Rural broadband – funding and BT’s pay-to-upgrade false economy

I’m a huge advocate for doing rural broadband right. Mainly because I live out in the sticks, but also because I believe in building infrastructure properly and doing things right. When it comes to digital infrastructure, rural communities have a problem – they’re not economically viable to maintain. So, first, an overview of the situation for small communities like mine.

BT put in basic service years ago to the entire country and are only now starting to look at upgrading areas outside of cities and larger towns, thanks to a large (£530 million£830 milion, after £300 million from the BBC license fee from 2015-17 got reallocated, grumble) handout from the government – under the auspices of Broadband Development UK. This pot of money is for connecting “90%” of the country at at least 2Mbps. Continue reading →

Getting started with XRF modules and LLAP

Months ago I picked up some radio modules – specifically the XRF radio modules from Ciseco. They’re about £10 a pop and are in theory very simple to use. This is… almost true. In the end my modules sat dormant in my component store, and the OpenKontrol gateway I got from them at the same time was never assembled, owing to some missing parts for the ethernet module and abysmal documentation for the entire project – it’s still sat on my desk and will probably migrate to the bin eventually. This theme of abysmal documentation is unfortunately consistent across all of the Cisceo product lines, which is a real shame since they make great bits and pieces in theory. I really do hope they’ll pull their finger out and fix their documentation.

All that aside, last week at work, we had a two-day event for physical prototyping and I decided that I’d try and get the things working – and after a day or so, succeeded. This post is a brief introduction to how to get the modules working as advertised. Continue reading →

Securing Webservers (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)

So I set up a lot of boxes and quite a few of them get hammered on pretty hard by attackers looking to break them open. I’ve been doing more than usual in the way of this lately so figured I’d do a quick round up of some of my favourite tools to make life easier. These aren’t just applicable to webservers but most of the boxes I use these on are.

Recently things have changed, with IPv6 becoming not just a nice-to-have but a need-to-have these days you’ll tend to run into quite a few tools that work great for IPv4 but aren’t applicable or don’t work on IPv6 yet.

Read on after the break! Continue reading →