Thursday, Nov 15, 2001
The players:
Nigel Thompson – a human
SULU and SCOTTY – two computers
Vic and Ron – the installers
We ordered our StarBand system to replace an expensive fractional T1. We already had Dish Network for our TV and that works well here where we live. I did the Dish Network installation myself.
The local company that was contacted to do our installation was Sky-Wave Satellite. They were scheduled to come on Saturday the 10th in the morning. I waited and waited but they didn’t show up. My wife called them and they said they were waiting for satellite details from StarBand. They had been waiting for several days (since we had placed our order.) Note that nobody phoned us to say they weren’t coming, but we’re used to that.
My wife phoned StarBand and found that the person who did the work was out, computer was down, the moon was wrong etc. and we re-scheduled the work for today – Thursday. The installers were due at 71m and I took the day off so as to be here when they arrived.
The installers showed up at a little after 8am. No apology. They brought their dog which they let out with our without asking. The unshaven one told me that he had forgotten the software and left again to return to his office in Colorado Springs. He took the dog with him but left the other guy to install the dish.
The remaining guy checked out our roof, located a spot where the dish could see the satellite (T-7 in this case) through the trees and set about mounting the dish. As a side benefit of installing this system which requires a bigger dish we had the option to move the LNBs for our TV downlink to the new dish and gain a few more channels because the bigger dish combined with double LNBs can see two of the Dish Network TV satellites instead of the one our old dish could see.
The unshaven one arrived back with the software and informed me that “We can’t install this on any machine that has proxy software, a firewall or any network software on it”. Pity because I wanted to install it on the Windows 2000 Advanced Server that I was currently using for Routing and NAT via a modem connection to my ISP. I had added a second network interface card (NIC) to this machine to get it ready to plug in the StarBand modem.
We tried installing the software and it failed – I just knew it would. It had an error message that complained about missing data in the registry. Funny because the earlier part of the installation had gone OK. Our installation guy phoned the tech support people at StarBand (who put him on hold a long time) and was told: “Nope, won’t install on Advanced Server”. So VERY RELUCTANTLY I let him try installing it on my main development machine which runs Windows 2000 Pro and has a spare USB port.
After a couple more phone calls to tech support at StarBand we disabled the NIC in my machine and got the StarBand modem to install. It seems to take a while for the system to stabilize but after that it looked like it might be working.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the failed installation on the first machine modified all my Internet Explorer settings, altering the title, the busy icon, home page and the search page. I consider this kind of thing rude and very imposing. When I ran the uninstall utility from the Control Panel, it removed the software but left the mangled IE. This is just not acceptable behavior even if Microsoft is involved.
So while I’m uninstalling from the first machine, the second machine blue screens. We all look at it like a cat that just crapped on the carpet at the wedding reception. I reboot the machine and it comes back up. Now the little starband accelerator icon in the system tray has vanished and the performance is like a slug – my modem was faster. I fiddle with disabling my network card again. I also find that there are no start-menu items for any of this stuff and use the Explorer to hunt down where it installed the EXEs. I run their utility which tells me the system is up, the modem is working and everything is fine. I find another EXE to click on and the acceleration starts working again.
While this has been going on I decided to put Windows 2000 Pro on the original machine from my MSDN disks. I create some boot floppies and get the ball rolling. The second machine stays up and things are starting to look better. The installation guys leave – it’s now around 2pm. Not bad for the two-hour visit they scheduled. Oh, yes, we now have 50 more TV channels – that part works great. More Discovery and other kids stuff and some more movies so at least if I can’t program from home any more I can watch the TV. Life is good – and it’s only cost me $781.49 and a day off work so far.
Just before the guys left I asked if I got any documentation. No. We get ONE PIECE OF PAPER from StarBand (glossy) with a 1-800 number to call. We get no IP address info, no configuration info, zip. Luckily I had the sense to write some of this down as my trusty installation dude was typing it in from the piece of scrap paper he brought with him.
