Quick announcement here. I’ve changed the domain to this blog to: broderic.blog

The old domain I was originally using I purchased off of google domains. Of course Squarespace had to ruin that. I then went to Namecheap and purchased broderic.blog for only 5 dollars and sixteen cents for one year. Domain dealers are lame though, they’ll give you a great deal when purchasing a new domain, but of course once it comes to renewal they will screw you over by jacking up the renewal price. Hopefully my renewal is no more than like $40.

A couple days ago I was mindlessly browsing the web when suddenly my internet went out. With it being 1am, it was a clear sign for me to go to bed, but I ignored it and just hopped on my phone for a bit. 30 minutes later I noticed the internet was still out and I was kinda pissed. (As if I was doing anything actually important.) Usually these outages only last about 10-15 minutes or so. I then decided to think more rationally and realized it was probably some maintenance upgrade since the outage started almost exactly at 1am. I was curious how long this outage would last and decided to create the greatest uptime script known to mankind:

Something I was just thinking about recently was our history of phones and how we used to all have a “home” phone. You know, just a phone that sits at home all day. A landline. Just about every home in America had one. Then suddenly cellphones came along, they got cheaper and cheaper until everyone had a flip phone in their pocket. And then one day, we each decided that there was no point in paying for a landline when we all had cell phones. But for most people, there was this brief period of time where we went about our days with both a landline and a cell phone. I would say between the years of 2008 - 2014 is when the majority of people were actively using both types of phones.

For the longest time I’ve never been able to print from my iPhone to the Dell printer in my parent’s house. I’m not exactly sure when we got the printer but I know it’s at least been like 7+ years. The printer in question is the Dell 2155cn Color MFP. According to the copyright on the user guide, the printer was released in 2010. That makes the printer a decade+ old.

When I first tried printing from my iPhone to this Dell printer some 5 years ago, iOS was unable to find the printer on the network. At the time, I assumed it was because the printer was so old, and that it was probably using some ancient protocol that only worked on Windows. Back then I’d just give up and print from my computer instead. Why waste time figuring out how to print from my phone when it takes like 20 seconds to just walk over to my desktop and print from there instead? Fast forward to now and I’ve deemed that unacceptable. I was going to get to the bottom of this and figure out why the hell iOS couldn’t find my printer.

So before I began this project, it was clear that the network closet was a mess:

Wires and cables everywhere. The patch panel is unorganized. There’s so much crap everywhere you can’t even tell what’s going on. I do want to say that most of this was not me. This was the previous owner. When we moved into the house the previous owner had already wired every inch of it with cat5e and coaxial. When installing Unifi AP’s around the house I traced them down to here and connected them all to a switch. The reason you don’t see a router or modem is because those are in a totally different room. For whatever reason the demarc doesn’t lead to the network closet. I’m sure there’s a way I can trace it to the network closet, but then I’d have to invest in a multimeter, which I don’t want to do just to trace coaxial.