Monthly Archives: September 2008

iBurst: Still no broadband

Posted by on September 30, 2008 3 comments

In a previously related post. I detailed my “journey” into the getting no broadband anymore. iBurst’s service is still degraded.

Due to all the download issues and retries I eventually exhausted my 5GB-bundle and my 3.5GB top-up and was forced to topup by another 3.5GB last week to just make it through the month and be able to work. The 5GB are generally sufficient, but the last 30 days I spent downloading the same 120MB (non-resumeable) file 13(!!!) times as iBurst disconnected the network and download-speeds had been below 200kbps (this is KiloBits, which is 25KB/sec — compare that to 400KB/sec on ADSL or 250KB/sec on 3G).

The call-centre will find any excuse (check your MTU settings, have you rebooted your computer, did you install the latest Windows service-pack) for not helping you. They will then also send you to their own speedtest site, which shows a sugary-picture:

It’s just a pity, that I never download anything from iBurst’s website and a real-life scenario shows a picture like this:

Yes, most downloads, news etc originate from US and Europe, and this is where iBurst does not deliver broadband. Before we blame it on international traffic being congested, how come that ADSL- or 3G-users don’t have this problem. Clearly points out that iBurst is in trouble.

The recent site visit from the iBurst engineer, also did not prove an issue on my end of the wireless internetlessness. My signal quality is 100%, no frame-errors, perfect throughput on modem and router, but still speed issues.

During a further Speedtest this morning I noticed a brief improvement of speed (lasted between 6:00-6:30 and fluctuated between 300-500kbps) – after 6:30am however it was back to the previous state. Also still experiencing the same disconnects and fluctuation in speed.
iBurst speedtest: Upload 464kpbs / Download 138kpbs
Speedtest – Johannesburg: Upload 509kpbs / Download 253kpbs
Speedtest – Capetown: Upload 362kpbs / Download 123kpbs
Speedtest – NY: Upload 272kpbs / Download 92kpbs

You will notice, that the further you get away from your connected location the more speed drops. In contrast, this is not the case with other connection types. Hell, even pairing my Nokia N95 via Bluetooth on 3G is faster than iBurst. Still waiting for a resolution, as the problem is currently looked at by the network team. It has been confirmed during the site-survey, that the issue is not on my end though!

Update 2009-01-01: I had cancelled iBurst with 1st December 2008 and have been on ADSL (4mb) since November. iBurst did not really care addressing the problem and customer service is just horrible. Moving over to ADSL (via Webafrica) is the best thing I could have done. Downloads are coming in at 400KB/sec – not comparable to the 40KB/sec on iBurst.



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The Friday Picture: Relativity

Posted by on September 26, 2008 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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/me Famous

Posted by on September 26, 2008 No comments

Well, it does not happen often that you get a mention in N4G – lookse here

What is all the hype about? Sony has acknowledged me as one of their super-customers and I have sofar participated in every single beta:

  • Home (first and only South African)
  • Motorstorm Pacific Rift (2nd reported invite)
  • Resistance Fall of Man 2 (1st reported invite)
  • SOCOM 2 (3rd reported invite)
  • Little Big Planet (2nd reported invite)
  • Killzone 2 (1st reported invite)

What’s there to say other than: THANK YOU SONY. (Now please invite some more South Africans —- you will see your revenue soar)

Please visit our great forum to support our cause in getting our own servers and put pressure on Sony!!!

