Category: Computing

All I.T. related rants/posts.

Now with IPv6 goodness

So, with about 10 mins of reading and 1 min of work, this site is now available with both IPv4 and IPv6. Thanks Bytemark for making it so easy, and of course to all the software stack that just works. If you want to test and ensure you’re using just IPv6, you can browse to ipv6.james.rcpt.to, which I have only published a AAAA address for.

Next up; update my Log3NF Apache module to understand IPv6 addresses as well as the IPv4 if currently does.

O2: don’t call me to tell me to stop using an unlimited broadband!

Dear O2 Broadband,

I’ve been a customer now for about 3 months. In this time I have experienced:

  1. Spontaneous reboots of the O2 broadband wireless router every 30 seconds, forcing me to put my own router in; support forums are full of plenty of people talking about this
  2. Very slow Speedtest.net speed results of around 1 MB/sec on an 8 MB/sec line in the evenings; I live around 300′ from the Poplar, London exchange (that’s the copper run, not line of site)

Now you’ve rung me to tell me to use my broadband less. Now, I’m familiar with fair usage, but quite frankly, the poor performance of the service is enough to throttle any usage.

So, here’s a couple of tips:

  • Work out how you can not suck badly in the evenings. Ther’s supposed to be a 21CN upgrade from BT for this exchange in the Q2 2010; get some of that roadmap out and publicised as to what this means for your customers? Anything? Nothing?
  • Accept that you have a bad fimware on your routers. Confirm it as a known issue. Apologise for this. Advise people of workarounds. Stop using these crappy Thompson devices. You choose, just don’t keep burrying your heads in the sand.
  • Don’t hassle your customers for using the service they are paying for. You say Unlimited. You say “No matter which O2 Home Broadband package you’re on, there aren’t any limits on how much you can download or upload in a month. So you can use the Internet as much as you like, within reason. Our network’s been designed to cope with people downloading large files (like music or films) and watching video online. But if you’re using the service excessively – like continually downloading large files at peak times – then we do reserve the right to warn you to lower your usage. In exceptional circumstances, we can even terminate your account. This is because excessive use by a few people can reduce the speed that others in the same area get with O2 Home Broadband. We just want to provide everyone with an excellent level of service.” I am not on a 100 MB/s fibre link here, its an ADSL link. It is limited already at… well, you say 8 MB/sec, I see 1 MB/sec. That’s enough of a limit already. Indeed, for central london, E14, less than a mile from some of the biggest internet exchanges in the United Kingdom, how about you actually get some performance in here.

You suggested to me that you may terminate my account; well, you’re offering has performed pretty poorly, so I am tempted to leave anyway.

C’mon Pidgin/libpurple

Pidgin is a pretty awesome, cross-platform, Instant Messaging client. It has the possibility of being one of the first Free cross-platform IM clients to support voice and video with the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Ticket 11075 on the Pidgin web site is for this feature request – it currently has voice and video on recent versions of GTK/Glib and supporting libraries under Linux, and Windows support is almost there (works in some snapshots, but not in any released version yet).
Pidgin use Trac for their bug list, and in here you can vote for a bug to increase it’s priority. Getting working cross-platform Voice and Video (VV) would rock, and gets my vote – if you care about open source IM video chat then take a look at ticket 11075. Right now it has 19 votes, making it the #2 ranked feature/defect, beaten only by 247: “MSN direct file transfers”. Shame I don’t have time or ability to help code.

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!