Wireless

by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Internet, Life, Placements, Success, Tips n Tricks, Wireless

Air Nirvana ( Got the job :P )

After countless written tests and two interviews I finally got the job offer from Airvana ( A mobile broadband company). This was the second written test which I cleared. The interview was very simple and straight forward. You can obviously outperform when somebody asks you something from your areas of interest. Main focus during interview was IntelligentMirror and VideoCache, you can guess the rest 😀

Before The Interview

**FUNNY PART**

Checklist before going for interview

  1. Company’s website’s page rank
    • Airvana.com (6 years) has a page rank (Google) of 5. Well thats good. Equals to my website Fedora.co.in (less than 1 year).
  2. Company’s website’s Alexa rank
  3. Domain Availability
    • Checked for Airvana keyword and airvana.in and airvana.co.in was available. Mouth watering. Isn’t it 😀 But somehow convinced myself not to spend another couple of dollars.

**STRANGE PART**

Both Saini(s) of my batch ( Me and Pankaj Saini) are placed together 😀 WTF!!!

Well, finally I am not a jobless anymore!!!

PS : Congratulations to Pankaj and Yogesh 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Internet, LAN, Life, Wireless

Shifted to OBH

Finally after a lot of mess and competition, I shifted to OBH yesterday. Finally, I am free from the job of a UPS restarter every few hours. And the damn job was not paid 😛 Kaidi(prisoner) number 200501043 has been shifted from NBH-C-8 to OBH-117 😀

I am expecting a lot of benefits from OBH to make my techie life easier and happier. The wireless here goes down at last after NBH and GH. And if wireless is down here, then its down everywhere 😀 There are more access points per person in OBH. The wireless works consistently. No break ups. The UPS here doesn’t suck.

Apart from technological advantages, there are other benefits as well. My room faces the newest OBH extension block and there are tress all over the place. Its cool even in the hottest part of the day. And night is a pleasure here. I wake up in the morning, open my door and what I see is really an eye candy. Only trees. Nothing else is visible here. I am loving this place.

Its a law of nature. With advantages come disavantages ( I don’t know why I suck so much in framing sentences 🙁 ). Room and bathRooms are a bit smaller here as compared to NBH and all my friends are in still NBH 🙁 I miss you guyz. Make if fast to OBH… please…

 
by Kulbir Saini on Internet, LAN, Life, Servers, Wireless

Things are moving finally

After a struggle of months if not years, I can see things moving finally. A big big credit goes to Rishabh Mukherjee, who was always there to offer his help whenever I had a problem with administration ( specific to IT infrastructure at IIIT). Yesterday, there was a meeting in which a test plan was worked out for the newly arrived access points for the OBH extension block. For a few weeks, they’ll be tested in one of the OBH wings and the performance will be logged. Also, a lot of changes will be seen in IT infrastructure at IIIT in near future. Now plans are coming out of meeting rooms and they are not limited to papers and emails anymore. A big thanks for Shatrunjay Sir for this.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Hardware, Internet, LAN, Life, Wireless

Yahooooooo !!!! Bandwidth Increased !!!

Long time, no post. Actually nothing significant happened in last one and a half month that might have been worth noticing. But something significant happened suddenly that I couldn’t stop myself from writing this post.

When I came to IIIT-H in year 2005, it has a 4Mbps backbone and a lot of users, may be around 600 or more. The browsing experience at that time was excellent. The average load time of any site was around 4-6 seconds. We used to get around 20-30kbps download speed from internet. Life was pretty easy and one need not to go to coffee shop until a site opens. But as the time passed, the no. of people @ IIIT-H started increasing and with no increment in the bandwidth. So, life became harder and harder. Then, suddenly some day the switch(i think the one of the two available, which used to route the traffic between hostels(wireless) and main building(wired)) was burnt due to some short-circuit or whatever. So, some traffic between the hostels and main building was banned(which includes DC++ traffic) because one switch can’t handle the huge traffic which IIIT-H produces in peak hours and if they allow all the traffic the other will also be burnt due to heating. So, we had a hard time. Due to increased no. of users, internet bandwidth share per user decreased and intranet traffic was also limited due to availability of just one switch.

There were time when you might have really thought of visiting coffee shop until the techtree.com(an Indian site somewhat similar to e-bay) page shows up. This was the situation for almost a year. People were hopeless. There was no other alternative except increasing the bandwidth. And thats what happened. Today we received a mail from the help desk that the bandwidth has been increased to 8Mbps. Twice!!!!! Wow!!!!! The browsing is now much more fun than it was in 2005. Average load time of any site is 2-3 seconds and that too because my PC is slow 🙁 . I have 1GB RAM and my browser still hangs when I load a no. of pages at a time, due to the fact that it can handle a specific amount of data at a time and proxy is swamping the browser with data instantly on request. I think, I have to advance with time and should get additional RAM.

There are some other significant improvements also, which are going to come into effect pretty soon. One that the burnt switch will be replaced soon. I hope that the blocked protocols between hostels and main building will be unblocked soon after that.

The other is that hostel wireless is going to localized with the help of level three switches. So, that if I want to download data from one room to my room in the same hostel, then it need not travel all the way from the other room to the main building and then back from the main building to my room. So, we hope for a better bandwidth utilization.

PS : I wrote what I could understand from the terms used in the mail by Dr. Kamal. They may have been misunderstood.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Hardware, Life, Windows, Wireless

My Computer

I bought a desktop last week on Tuesday the 16th May, 2006. Though we are supposed to buy the laptops, i preffered the desktop as it can be a good partner for developing things and of course its cheeaper than a low end laptop. I bought AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 939 pin, the Gigabyte nVidia nForce2 motherboard, Samsung SyncMaster 739S 17″ , Seagate 200GB SATA-II with other necessary accessories. Well, it cost me only 30700/- and that is quite cheap. One bad thing that i didnt buy any graphics card b’cos in case we are forced to buy the laptops, i’ll have to buy a laptop within 25000/- so that total cost can come under 55000/-. Even that is quite lower than the cost of a high end laptop. As i didnt take any project i m just watching movies and playing games and i shud admit that AMD rocks for gaming. Its enough alone to check the graphics details of the popular games like UT, NFS Most Wanted , Doom 3, Prince of Persia etc … But i m sad that still i m not able to configure my wlan card in linux. its WNC-0301 level one lan card. If you have any suggestions please let me know, i m just killing my time using windows and this norton really sucks. it reports windows registry file as trogen, i dunno why ?????????