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Commenting is now fixed, sorry
Sep 18th
Anybody who tried to register on this blog during the last 6 months or so, would not have received an activation email. So many people will have been unable to comment. If this has happened to you sorry for the inconvenience.
This WordPress installation can now send emails, thanks to the Configure SMTP plugin by Scott Reilly.
If you have any problems, please email me, my address is alex@moreati.org.uk.
On migrating between internet service providers
Mar 8th
Apologies to anyone who got email to moreati.org.uk bounced or a 404 over the last week. I’ve been moving hosting provider, from Dreamhost to Webfaction and ironing out some finer points of DNS configuration – I’m a DBA Jim, not a network engineer.
Thanks to standards and open source software information services are becoming interchangeable commodities, like electricity or water. Increasingly it doesn’t matter which provider one chooses, the differentiators are cost and bundled features. However we’re not totally there, one cannot export a complete domain from provider A and import it to provider B. We may never be there*, a gas service has very little state and very little choice in how the service is presented, everything is standardized. We in the ICT field still invent unique and wacky methods to reach a goal.
Some areas are further behind then others in making a switch easy. In the UK Local Loop Unbundling is in full swing. The incumbent provider – BT – is required to allow competitors’ to provide telephone/broadband by installing equipment in local exchanges. The regulator requires that a transfer from BT to an LLU provider can happen in a matter of days, with minimal downtime. However in a curious limitation it is not possible to transfer from one LLU provider to another. One must return to BT, incurring a reconnection charge and (I believe) a 12 month contract, then migrate from BT to the other LLU provider. How quaint.
* Perhaps the closest we have gotten so far is the J2EE .war file.
How to make T-Mobile Web n Walk a real web connection
Feb 28th
Thanks to a comment on the blog post Hacking T-Mobile, I’ve discovered that the T-Mobile Web n Walk transparent proxy can be bypassed neutered. Assuming you use Firefox, here are the steps:
- Install the Modify Headers addon.
- In Tools -> Modify Headers, open the Modify Headers dialog.
- Along the top row set the operation as Add, the name as ‘Cache-Control’, the value as ‘no-transform’. Click Add, the header modification should appear in the list, with a green circle to show it’s enabled.
- Click Configuration, tick the Always On check box. Close the dialog.
Explanation: Normally T-Mobile recompresses all images in websites viewed through web n walk. The effect varies from slightly grainy to jarringly blocky. The recompression can be overridden, by performing a forced refresh. T-Mobile add tooltips in the HTML, to mention this. A forced refresh causes the header ‘Cache-Control: no-cache’ to be sent, which overrides the transparent proxy and forces the request to go straight to the original web server. This means the original image is delivered, but more traffic than necessary is generated. The header ‘Cache-Control: no-transform’ allows T-Mobile to cache the content, but forbids them from recompressing images or otherwise modifying the web page.
Alex
Tiscali: Cheap and crap
Feb 28th
I’ll admit it, I’m cheap when it comes to telecommunication. I generally look for the line rental refund when renewing my mobile and I hate paying line rental to BT.
Two years ago I moved house, outside the area cabled by Blueyonder, who were great. First I tried Orange broadband, which was free with my mobile phone. It was slow and the supplied router was a bit flaky.
Last year I jumped ship to T-Mobile, £20/month covered line rental and 1 Mbit broadband – bargain! Setup was a hassle, they took several weeks to activate the line, but once it worked I was content. In October they started faking DNS results, to stick advertising in place of the browser’s error page. In January they ‘upgraded’ many users to ‘ADSL Max, upto 8 Mbit.’ Thats when the real trouble started, widespread throttling and intermittent connections have since been the norm.
The tiscali support forum is flooded with faults and complaints. The 0870 support line is congested and useless, it’s just clueless Indians parroting their scripts: reboot, reset the router, retry, engineers are working on the problem, wait 24 hours etc. Meanwhile the tiscali status page reports all is well, 100% service.
Time to jump ship again. Thank heck for Web n Walk. A useful post, to make up for this rant, will shortly follow.
Brought to you by the letters H, D, D and the sound tinkle
Jan 3rd
It is said there are 2 types of people:
- Those who perform backups.
- Those who’ve never lost valuable data.
This is wrong, I’m in a third, transitory group. I’m no longer in the second group, but I’m not yet in the first. I resolve to join, once I replace my ex hard disk – now a rattle.
Embarrassingly, it took with it my gpg private key & photos. Miraculously the rest of the laptop appears to have survived.
Alex
Update: I did have a backup of my GPG key, panic over.
Getting proper internet access on T-Mobile Web n Walk Plus
Jun 19th
Since joining T-Mobile I’ve been impressed with the speed of Web n Walk. However, I had problems accessing MSN Instant Messenger, Jabber, FTP & IRC. Some other users recounted there MSN IM troubles in a Modaco thread on on the introduction of port blocking and a 3G forum thread on WnW AUP.
I’m happy to report that a T-Mobile technician and I resolved the issues. The short answer: I was on Flext+WnW, upgraded to WnW Plus. T-Mobile switched my plan to Flext+WnW Plus, everything in the base package. Since then I’ve reliably been able to make MSN IM, Jabber, FTP and IRC connections.
A longer answer follows: T-Mobile markets Web n Walk plans in 3 tiers:
- WnW: web browsing on your handset, upto 1 GB/month. No Instant Messaging, VOIP or P2P.
- WnW plus: internet on your handset or a computer connected through it, upto 3 GB/month. No VOIP or P2P
- WnW max: internet on handset or computer, upto 10 GB/month. All traffic types allowed.
A WnW plan may be sold as part of a Flext contract, or later added as an extra. My contract had been upgraded to WnW plus, from WnW – I was experiencing connection issues with MSN IM and other protocols. A colleague had taken WnW plus from the start, it was part of his base contract – he has no connection issues. Swapping SIMs made no difference, the behaviour was not related to our different handsets. Once I informed the T-Mobile technician of this, he asked the route by which we came to WnW plus. The technician changed my contract to match my colleague’s and the connection problems promptly disappeared.
It could have been the act of reseting the account that fixed this, or that it was a bug triggered by a particular account configuration. The very helpful technician said that he would be chasing the matter, to check if anything systematic is at play to cause these symptoms.
T-Mobile Web n Walk
Jun 9th
I got a new phone with T-Mobile Web n Walk Plus today. I’m impressed, it’s working better than I’d hoped. Downloads are plenty fast with HSDPA (3.5G) and configration was bearable. Websites with a mobile variant are usable at 320×240, accessing the web on my laptop, at broadband speeds, when I don’t have broadband is incredible.
However, so far I’ve discovered some downsides:
- T-Mobile run a transparent proxy. I cannot ping remote hosts, or telnet to the smtp port of my email provider.
- The proxy recompresses JPEG images at a higher ratio. The results are very poor.
It beats the pants off WAP and all those walled gardens that mobile operators seem obsessed with. True mobile internet still isn’t quite here.
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