I ordered several, but the two that have arrived are the Paleo Kits from Steve’s Original and the Primal Pacs.

I ordered the Journeyman Pack from Steve’s Original in an effort to get a bit of a sampler since they have a pretty good variety on their website.   Their jerky was really good and close to my favorite (and now gone) Hombre that was made by a small company in Kansas near where I grew up.  The recession killed them off sadly.   Hombre was really good and spicy, and was just meat and had no carbs at all even with the spice.

I couldn’t tell a difference taste wise between the grass fed and the non-grass fed ‘just jerky’ packages.   Both were tasty.   There was a bit of a residue in the bag, and overall the jerky was a bit oily/greasy and I am bettting that’s from the vacuum packing sucking bits of moisture out of the product   Other than the need to wipe the hand off when absently grabbing it while eating and working it wasn’t that big of a deal.   My wife wasn’t fond of the dried fruit in the PaeloKit but I enjoyed it, added some variety.   I found myself dumping out the contents of the bag onto a paper towel and munching while working.   All in all the jerky and jerky combos were really good.

The thing I was hesitant at first about was the ‘PaleoKrunch’.   It is an attempt at making a granola like product without the stuff that’s against the primal diet.   It came with a ‘crunch bar’ and a ‘cereal’.   I must admit this was really tasty.   A bit different taste style wise due to the new flavors but it was really good.   My wife enjoyed it as well and devoured the crunch bar one breakfast and was really happy with it.  Both of these items will be purchase.   I found the cereal mix a good snack.

Needless to say, the sampler is gone.  We will be ordering more.

The Primal Pacs are a bit less variety.   Basically two sizes, large and small and how many you want are your ordering options.   I’ve only had one so far and I’m taking some with me on my next trip to see how it goes.    I’m not a big fan of their style of jerky, as it is more ‘sweet’ than spicy.   It’s not bad, it’s just not my favorite flavor I am not a sweet tasting meat kind of person, I much prefer salty/spicy/meaty flavor and that was missing from these.   The nuts and dried fruit with the jerky were great, and this packaging suffered a bit from the greasy feel but again I feel that is because of the packaging being vacuum packed for freshness that the vacuum packing sucks some moisture out of the product.   I don’t know if my wife tried any so I will have to get her opinion.   Most likely I will go more with the Steve’s original because it’s more my flavor.

I have some more jerky coming from other sources since I can’t get Hombre any more.

I’ve done atkins successfully for almost eight months.   I got down to a stellar 250 lbs.  Lost so much weight that my physician felt I need a UP3.  They cut out my tonsils and my soft palette, and then I failed to stay on atkins.   

My buddy Brian has been talking about low GI/primal/caveman/whatever for quite a while now.   He turned me on to Mark’s Daily Apple which is the blog of an author of a book ‘Primal Blueprint’ about the paleo diet.

I’m still working my way through it and cleaning out the cupboards of stuff I have that needs to be eaten / given away before we do this.   I have my supplements and I’m going to start those before I completely start the diet over the next week.   

So I’m going to blog it again, see what I can write about how things are going.   I’m the biggest I’ve ever been in my life, denied life insurance because of my height to weight ratio, and I’m only 40 and have four kids to worry about for quite a while.

That, and I kinda like it here on earth, republican nuts not withstanding.

I’m going to start out by highly recommending you use the ethernet option to connect things.   We have had lots of glitches with coax that was ‘good enough’ for satellite but would have hiccups in the stream when using the same built-in coax.  Now, my house is almost 10 years old so it’s probably lower grade coax than a new place would have but still, I expected more.

I converted the eight wire phone jack into Cat5E and the glitches went away.    I even converted the upstairs jack as well and now both boxes are on Ethernet on their own network to the box and things are pretty rock solid.

I’m still bummed only one HD record at a time, the four SD records kinda make up for it but I would still like another HD record.  I hope things improve or something changes in our distance from the CO, as we’re at the ragged edge unfortunately.   I also had some questions about my bill and how things weren’t adding up after I made the changes where I had a separate 10Mb DSL line put in instead of piggy backing along with the TV signal.   With little argument they credited me back for the next year a really reasonable amount so I have no complaints there.

You can view and record HD simultaneously, so there is enough bandwidth for that.   Just with wide screen TVs having a letterboxes 4:3 SD record gets old some days.

