I recently realized that my Asus RT-N66U wasn’t routing at the speed it should have been when running the Tomato firmware. Apparently this is because Tomato disables (or rather, doesn’t enable) the hardware acceleration for NAT traffic. So, I started looking at a replacement router. At first I was looking at a Routerboard from Mikrotik, but a friend steered me toward the Ubiquiti Edgerouter products. The Edgerouter Lite is a pretty popular product for Sys Admins and network engineers home networks, but Ubiquiti recently released the Edgerouter X series. They’re the same OS, just slightly more consumer based hardware (no hardware acceleration, faster processor, but less RAM/Flash, and more ports). The stock X was nice, but the SFP version really caught my eye because it had Passive POE on all ports, and supported a single SFP module (which I could throw a copper module in and use for uplink to my cable modem). Amazon had them for $79 with Prime, so I ordered one and waited anxiously for it to show up.
Repair MOTU 828mkII
Dad dropped a “new” (new to him, that is) MOTU 8282 Mk II off with me a few days ago complaining that it was rebooting randomly. A quick Google search turned up this is a relatively known issue, and that the LM1117-3.3 (3.3V regulator) basically starts to flake out after a few years, and causes issues.
I opened the unit, and indeed, the PCB around the LM1117 was brown from heat. After the unit running for a while, the LM1117 was over 90C. They’re feeding about 9V into the regulator (which is pretty high for a 3.3V regulator), and apparently drawing a fair bit of current to get it that hot. Before replacing the regulator, I wanted to confirm the failure. Knowing it was intermittent, and the reboot only took about 5 seconds, I set up a webcam in front of the unit with motion tracking software, and had it email me anytime the screen changed. Within a few hours, I’d captured half a dozen reboots. Once it starts rebooting, it rarely lasts more than 10 minutes without rebooting again.
Fitbit Aria confusing users
Figured I’d post this incase anyone else has this issue. Normally, when two people are of similar weight, the Fitbit Aria will ask “who are you?”
Well, for some reason, that stopped last week. Someone was weighing themselves on my scale, and it assumed they were me. Didn’t ask, just just it and uploaded. The Fitbit site doesn’t really address this issue, but in digging through their forum, I found a tidbit that fixed it. Basically, tell the scale it’s wrong. Rather than deleting the erroneous entries, go in and re-assign the weights to the proper person. Next time they weigh themselves, it SHOULD start asking again “who are you?”
Figured I’d save someone hunting through forums. =)
Thanks!