From my invite:
Enter the most fearsome theatre of war you’ve ever seen.
Developed by Guerrilla Games, Killzone 2 is the highly anticipated first person shooter created exclusively for PLAYSTATION 3.
Following events and action from the original Killzone for PlayStation®2, two years after the Helghast assault on Vekta, the ISA is taking the fight to the enemy’s home world of Helghan. The ISA goal is clear: capture the Helghast leader, Emperor Visari, and bring the Helghast war machine to a halt.
• Experience realistic, highly atmospheric and destructible environments that respond dynamically to the violent conditions on the planet Helghan
• Control an arsenal of new and unique weapons and vehicles, in addition to trusty Killzone classics such as the M82-G and the StA-52 LA
• Engage in an extensive single player campaign and thrilling multiplayer mode
For more information about Killzone 2, screenshots and videos, please visit the Killzone 2 information page on eu.playstation.com by clicking on the following link:

http://uk.playstation.com/games-media/games/detail/item101903/

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iBurst: Fix your broadband

Posted by on September 23, 2008 1 comment

There is no doubt that iBurst is one of the worse broadband providers out there. Look at the over 500 complaints in the last 12 months on HelloPeter or HellBurst.

While most users complain about incorrect debit orders and the accounts department being up to sh#t, I pay via EFT and avoid surprise debits exceeding several thousand Rand a month. Yes, choosing iBurst was my choice — Telkom was not capable installing a copper line (after 5 months), Neotel did not launch and 3G is too expensive, but the incorrect advertising (broadband) and the (lacking) level of service is consistently delivered by iBurst.

While I originally used to get 500-700kbps (with omni-directional antenna and 100% signal), over the last 2 weeks my download speed looks like this (note that this is in KiloBits per second and not KB):

and a Speedtest reveals this:

Great ping-time, but iBurst completely lacks the backhaul capacity to provide any level of service. Incident was logged with them 19th September with the promise to have an engineer call within 1 hour. Phoned again today and was told that “everyone” is working on this.

On the MyAdsl forum you will notice posts like this one, that one, or this one, or that other one, or this one. By now you should get the hint, that not everything is as rosy as we are led to believe.

What does it mean to me: Tried to download since Thursday a 150MB patch for PS3 Burnout Paradise. Sofar the download was interrupted 12 times (4x on Thurs, 5x Friday, 3x Sat). This has cost me over 1GB of my bandwidth and iBurst is refusing to fix or compensate —- bad business practices.

Although Telkom could not get their act together in January, I have re-applied and hope that in a few months I will be on ADSL. PM me if you would like to purchase the iBurst Desktop modem (not that I have not warned you…)

Update 1: It has been now 3 days since I started notice the bad connectivity. Between 18/09 and 21/09 I wasted already 2869MB on trying to redownload a 120MB file. This is using up the additional R599,00 bundle I bought – iBurst will unlikely provide compensation for this.

Update 2: The call-centre now tells me that my local setup is wrong – iBurst see screenshots below (100% signal strength, no frame-errors, but your magic link-speed is 293kbps):

Update 3: Close to a week later, several phone-calls and emails, iBurst has now decided that the problem is on my side. So how is it possible that I can have great speed-tests against iBurst servers, but any international download suffers from lack of speed (download this morning of a 64MB Synology Firmware was going at a hot 5KB/sec). I will get my site-visit now on 26th – a week after reporting the incident the first time. Will be surprised to see what the resolution will be.

From some people I heard that iBurst does not have sufficient international back-haul capacity and all their towers are oversubscribed, this would then explain an international SpeedTest:

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NAS: Display Squid cachemgr

Posted by on September 21, 2008 No comments

In a previous post I detailed how to install Squid on a Synology DS107+. This post explains how you are able to include Squid’s cache-manager UI. This post is for advanced users and I am not going to re-explain how to configure a 3rd party application in the DS.