A little earlier I had asked: “Hey, does StarBand train you guys?” You’ll like this bit. He says “No, they give you an on-line tutorial followed by an on-line test that asks some pretty stupid questions”. “What kind of questions” I ask. “Is it OK to use an aluminum ladder to do the installation?” WHAT!? This is quite a reasonable question to ask if you think someone might be out near the power lines but has very little to do with azimuth, elevation of the satellite, mounting the dish, CONFIGURING THE CUSTOMER’S COMPUTER etc. They don’t even get a manual. The folder he brought with him (but didn’t leave) had been printed by himself (using the free bubble printer he got with his PC). It had page by page steps with screen shots and arrows drawn on the screen shots for which options to select and which buttons to push. My kids could do that. StarBand says you can’t do the install yourself – you must have a professional do it. I’m a professional and I know a lot more about electronics, computers and orbital geometry than my two local heroes do. We shall see because as I write this I am reinstalling machine number one (still) and plan to do the setup from the StarBand CD myself.
Oh and the number two machine blue-screened again while I was out and has trashed the registry so it won’t boot at all now. Pretty good day so far. It’s 6:45pm and I’m off for dinner. Back soon.
[Pause for dins]
It’s now 7pm and I am back working on machine one which is called SULU. This is an old-ish Dell Dimension, 200MHz machine. Pretty good in it’s day with about the same computing power as your average phone today. Never-the-less, well up to the job. I have installed Windows 2000 Pro and Windows 2000 Service Pack 2. It has two NICs in it. One for the internal LAN (assuming we get as far as installing WinProxy later) and one for the StarBand modem. The modem and computer are powered off. Everything is plugged in and …. The monkey flips the switch (on the modem). Nothing – silly me – forgot to plug the cable into the UPS. Try again … Yes, the modem powers up – no smoke, a few green lights flash and settle down to the top two. No, top three then four. Then two, then three. Now four again. And we look stable at four. Of course, if I had a manual I’d have some idea of what all this means, But we don’t so I decide to take a photo of the modem for later with a borrowed digital camera. The top 4 lights say Power, Rx, Syn and Con and that probably all means that the link to the satellite is good. The last two lights which are off right now are Tx and PC which means we are not transmitting up to the satellite and the PC link is down. OK so far. Time to boot the PC.
I decide to start reinstalling Windows 2000 Pro on my main development machine which is still sitting there in it’s blue screen state reporting that the registry is unreadable.
The PC boots. Doesn’t report any new hardware. I check the Device Manager to ensure both network cards got installed OK and they are both there. I use the Network Connections applet to name the NIC on the internal LAN as “Internal LAN” and the other one as “StarBand Link”. I set the options for each one to show an icon on the system tray when connected. This shows me that my local LAN connection is good at 100 Mbits/s and the StarBand link is up at 10Mbits/s and has sent 78 packets and received 2. So the link looks good. The ‘PC’ light on the StarBand modem is on now too. The next step is to install the StarBand software.
The StarBand CD comes in a nasty cheap clear-plastic sleeve with no docs. It is marked “StarBand Model 360 ™ Installation CD”. One assumes they have trademarked the number ‘360’. Good for them. It also says that it’s “Version 2.01”. Excellent. Blue-screen generating software that’s in it’s second revision. I put the CD into the drive and SULU dutifully closes the tray. A few seconds later the StarBand installation window opens.
I’m recording here each step as best I can so hopefully we reproduce this if needed.
I click on “Click Here to Get Started”. I get four options:
Now, none these seem like a good choice. My antenna is already installed and I really just want to install the software but I’m not upgrading my equipment. I doubt I can configure the PC without the software. I pick the first one.
Aha! We get a system test screen with all green check marks that reports (With a yellow smiley face) that: “This PC fully meets the minimum system requirements”. Mind you I saw that earlier today right before the installation failed. I also note that it says I am connected to the modem with an Ethernet port. I close this window and we go to the “Point Dish” screen. It asks for Zip code and I enter mine: 80908. It asks for choice of satellite between 101 West which is GE-4 and 129 West which is T-7. Luckily I wrote down this afternoon that mine is T-7 as my installer didn’t leave me any documentation at all. I click the “Calculate” button and see the azimuth, elevation and other info for aligning the dish. I click “Exit” as I know the dish is already aligned.
I’m now back at the main menu so I select the second option: “Install Software …”. I think very hard “Pleeese let this work”. This has never helped in the past but we must have some faith. We get a wizard that “Strongly” recommends I take a Valium, close all Windows apps, hold a grounded wire in my teeth and consult a lawyer to read the last paragraph to me. I click “Next” which leads to more lawyerly talk that lets me know this software (ratty as it is) belongs to the folks at StarBand. Always good to know who the perp. Is early in the plot. We move on to select a drive for installation. Having only one, I pick C:. A progress bar shows me the software being copied to my system. This takes about 30 seconds. At one point it says “Installing Deterministic Network Enhancer”. I bet $5 this is the blue-screen guy!