First, it’s important to note that I am told I am about 6200 feet from the central office.  This is important from a DSL perspective.    I initially tried to get Prism back in July and that had some unexpected excitement after they discovered I was unable to have it installed because my area wasn’t completely ready yet.   I got a call in September of someone wanting to tell me about the exciting new service and I was all for it, so I ordered the entire package with 10MB/s internet.   It had an introductory price of $150 a month, and then after a few months it would go up as the HD service would no longer be free.

I already had 5MB/s DSL from them, and have had for years.   The new service comes on a pair of bonded DSL channels.   Ideally they should get about 25MB/s to your home, 15MB/s for the prism service, and the rest for your internet.  Unfortunately for me at best they were able to squeak out about 2.7MB/s for my internet.

I opted to keep it and figured I wouldn’t miss the 2.3 MB/s I was losing.   More on that later.

I have two HD televisions, one 65″ and one 27″.   I opted for the DVR to be near my 65″ and the remote STB that you can view the DVR contents with down on the 27″ TV.   The devices have two options for connecting to your router (A Cisco 2200) and in my case, they were excited because i had ethernet to each TV room and they could use that.   So we used my existing infrastructure that consisted of a router in my garage hooked to the DSL line with gigabit ethernet ran to a Apple Airport Extreme base station and a Apple 2TB Time Capsule upstairs.   It took them most of the day to get the prism service to the house, and all of 30 seconds to plug in the boxes.  They were really happy, the screen worked, they gave me the login information for the Cisco 2200 so I could make my changes if I wanted and left.

Now the next part started to drive me slowly insane for a bit.   My internet started dropping out.   It took me a while, and a lot of trial and error, but what I discovered was if HD programming was going to the box, anything else on that wire was discarded by the 2200.  So, in my situation I replaced my router at the entry point with the 2200 as it was a internet router/TV over IP router.  It (lamely) was only 802.11b/g so I disabled its wireless features in favor of my 2.4Ghz/5Ghz N network.   The ethernet port are also lamely 100 MB/s only.  So my bridge to bridge speed was taken down to 10% of what it was before.

I had to head out of town for work, but when I got back I worked with Centurylink support only to be told it was ‘my equipment’.   I argued with them that they came into ‘my house’ and used ‘my equipment’ and it was ‘their equipment’ that was taking out my network but they wouldn’t listen.  So I grumbled about it on DSL Reports.  I discovered via that forum that Centurylink has an email address to a very responsive team of customer care guys.   The email address is talktous at century link dot com.   I sent my conundrum of HDTV killing the network cable it was on, and they responded probably within a few hours which was really nice.  They also said that they had a presentation from another support incident that sounded similar and would send it to me if I’d like to see if it fit.

it did, and it basically explained that there is some kind of hidden QoS on the wire that effectively kills the usefulness of that port the box is plugged into.  You have to use another port for your internet or you will lose everything when the HDTV goes on or high bandwidth activity is occurring.

I could easily move my downstairs TV as it had a jack that was still wired and I knew where it went.  So I moved the downstairs TV from ethernet to the coax cable and used HPNA.   That wiped out any performance issues when connected downstairs.

Upstairs was another story though.  My house has structured wiring but no one labeled the wires.  They wired every room, so I have somewhere around 15 cables going o one spot, and I have no whistler to find which one is which, and i had unhooked the cables that went to the DirecTV box because I needed some space in my cabinet.   So, I put off taking care of it.

This created a lot of frustration as my internet would fade in and out, and really, 2.7Mb/s is just not fast enough for what we do in the house.   With two older kids that use the computer, a wife that uses the computer, and myself things were a bit flaky when everyone was home.   So I called Centurylink last month and asked if it was possible to have ‘plain’ DSL at 10MB/s on my office line, and Prism on my home line with the internet disabled.

It was, and it cost me a whole $7 more.

So color me really happy now.   We get 10Mb/s easily (Downloading something at 1MB/s is fun) and things are really hauling ass.   Other than the horrible idiot i ran into back in July I have zero complaints about things.  Everything has settled down, connectivity is great, and our TV watching is great.   I can only record one HD channel at a time but we can record 4 SD channels as well so with a little decisions on what shows I really care about in HD or not and we’re set.