  1. Adjust your cachemgr.conf and include your Squid’s url. In my case this is an extra line with 172.16.0.97:8080
  2. Ensure that you have configured the correct ACLs for the cache-manager. If you took my squid.conf then you are fine.
  3. Test the cache-manager: squidclient -h 172.16.0.97 -p 8080 mgr:info

     Squid Object Cache: Version 2.6.STABLE21 Start Time: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:57:53 GMT Current Time: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:08:44 GMT Connection information for squid: Number of clients accessing cache: 2 Number of HTTP requests received: 154 Number of ICP messages received: 0 Number of ICP messages sent: 0 Number of queued ICP replies: 0 Request failure ratio: 0.01 Average HTTP requests per minute since start: 14.2 Average ICP messages per minute since start: 0.0 Select loop called: 135277 times, 4.810 ms avg

     

  4. The Squid installation comes with the cachemgr.cgi in /opt/libexec/cachemgr.cgi. Best way is to symlink (ln -s) the file into your 3rd party-directory

With the above information you will be able to tune Squid accordingly.

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The Friday Picture: Craftmanship

Posted by on September 19, 2008 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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NAS: Create your own caching proxy

Posted by on September 19, 2008 16 comments

There you are, with that 1TB NAS and you surf mostly the same websites and in the process waste plenty of time waiting on downloads. So why not install your own Squid-proxy server on your NAS?

With the Synology and the pre-requisite of having ipkg installed – this takes no more than 10 minutes.

Update (2008-12-22): I have adjusted the Squid-configuration to block websites for unlisted IP-addresses. If you don’t require this (and want your kids to download several gigs of You Tube-videos) then delete the lines acl nonblockedip, acl blocksites and http_access deny blocksites.

In my example, my NAS IP is 172.16.0.97 and my IP range on my LAN is 172.16.0.0 – adjust this accordingly below:

  1. Install squid: ipkg install squid
  2. Adjust Squid’s config-file located in /opt/etc/squid/squid.conf:

     ## SQUID CONFIG cache_mgr [email protected] ## Those are the ports the proxy is going to listen to http_port 172.16.0.97:3128 http_port 172.16.0.97:8080 # TAG: visible_hostname # The host-name of the proxy-server. Can really be anything visible_hostname MuffinStationProxy # DISK CACHE OPTIONS # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Disk-cache options. Just adjust the cache-siz (in my case 20GB) cache_replacement_policy lru cache_dir ufs /opt/var/squid/cache/ 20000 16 256 minimum_object_size 0 KB maximum_object_size 2097152 KB maximum_object_size_in_memory 1024 KB # MEMORY CACHE OPTIONS # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- # TAG: cache_mem (bytes) cache_mem 8 MB memory_replacement_policy lru # ACCESS CONTROLS # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 acl manager proto cache_object acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255 acl our_networks src 172.16.0.0/24 172.16.1.0/24 acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8 acl nonblockedip src 172.16.0.3 172.16.0.5 # childblocks acl blocksites dstdomain "/opt/etc/squid/restricted-sites.squid" #Block childblocked sites http_access deny blocksites !nonblockedip all http_access allow manager localhost http_access allow manager our_networks http_access deny manager # Allow all clients from my network http_access allow our_networks # And finally deny all other access to this proxy http_access deny all #Allow ICP queries from everyone icp_access allow all # LOG-FILES # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- access_log /opt/var/squid/logs/access.log squid #cache_log none #cache_log /opt/var/squid/logs/cache.log #cache_access_log none #cache_access_log /opt/var/squid/logs/access.log #cache_store_log none #cache_store_log /opt/var/squid/logs/store.log # OPTIONS FOR TUNING THE CACHE # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- # TAG: cache # A list of ACL elements which, if matched, cause the request to # not be satisfied from the cache and the reply to not be cached. # In other words, use this to force certain objects to never be cached. # # You must use the word 'DENY' to indicate the ACL names which should # NOT be cached. # # Default is to allow all to be cached #We recommend you to use the following two lines. acl QUERY urlpath_regex cgi-bin \? cache deny QUERY refresh_pattern ^ftp: 1440 20% 10080 refresh_pattern ^gopher: 1440 0% 1440 refresh_pattern . 0 20% 4320 refresh_pattern \.gif 1440 50% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern \.jpg 1440 50% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern \.tif 4320 50% 43200 refresh_pattern \.png 1440 50% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern \.jpeg 1440 50% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern ^http://*.google.*/.* 720 100% 4320 # refresh patterns to enable caching of MS windows update refresh_pattern windowsupdate\.microsoft\.com/.*\.(cab|exe|psf) 4320 100% 120960 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern update\.microsoft\.com/.*\.(cab|exe|psf) 4320 100% 120960 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern office\.microsoft\.com/.*\.(cab|exe|psf) 4320 100% 120960 refresh_pattern windowsupdate\.com/.*\.(cab|exe|psf) 4320 100% 120960 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern download\.microsoft\.com/.*\.(cab|exe|psf) 4320 100% 120960 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern microsoft\.com 4320 100% 10080 pipeline_prefetch on # Apache mod_gzip and mod_deflate known to be broken so don't trust # Apache to signal ETag correctly on such responses acl apache rep_header Server ^Apache broken_vary_encoding allow apache # Leave coredumps in the first cache dir coredump_dir /opt/var/squid/cache # Disable cachemgr password cachemgr_passwd none all