Next we get to a license agreement we have to agree too. StarBand’s lawyers certainly took an interest in this software. I accept and move on. Next comes a Window that tells me that Windows 2000 Install includes Internet Explorer 5.5. There is no option here. So you Netscape users can just phone StarBand (1-800-4STARBAND) and complain about the wasted disk space. Remember this is a partnership with Microsoft deal and any deal with the Evil Empire includes Internet Explorer. We move on to a new progress indicator that copies a lot of ‘components’ including IE 5.5. This is pretty slow. This is largely because IE 5.x is a pig. While this is going on, I’m up to floppy number 4 in the process of re-installing all the software on the machine that got trashed.
The installation completes OK, and we are asked to reboot. If there were time here I’d go on and on about why rebooting is stupid and how Windows 2000 has dynamically installable drivers so we really don’t need to reboot but this is pointless because our only choice at this point is to reboot. Sigh.
Just before rebooting I see the notice in the reboot window that says: “Restart Computer. Please save your work and then close all applications before continuing. Thank you for choosing Microsoft products!”. Interesting because it asked me to close all applications before starting the installation so there really can’t be a lot left to close. More interesting because it says Microsoft and not StarBand. This could be a ploy by the guy that wrote the blue-screening drivers to deflect my interest from the real culprit. I opt to reboot. But instead of rebooting I get another window that congratulates me on installing the software and (you’ll like this one too) tells me that after the machine has rebooted I should plug in my modem and connect it to the PC. Whoops. I wonder why it didn’t say that on the “Getting Started” guide that I didn’t get? I click “Finish” and get a dialog box that asks me if I want to reboot now or later. Silly me, I pick “Yes” for now. What can I say – I’ve been conditioned. Finally, the machine does actually reboot.
My oldest daughter has brought in tea and two cookies. Everyone knows I get very grumpy and bad tempered when doing installations so my wife has taken the two other kids out and left our oldest to deal with me. The tea is excellent. Which is important if you’re originally English as I am.
As I wait for the reboot I take a look at SCOTTY which is also rebooting as part of the new installation of Win 2k Pro. I notice that it is stuck at the POST screen with the RAM test showing a lot less RAM than I know it has. Hmmmm, perhaps the blue-screen is indicative of bad RAM. Or perhaps the nasty software trashed the CMOS RAM.
SULU has rebooted now and I log on as an administrator again. (Not with the Administrator account of course which we like to disable as a security precaution). I see a StarBand Icon on my desktop – more unwanted pollution. Properties indicate this is a URL to the starband site. The StarBand installation window comes up again. On my system tray I now have the two icons for the NICs which both show good connections and a new icon called (wait for it) “StarBand Mission Control”. Hmmm, choices, choices. Do I go for the next main menu item on the installation window which is “Configure PC and Modem” (tempting) or click the outrageously named mission control? I wimp out and right-click the mission control icon to see its menu which shows: “Troubleshooting Assistant, Network Status, About StarBand Mission Control and Check for Updates”. If I had a manual at this point I would look at it. Really. I know I don’t generally start with the manual but now seems like a good time to have one. I decide to check the network status and get to see a cartoon representation of my house, satellite dish, satellite, alien spacecraft and the StarBand ground station. There are a lot of green check marks on each leg of the link so methinks we might be up. I click the “Advanced” tab and get a list of items with green lights. My signal quality is 7.200. (If we had another 4 hours together we could discuss the relevance of decimal places in calculated data but we don’t – or at least I don’t’). While is was typing that, signal quality dropped to 7.100 then went back to 7.200. Notice that it didn’t go to 7.105 or any other intermediate number. Hey – you guys at StarBand – you don’t need all those decimal places – just give me a wide bar like you do on my TV that goes from 0 to 100%. The “Report” tab tells me that “The network connection is working properly, and is optimized”. I expand the report page a little and see my IP address and a bunch of modem parameters and revision levels. There is a lot of other info here like DNS addresses and information about my two NICs. There is even a very sensible print option. Pity I don’t have the printer drive installed yet. So unless I am mistaken we might be connected to the Internet. Let’s launch the browser and see.