The only complaints I have is the scheduler on the DVR is stupid.   Conflict resolution is not intuitive or intelligent, and they have some work to do there.  I have noticed one software update on the DVRs that changed some things, and we’ve yet to fill the DVR as it has I think 320GB of space.   we got it down to 25-30% one time but that’s it.

DirecTV can bite me for disabling the DVR and what i had recorded on it though.   I was still catching up on shows and when they de-subscribed me they didn’t take my DVR away they just turned it into a boat anchor that wouldn’t play shows already recorded.   So I missed most of Suits on USA which I was enjoying.

You fire it up, hook up your FCoE card, aaaaand….

Nothin.

show flogi Database shows the adapter is logged in

show fcns database shows the adapter, but it’s missing the FC4 Type.

So, to save you from beating your head against the wall for a few hours trying to figure out ‘what’s different’ I’m just going to link you to this Nexus 5000 vs 5500 Troubleshooting tip

In a nutshell, in the 5548 The FCoE class-fcoe system class is not enabled in the QoS configuration by default anymore, and needs to be configured. The above link takes you to an example config that when I pasted it into my 5548 my problems with the IBM Virtual Fabric Adapter 2 connecting to it vanished.

Now maybe this is obvious and everyone knows this, but I spent a week telling the people responsible for this switch that it was a configuration issue with their switch and they spent a week telling me my FCoE card is broken. In the end I turned out correct, and we found the missing setting. This was after I was told that several ‘switch experts’ reviewed the configuration and it was correct (HINT: It Wasn’t) so I wanted to document this because it took us several hours of google hints and trial and error trying to identify what was different between the 50xx switches and the 5548 we had.

My problem was my account was left in a state of moving from DSL to Prism, so my DSL didn’t work anymore.

Not a big deal, just need someone in tech support to re-provision my account.   Not a big deal you would think.    Try again.

I called in, spoke to a nice woman who said since I had pending orders I needed to speak to customer service.   No problem.  I speak with customer service, and they tell me that they can’t close the order as it’d cancel my install.   They said they would transfer me back to customer support, and to tell them what the deal was and that the orders needed to remain open, they just needed to re-provision my account for DSL until Prism was finished next week.
I get a guy this time, I try to tell him this but he wants to go through his script of reboot the modem, then, reset the modem with the holding the button in thing.
When this fails, he tries to send me to customer support again.

This my friends, this is when it gets surreal.  I mean like there is no way this guy si s this stupid, he’s out to destroy his employers view in my eyes and he’s going to work his ass off to do it.

I tell him when he tells me to call customer support that his customer support department that I needed to ask for a supervisor.  I would like to speak to a supervisor please.  He tells me he can’t give me a supervisor because they’ll just tell me to call customer support.  I tell him, no, please give me a tech support manager.  He again, tells me he can’t give ma supervisor because they’ll just tell me to call customer support.  I swear to you, this probably happened 5 to 10 more times before I started losing it.  I asked for his name and his employee ID at this point. He would only tell me his name is ‘Keith’.    Yes, I started cussing in my requests at this point.  I’m sure I said things like Don’t fucking tell me to talk to customer support, give me your god damn manager now.

I probably interrupted his constant mantra of call customer support.  At no time was the call disconnected.  Probably the 4th or 5th time I peppered my request with a fuck or god dammit or you shit head he said he’d disconnect the call if I didn’t treat him in a professional manner.  I told him I’d talk to him professionally if he treated me professionally and gave me his supervisor.  I proceeded to be in this god awful infinite loop from 3:20PM to 5:00PM.   While he was rambling away rainman like about me contacting customer support I picked up my mobile and called back, this time I punched the numbers to disconnect service.   I got a nice guy named Brian and told him I’m on the phone with your tech support and I got this guy who says his name is Keith and he’s repeating in my other ear I need to call customer support.  I explained to him my situation and how this guy wouldn’t give me a supervisor.  I muted keith at one point because he was just repeating this loop of my supervisor is only going to tell you to call customer support.   Finally I told him we’ll see who finds a manager first, the disconnect guy or him.  At this point he claimed to be getting me a manager.

The disconnect guy took my name, and said he’d have someone named Chris call me back.   At this point, it is now 5pm.

