A blog about life, technology & databases
Posts tagged internet
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.
Recent Comments