I exit from the report and launch my browser which promptly goes full-screen and takes me to “Member Registration” and yet another “Click Here to Get Started”. It’s now 8:20pm and what I really want to see is a button that says “Click Here to Get Your Life Back”. I click to get started and notice that the ‘Tx’ light on the modem flashes. I get a page asking for my phone number and zip code. This is what StarBand uses to identify users. There is a link to skip this and go to the members area which I click.
Earlier in the day I chose a member name. Mine is ‘nigel’ and they set up an email address of nigel@starband.net (through which I assume you can now email me). It also asked me for a password and when I tried to enter a good password with nice security features like punctuation characters in it, it was rejected. They only accept letters and digits which is very poor. Any dictionary attack worth its salt can crack those. GET WITH THE PROGRAM STARBAND. The World is full of hackers. It also showed me my password on a web page in plain text. I’m sure this is for mom and pop but as a professional I hate this pathetic level of security.
I log in with my account name and feeble password. Wow – we’re UP!!!! I try the search button in the browser only to be reminded that StarBand has mangled my browser settings and put their own Google-based page there. I like Google a lot but I still like to choose my own settings. I try a Google search for Nigel Thompson and don’t find me so annoyed I enter the address of my own web site: www.nadtec.to which comes up pretty quick. I check the stats page to see if there are any more hits from foreign countries. Currently I seem to have some fans in Poland, Romania, France and a few other out of the way places. Must be the survival training pages.
SITREP: We are connected to the Internet via the StarBand satellite. The computer (SULU) is up and has not blue-screened. My web browser, despite being mangled by StarBand seems to work pretty well and we watched the video feed of the news for a bit. No sound mind you but that’s because the server doesn’t have a sound card. So what we really need to do now is the proxy server software installed so we can try to connect from the other machines in my office and around the house.
Part II in which Nigel the lone human installs WinProxy
Part of the reason for selecting StarBand as our new ISP was that WinProxy has a special version (albeit only a trial version) that is supposed to work well with StarBand. Our former T1 connection provided me with 32 IP addresses which I happily squandered on machines around the house via a DHCP server. We still have a DHCP server but now it assigns addresses from the 10.0.0.0/8 non-routable block.
WinProxy has a very good manual (unlike StarBand) and you should print this out or have it available on a computer near you a long time before you try the installation. I was most impressed with the manual which runs to about 250 pages. Ositis, the makers of WinProxy also have an 11 page manual for installing WinProxy for StarBand.
Step one before installing WinProxy is to set up the IP address of the NIC on the internal LAN side of SULU. I use the 10.10.0.0 network and always use .1 for my default router so I set SULU’s IP address to 10.10.0.1 and a sub-net mask of 255.255.0.0 which isn’t quite what the 10. net usually has but allows me to use other sub-nets in the 10. group for other things. Once you have IP addresses set up do a few pings from machine to machine to verify the LAN is kosher before continuing. The WinProxy User Guide has a very good introduction to setting up a LAN in your house or office. If you don’t know what you’re doing with a network, start there. If that doesn’t help, get one of your kids to explain it to you.
Oh, it’s 9:05pm now and we have the coffee on.
Peeling the wrapper from the WinProxy CD I see that it’s a promotional disk from StarBand. I also have a CD I burned with the software downloaded from the Ositis site just in case. We’ll trust the StarBand folks for this one and use the CD they provided. It has no product info or version number on the label.
The CD starts and we get a sensible menu offering choices like “View Quick Start Guide” and “Install WinProxy Software”. Since I already have the guide printed out I elect to install the software. (I did notice a “Get Help” menu item which is pretty close to the “Get Your Life Back” menu item I was looking for earlier but I suspect it’s not the kind of psychiatric help I need and pass it by).
WinProxy setup uses an InstallShield Wizard which I like. It’s software I’ve used at work and seems to help vendors create pretty good install processes. I accept the license agreement, default installation location and the ‘Typical’ installation option. A couple of normal wizard steps later and we’re copying files. The caption says “WinProxy for StarBand 4.0 (Version R1c)”. It copies help files and the user manual and presumably a lot of other stuff (pretty quickly too) and we eventually get asked to reboot.
