Today I have been trying to work out the devices on our home/office network that are consuming the most bandwidth. We are getting close to our limit with the ISP and I want to find out where the main usage is. You would think it was pretty straightforward, but not a bit of it.

I am not a networking person so my understanding of protocols is somewhat limited. However after some rummaging on the internet the tool of choice seems to be PRTG Network Monitor. Having installed this it turns out that I need to enable SNMP (network monitoring) on my Netgear 834G router which requires accessing a hidden SNMP screen. Next it turns out that this router prefers to block SNMP traffic and its default setting is to turn it off. To turn it on you have to Telnet into the router and issue a line command to turn SNMP on (all of this uncovered through a single post way down a forum page back in 2006). If the connection drops or the router re-sets, you have to do the Telnet thing again. My computer didn’t have Telnet on it so I downloaded a copy of putty.exe which was immediately quarantined by Norton 360 and had to be rescued from the sin bin.

The next job having got PRTG running and the router happy to deal with SNMP requests, is to add sensors for SNMP traffic to the router records in PRTG. Turns out that it can only monitor SNMP for other devices that have SNMP enabled (it’s turned off in most Windows installations by default).  So having been round other Windows machines and switched SNMP on, I now expected these “interfaces” to be picked up by PRTG. Unfortunately not. Going to add new SNMP sensors to the router in PRTG does not find any, none are listed and “select all connected interfaces” draws a blank. “Nothing was selected, no sensors could be created” it says.

So I have given up. Stumbling block after stumbling block, and a lot of wasted effort delving into device settings that still didn’t work. In any case I want to be able to monitor traffic used by wireless and non-Windows Devices like the iPhone and the Wii as well as the desktop computers and laptops. The network should be secure but all the same it would be nice to know if anyone has managed to connect to it unauthorised, and is taking some of the bandwidth. I can only hope that someone out there is developing a network monitoring tool that is properly “plug and play” for this kind of environment!

Recently my web design clients have been experiencing space problems with their POP3 mail boxes provided with their web space. Often it’s down to poor housekeeping, and during recent bad weather some mailboxes went unchecked for a few days as staff weren’t getting to the office to log in. More and more people are also sending larger and larger files these days too, so a single large graphic document can easily take a user past their quota in one fell swoop. I’ve even had these problems myself.

So having had a Gmail account in the background for a while, I decided now would be the time to bring it to the front of stage and use it as my main mail processing centre, because of the vast free storage space it offers. I previously used the paid-for Spamcop service to filter out all junk and then send it on, but by many accounts Gmail’s spam filtering is pretty good too.

Initially, however, I set up Gmail to pull all the mail from my POP3 accounts. Which is fine, except it won’t fetch down anything that has a virus in it. Which means over time that your POP3 mailbox (now not being polled from the desktop) still fills up, but with bad messages, so you still have to go in and clear them down. May not be a problem, depending on the number of virus emails received. So instead I have now removed the POP3 mailboxes and set a mail forwarder on the domain name, to pass everything on to Gmail rather than wait for Gmail to fetch it and pick and choose what it wants to accept.

One other thing I have done is to set Gmail to forward all mail received on to one more POP3 mailbox on another domain name, and leave the Gmail copy in the inbox. The reason for this is that I want to fetch my mail to my desktop computer using my existing  POP3 Thunderbird settings, and keep using the same mail folders and mail processing rules (sending to various folders depending on content) that I already have. If you set up Gmail as a new account in Thunderbird it goes in a separate section of the Thunderbird inbox and all the rules need re-doing. The Gmail copy acts as a backup and can be viewed and marked as read either in the Gmail browser or when out and about with my iPhone.

So in summary, my POP3 mailboxes no longer exist, and the addresses they serviced are now just mail-forwards to Gmail. Gmail processes the spam and viruses, and then forwards a copy of everything to a “clean” POP3 box on another domain, that I poll from my regular computer. Having the Gmail copy as well is useful as a backup and means I am always seeing live mail in my mobile device too. I think this is the best solution for my mail needs and I will be recommending to my web clients with mail storage issues to do similar over the coming months.

Even though I play Hattrick I don’t really support any football teams. I was born near West Ham and also had a Chelsea football shirt when I was little but never got really fanatical about either. Later I lived near Crystal Palace when they got to an FA Cup Final and bought a club scarf to show my support, but still never felt like I wanted to sign up as a committed follower. Over Christmas I was reading ”Why England Lose” which covers a lot of topics relating to supporting football teams.  Which got me thinking about what is it exactly that makes someone go that one step further from casual interest to feeling part of a club?

