns out that my old router had 1434 forwarded for SQL, but that was the only thing I could find for SQL. I'm not sure how it was working at home. As I was describing the problem to tech support and looking at the firewall, I noticed it listed 1433 for SQL. I think it uses both ports depending on what features you are using. At any rate I added 1433 to the port forwarding and everything started working.

This router is kind of peculiar. I used the default of .100 to .249 for the DHCP address space. With my old FIOS router, I could hard code an IP under .100 and then use the mac address to to tell the router what it was. It showed up like all the other devices. That router is old enough that it doesn't use DHCP reservation, hard coding IPs was the only way to get a static IP. This new Calix router does have DHCP reservation and there is no way to tell the router about a device outside that address space (at least none I could find). I had a printer that I had hardcoded the IP on the old router. With this new router I just used DHCP reservation which is a nice feature. But I have a bunch of old code that has IP addresses in it and I didn't want to have to go back and find and fix it all, so I wanted to hard code the same static IP for the desktop.

The interesting thing about this router is that it doesn't seem to know about the desktop. It routes traffic just fine to and from it, but when I look at the status of the network, it only shows me devices that are in the DHCP address space. But everything is working and that is a small quirk.

Thanks,

Jack
 
I would look at Hughs Net before I did Starlink.


Hughes net is garbage! It woks sometimes, there are data caps, and latency is horrible. I work from the phone with digital service, and have tried Hughes net, and I would say at best, I got a 2 second delay when talking on the phone. Internet speeds of anywhere from .1mb to 20mb, and if it was snowing, or raining, it would shut down. Hell, even on sunny days I would lose signal. When I had Hughes, I was paying $50 for 20gb per month. I got it to run my security system, and inhome system for HVAC. But I would need to reboot every weekend I came here, because the modem would be locked up. It was worthless. Ping speeds would be horrible, My son would attempt to play COD, and it was so glitchy, he just gave up on trying.

Starlink, I know of a few people that have it in my area, they have less then 1 minute of down time monthly, and average 100-250mb download, and 25 upload speeds, with a ping rate of under 20ms. Speeds do not drop with snow, or rain. They also have no data cap. They are being smart about allowing new customers, to not drop below the 100mb download speeds. When they get new satellites operational they alow new customers to come online. Plus Starlink is focusing the majority of their new satellites around the Canadian border, where I would benefit from it.
 
The R/W issue was that these specified for electric so they could use for fiber.I you were getting FTTH you should just be able to hook up any ethernet router and it work.We install TP link dual bands for our regular installs and you can access these and make any changes you want.Any settings above these 99% of the people don't need.The ONT is not the modem and they are brand specific depending on what brand equipment that the supplying company runs in their CO.There are alot of these companies that got handout money that didn't finish the job of providing service to the areas they had applied for and non of the satellite companies should have received money for any areas except the very remote areas.At around 30K per mile for fiber if buried and not rocky it can be tough to pay for by the companies.
 
The R/W issue was that these specified for electric so they could use for fiber.I you were getting FTTH you should just be able to hook up any ethernet router and it work.We install TP link dual bands for our regular installs and you can access these and make any changes you want.Any settings above these 99% of the people don't need.The ONT is not the modem and they are brand specific depending on what brand equipment that the supplying company runs in their CO.There are alot of these companies that got handout money that didn't finish the job of providing service to the areas they had applied for and non of the satellite companies should have received money for any areas except the very remote areas.At around 30K per mile for fiber if buried and not rocky it can be tough to pay for by the companies.

I have not investigated providing my own router. I'm sure that it would technically work. The question is whether or not I can do that within the TOS. It is something that I will investigate if the 100 mb proves to be a limitation in the future. I'm sure each provider is different. Perhaps TP gives users full control of the router. Evidently this provider that uses Calix dual ban wifi routers, does not give admin access to their residential service customers. At least that is what they told me. They do let you control the basic setting on the router, but port forwarding is in the advanced set of commands. They called it "Managed" wifi.

As for the ONT, I'm not sure exactly how it works in detail. It clearly takes digital bits from the ethernet port and converts them to optical signals and optical signals from the fiber and converts them to bits. Whether it does a demod and remod (which I would suspect) or or retains the same modulation scheme simply converting the media, I'm not sure.
 
Why are you needing port forwarding?We usually see it causing multiple issues in a instances that a router is being used under normal residential use.Just glad you got a service that works.We provide service to some really rural area that it may be as far as 5 miles between houses.
 