The Government (who I do not generally trust all that much) should make Microsoft send $1.00 to each user for each reboot they force. That would get it fixed pretty quick. In 1988 when I worked at the Evil Empire, 25% of Microsoft’s income was from the $1.00 license fee for its mouse design. Big bucks in those $1.00 deals.
I notice we are not rebooting and click the “Finish” button again. It still doesn’t reboot. I try again with no luck. I close all other windows and try again – zip. I select the reboot later option and the finish button now works – weird. I restart the machine just in case it really needs it. Boy that reboot conditioning really takes hold after a while doesn’t it. It still doesn’t reboot! I close the Ositis installation window and try again. Nope. I run the Task Manager and see what processes are using CPU cycles. Nothing interesting. I notice the StarBand icon vanish from the System Tray. Perhaps we were waiting for it to shut down? I try to just log off. Nope. Maybe the aliens have got me now. Maybe some teenage hacker has found my fixed IP address and is having some fun with me. Frustrated I hit the “Reset” button on SULU’s front panel. I’m getting nervous now because while trying the shutdown stuff I noticed that the browser couldn’t get to the StarBand site any more. The modem lights all still look good. Oh well, have faith and wait for the reboot to complete. It’s 9:30pm now.
The reboot completes and I log on. WinProxy announces in a dialog window that it has been installed with a 30 day free trial. The window shows instructions for purchasing a serial number over the phone or the web. I OK the dialog and get a registration screen. I enter my name and email address and receive another warning that this is an evaluation version followed by a dialog that asks me if I am using StarBand. I select the StarBand option which is already selected.
Argh. Our first problem. WinProxy reports that it cannot find any internal network adapters. I proceed to the next screen and see that WinProxy has listed both my NICs in the External IP list. I move my 10.10.0.1 address to the internal list.
Now we get into configuring WinProxy and as I always try to do on the first run through, I use the default settings unless they look really unlikely. The screens I see follow the quick start guide screen shots – this is VERY good – well done so far guys.
I enter an email address that WinProxy will use for administrative alerts. It’s pretty clever here and uses the address I typed in for registration. It asks for the SMTP server but doesn’t give you any options as to how you might connect etc. so I know this isn’t going to work with my MSN account and change this to use an SMTP server we have on our local LAN which will forward the request.
WinProxy now runs some tests to verify that the network is properly configured. At this point I have noticed that the StarBand icon on the System Tray has a red X though it and says that the satellite modem is disconnected yet I can see the modem lights are good and see it transmitting occasionally. The WinProxy tests complete OK, so we guess we are still connected and click “Begin using WinProxy”.
I bring up a browser window on the machine I’m using to type this document on and it connects over the local LAN, through WinProxy and over the net. It works! I see an entry in the WinProxy window for the connection I’m using. This is great. This is how software should work. I am a happy camper – well almost. SCOTTY lies dead behind me. It won’t boot past the memory test any more.
So now it a little after 10:00pm and all the machines in the house seem to be working. We’ve even tried a little streaming video feed from StarBand an that seems to work pretty well.
There is an option to install WinProxy as a Windows service which I need to do and I also need to update our LAN’s DHCP server to use the DNS addresses that StarBand provides but other than those few things we seem to be finished. I see now that the StarBand icon on SULU’s system try now shows it as OK so I’m assuming that WinProxy gets in the IP stack somewhere and was interfering while we installed it.
Some days later
It's now Tuesday, November 20th and my system has been up since last Thursday. I did have a minor hiccup or two. I found that WinProxy include a DHCP server that I hadn't noticed and it was issuing IP addresses that conflicted with some fixed addresses I had assigned to servers on my LAN. Ideally WinProxy would have detected the presence of my DHCP server and not enabled its own. Not a big deal once I figured out what was wrong. I simply unchecked the DHCP option in the WinProxy configuration and restarted it.
I also found that SCOTTY had died due to a memory failure and not the StarBand drivers. Well, actually I don't know that the StarBand USB driver didn't cause the blue-screen because I stopped using that when I moved the StarBand modem to SULU and connected it using a second NIC. Anyway, probably not StarBand's fault that my machine died. I got a couple of new RAM sticks directly from Dell (few other places have memory for ancient machines like mine), put in a new IDE drive from Comp USA and reinstalled Windows 2000 Professional.
On the whole, I think that StarBand is worth the money - especially if you can't get DSL or a microwave link or whatever in your area. I think WinProxy is excellent and plan to fiddle with that a bit more.