When you see TV interviews with fans after games, pretty much everyone talks about the team they support in a possessive way, e.g. “we were absolute rubbish”, or “our lads did really well”.  I wonder at what point people start referring to their favourite team in that way? Is it from childhood or through a tradition in the family, or when someone moves to a new area and chooses a club to support, or perhaps when they attend their first home game and shout encouragement from the stands, or maybe when they buy a season ticket?

For my part I do follow the England team and will do in the World Cup, but for me, saying “England will easily beat Algeria” sits more comfortably than “we will easily beat Algeria”. I am not a member of the England Supporters’ Club, only watch televised games, and even though I know most of the players and the clubs they play for, I don’t feel any sense of ownership towards the England team even though it’s my national team. I also follow my local town football team’s non-league progress but I rarely attend games, know few of the players and other than living in the same geographical location where the home games are played, again I would always refer to them in the third person (”they should have done better in that game” for example).

To me, talking about a club in the possessive seems a curious thing to do if you are not part of the actual team, paid staff or directors. How does it feel as a club manager or director to have all these people claiming ownership of something that is your own responsibility?

The opposite extreme is if I am playing a multiplayer internet fantasy game in a mission or quest team with other real people such as members of a guild. There I am actually part of the team doing the mission, and we stand or fall by our own actions. After the mission I can happily say in the chat ”we should have gone this way” or “we used the wrong spells on the Necromancer Boss”.  Whereas if I go to a football match my presence has no effect on the outcome of the game, so it seems odd to talk about the people I was just watching chasing and kicking a ball for 90 minutes in a possessive way.

But clearly there is some hidden hurdle that once you have crossed it, makes you feel entitled to speak as if the club is yours and that you have played some personal part in every win or defeat. Funny, that. I wonder what it is?

I’m using this blog as an occasional means of sharing information and topics that interest me. I thought I’d start with the football browser game Hattrick. Developed in Sweden, it’s been running for over 10 years now but is experiencing a bit of a drop off in players so worth a mention as we’ve just come to the end of a season and the next one starts between Christmas 2009 and New Year.

Rather than go into lots of detail, I’ll just say that it’s a slow-burning game that takes many weeks and months before you see signs of good progress, and in these days of instant gratification that is no bad thing. I’ve had a team since 2005 and I am not much of a football fan myself – I don’t go to games and rarely watch anything other than England internationals on TV.

As long as you have a basic understanding of the game – team of 11, goalie, defenders, midfield, forwards, free kicks, corners and penalties – object being to score more goals than your opponent – that’s all you need to know, at least to begin with. Although the subject is football (soccer), the game teaches you about long term planning and developing strategies to maximise performance from a team with limited resources; and thus can relate to many areas of work, home and leisure activity.

It’s a bit like being a crossword addict I guess, every day you get a new newspaper and you set about the day’s word challenge. In Hattrick the challenges are the league games are every weekend with midweek friendlies (or cup games for those not yet knocked out), and with various other things to do like check training reports, manage youth players and dabble in the transfer market, there are reasons for logging on most days.

Basically you have to shoehorn your rabble of players into some semblance of order for each game, putting the guys who know how to score up front, the guys who can keep possession in midfield, and the best defenders at the back. Having a good free kick taker on the team helps too.  Then just wait for the match to play out and see how you did, and every week you’ll get some income which you can use to buy new players. It takes probably about 30-60 minutes a week to adequately look after a team, although if you get involved in the game’s comprehensive and friendly discussion forums you can be on there a lot longer.

Over the years it’s become something of a ritual, like making sure you always sit down to watch EastEnders, every Sunday we have to make sure our lineups are set before the game. If you’re away you can set them up weeks ahead if you need to. The match plays out in text only so there are no 3D graphics, you can follow games easily and cheaply on your mobile PDA or iPhone.

Hattrick has earned itself something of a geeky/studenty label over the years, but it’s really not, and is played by men and women of all ages and all over the world. Keeping your Hattrick team running and striving for bigger and better things gives you a little something to focus on every week away from real life stress! If you sign up as a result of this little review, once in-game look for the username “profscooter”, send an internal email, and I’ll give you some pointers if you are stuck.

The English national cup games for Season 41 commence on Tuesday 29th December and the first league game of the new season is on Sunday 3rd January. Plenty of time to apply for a team, start reading the rules and sorting out your players over the Christmas turkey!