I admitted in a previous post I'm not the typical customer and tried to explain my application...but probably not well. I'm hosting a few non-commercial websites on Windows 10. Windows 10 does have some simultaneous connections limitations, so you couldn't use it for anything with a large user base, but it is a very inexpensive way to host a website out of your house rather than paying Godaddy or some other hosting service every month. I have a site where I and other Hunter Ed instructors collaborate on putting together class material. When Photobucket decided to monetize and charge folks for using their picture hosting, I simply built my own photo server for pics I post on this and other forums. I also have a site where the other owners of our farm can access game cam pictures, management data, and such. The only thing forward facing are login pages.

In order to hot a website from your home, you point the DNS for the web URL to the external address of your router. With a static IP, this is a simply one time thing. If the router uses DHCP upstream, things are a bit more complex, but my previous Verizon FIOS setup had a dynamic IP and I found a work around for that. When an HTTP or HTTPS request comes to your router's IP address, it needs to know what to do with it. Port forwarding tells the router which internal IP address to forward the request. So the router firewall (as well as windows 10 firewall on the hosting computer) need to allow HTTP/HTTPS request to pass and the router needs to forward them to the hosting computer. That is enough to host a simple web site. If you use a database as the back end, which my sites do), there also needs to be port forwarding done for the port that SQL uses and the firewalls need to be open for it.

That is the more detailed explanation. You are right, that most residential users are not hosting websites and giving the access to advanced router controls probably just makes more headaches for tech support.

Thanks,

Jack
 
Well, last September, I really screwed up. I had been backing my 35G under the over hang all summer and I finally did it. I forgot to lower the boom and was looking behind me as I was backing in. You guessed it:

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No structural damage was done. It was just the cosmetic nice looking corner. I called the guy that built the barn to get it repaired. He said it wasn't worth his time to send a crew out as they are not local. He gave me the name of one of his workers that lives closer and said he might be interested in doing it as a side job. I called him. It took a bunch of back and forth but he said he would come take a look. He told me he would be glad to do the work but could not get to it until spring. I did the clean up. I then just sprayed insulating foam (greatstuff) to seal everything off for the winter.

When I got a hold of him he said his "priorities changed" and wanted to spend more time with his family. Can't fault him for that but it left me in a bit of a lurch. As it turns out, my new neighbor is a class A contractor. I figured that he would be booked out the wazoo and would not have time for such a little job, but I was wrong. As it turns out, it is the perfect fit....

On a longer term note, we had originally planned to retire at the end of this calendar year, sell our current house, move in to the barn finished area, and use the house sale proceeds to build our house. Well, the supply chain hiccups, spiraling prices, and such have caused us to change our plans. We now plan to work until the end of 2023 at least. With that in mind, we decided to upgrade the barn. I plan to put an overhang on the opposite side (should have done that originally), as well as an overhang on the north overhead door where I'll mount a hoist for deer processing.

As it turns out the reason this work is such a good fit is that I'm in no hurry for it to get done and my contractor lives next door. He can use my place as fill work when another project has a hole waiting for materials or something. That will let him keep his crew working which benefits him.

He sent me a very reasonable estimate for the work yesterday and is ready to start anytime. I gave him the go-ahead!

I'll post pics as things develop.

Just a couple notes: I'm cheap and aesthetics are secondary for me (as long as my wife is OK) . With the overhang going on the back side of the barn, she is willing to capitulate to my cheapness. So, instead of opening up the roof, we will just put a header below the eve. I want the same clearance for driving under it, so the slope will be slightly different than the existing overhang. We will pull the spouting from the current roof and put it on the new overhang. Since I already screwed up the end cover on one side, I'm not going to have them replace that end cover or put any on the new overhang.

Thanks,

Jack
 
That was quick. They already have the overhang laid out and the footers poured!

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Lots of rain predicted for a bit so I would expect progress to slow.

Thanks,

Jack
 
My neighbor is a contractor and is using this as a fill job but gave me the good neighbor price. I'm in no rush. They are making some progress. This week they go the metal roof on the big overhang and the small one framed and the roof on it too.

45dbf28b-925b-4dbf-902c-41f881d86486.jpg


Thanks,

Jack
 
Make sure you don't back into one of those posts,just kidding
 
Make sure you don't back into one of those posts,just kidding

That is not impossible. My plan is to spread millings under it when it is done. I know I'll need to be careful! :emoji_laughing:
 
When they tore off the rain gutters they found they were pretty damaged by snow. I'm not sure if we will be able to reuse them or not. Either way I'm gong to have them install snow guards this time.
 
I will be really nice when you get it done and will last for years
 
I will be really nice when you get it done and will last for years

Yes, it is the first step and the easy one. Soon we will be engaging an architect to draw up plans for the house. Getting our current home ready for sale, stuffing all our belongings into the barn, and living in the 500 sq ft living space in the barn for a year or so while the hours is constructed will be a challenge!
 
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