     

  3. Take note from my above config, that I chose a cache-size of 20(!) GB (cache_dir).
  4. Validate your Squid configuration with squid -k parse
  5. Create the Squid cache-directories with squid -z
  6. Start Squid manually to check for errors: squid -NCd1
  7. Create a symbolic link so that Squid starts automatically: ln -s /opt/etc/init.d/S80squid /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/
  8. Once you restart the NAS, Squid should be started automatically (log files are in /opt/var/squid/logs)

Dummy error: Happened to me – if Squid starts and you don’t notice any improvements in browsing speed, make sure that you have your browser’s proxy settings adjusted :oops:

IMPORTANT: As I have the caching server within a DMZ/Firewall, security-concerns are secondary. All users having access to the LAN and fall within the IP-range will automatically have access to the caching-proxy. The implementation of Squid was for improving the browsing/web-experience (speed has improved by almost 200% and average bandwidth consumption dropped by 30%).
Continue reading “NAS: Create your own caching proxy” »

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OSX: Garmin Roadtrip released

Posted by on September 17, 2008 No comments

Formerly known as Garmin Bobcat, Garmin has now released RoadTrip.

  • RoadTrip allows you to transfer waypoints, tracks, and routes between your Mac and Garmin device and manage your data using your Garmin maps.
  • RoadTrip provides the ability to search for points of interest from the convenience of your Mac and then send the locations to your Garmin GPS.
  • MapManager copies maps and unlock codes into the right place to be accessible by RoadTrip and MapInstall. To migrate the maps from your Windows PC, download MapConverter onto your PC and follow the instructions.
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PS3: Sony give us our own server

Posted by on September 12, 2008 No comments

There we are, a 2000 member strong PS3 community, with an average of 2000-3000 PS3 selling in South Africa per month, but Sony refuses to provide us with a dedicated regional server for online gaming and purchasing content. It is simply not enough to make the PSN-store display the currency in Rand.

All online gaming occurs through European servers and results in a mediocre gaming experience for South African gamers. A local network would ensure that gamers in South Africa can download not just the necessary updates, but also purchase downloadable content through (faster) local bandwidth. – At the moment we hardly buy games online, as bandwidth costs makes a downloadable game almost twice as expensive than buying it from a store.

It would further mean that residents would only have to purchase local bandwidth, which is considerably less than that of international. At present, we are at a huge disadvantage when playing online, as there is visible lag when playing certain games, as well as extended download times.

Local would speed up download times, as well as provide a level playing field while playing online. SO SONY – STOP TAKING JUST OUR MONEY — GIVE US SOMETHING BACK…. SUCH AS…. OUR OWN REGIONAL SERVER

If you want to support this initiative or respond to our pledge, please VISIT OUR FORUM HERE AND VOTE.

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The Friday Picture: Knowledge

Posted by on September 12, 2008 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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