Finally, after at least another 20 minutes, Mike comes on the phone and asks me what is going on.   I tell him the story, going to get prism, they had an issue, DSL no work, can you fix please.  I swear to god people he typed for 5 seconds and then said ‘do you have it now?’ and my shit was working.

I probably am dead and had an aneurysm and this is the sparks left in my head.

I relayed my entire experience, and he even said ‘oh man you’ve been on the phone since 3:20?’.  He said he took my information and was making sure shit was getting sorted but at this point, I don’t know if that’s true.

My internet is up (obviously) and I thank him, but tell him I want this fucker fired.   It’s idiots like this that have us come to this forums and tell people WORST SHIT SERVICE EVER! TERRIBLE INSTALLER!    I thank the guy for fixing it, he tells me he has some more complaint paperwork to fill out but he doesn’t need to hold me on the line.

About 5 minutes later Chris from Centurylink calls me back.   He said he was with the teir three of the disconnect guys and I tell him what happened and how i want this guy fired and perp walked out the building.  He apologizes profusely but tells me that his system isn’t connected to support so he can’t look it up.
I take a shower, because I’m literarily shaking from the adrenaline push and sweating like crazy.

I call back to support and get a nice lady.  I tell her that this is going to be an odd request and I ask her if I can get the information on the last person(s) to touch my account so I can get an ID number to find this guy and identify him to the right people.   She asks me what happened and I told her.   This time I got a human.  She was as stuttering as I was about how just flat out retarded this was.   She apologized multiple times but said she can’t look at that information.  She told me all calls are recorded so there is a 1.5hr recording of me being nice and friendly, and then going stark raving mad, and then some dude fixing it.
If you are a lurker here and work for century link please cut/paste this information and send it to your entire management structure.   I want this guy found, and I want him perp walked out of the building and not paid for Friday, July 1s 2011 because he wasn’t working for your company answering phones.  He was torturing your customers.

I’ve spoken to multiple people on the phone and told them my story.  I’ve submitted and email ticket.  I want someone to acknowledge what happened and I want this fucker found and fired with bad references.   If I don’t find this guy and get some acknowledgement that he’s found I’m going to the state and federal communication folks and filing complaints there too.  Looking forward to having Prism installed next week.   I wouldn’t mind getting that guys paycheck to cover my bill for a few months.

No applications, no way to integrated other social media outlets into it.

The web interface is great though.  However they gimp it if you view from iPad.  I can view stuff, I just couldn’t figure out how to add more people or anything of that nature.

I currently am running with them in a mobile sense only.  I have the no longer available Sierra Wireless 3G/4G hot spot.   I managed to lose my first one and they let me replace it for a whopping $74 so I was really excited about that price.  Wasn’t looking forward to having to pay a few hundred that I thought it would cost.   Currently I have this hooked up inside our Ford Flex.  The kids use it for WiFi access on their Apple iPads that they have instead of an in car DVD system.

I’m disappointed with the lack of growth of WiMax as far as coverage over the last year.  I was really hoping that RTP coverage.  I would think they’d want coverage near Cisco, IBM, and other tech offices there but right now it’s still a 3G area.   This has severely limited my need for it for business use and I haven’t taken it anywhere with me.  So other than letting the kids use it for netflix in the car, it doesn’t see much use.

I will most likely cancel service when my agreement is up unless something changes.   With the financial woes and lots of products/services going away from them, I wonder how much longer this will continue.

BNT’s BladeOS Treats 802.1q tagged packets differently by default than other switch operating systems. If a packet comes in untagged, it isn’t touched. If it’s tagged however, the tag is replaced regardless of how it’s tagged with a VLAN tag of 1 by default.

Obviously, in a VST environment this isn’t what you want to happen. In order for you to properly pass tagged packets within a BNT switch you have to do the following:

Let’s say you have three VST tags on your network link. To have the BNT switch not change the tag you need to set the following on the uplink port on the BNT switch:

–
int port 1
tagging
pvid 1
exit

vlan 10
enable
member 1

vlan 20
enable
member 1

vlan 30
enable
member 1
–

If you are doing more than one port, you would need to put the port in the member of each vlan (IE: member 1-14, etc). This is true on either the BladeCenter or Rack variant of the switch.

If you are using vNIC, the behavior is different and I’ll address that at another time.