69mb

See part one & two.

So far things things are running smoothly. I’ve been able to complete a system update of about 200 megs,  pull down my podcasts (~70megs every other day), I’m getting at least 256Kbps for local traffic and the general browsing experience, though not spectacular, is comfortable. This is what a relatively busy day on the link looks like: 

I also got the 30 day subscription for 2,900/- through  MyISP. Compared to what’s on offer in the market, 2,900/- is  a heck of bargain given the service quality.    

 On reliability. The thing has been down thrice in the past two weeks: both Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evening last week.  I didn’t try calling for support but next time it happens I’ll give it a try and see how that goes.

Security. I’ve noticed that someone has been port scanning me but its nothing a good shorewall config can’t handle. I just drop all traffic initiated from the Butterfly end.

There is a discussion over at Slashdot on whether AMD as a company is dead in the water as predicted by by IBM 5 years ago. The consensus is no and is aptly captured by the following comment:

AMD is a picture of a tall (6.5 feet), lean, kenyan man, whose stamina, endurance make him take the 15 mile marathon easily without breaking a sweat.

Link 

February 17th marked 6 months since I went mac. I’m not going to get into the reasons behind my switch since I find this to be very subjective. Just go with whatever. Software I’m using is all I want to put here.

OS - Tiger (hope to go Leopard soon. I really need the virtual desktops) 

Web browser - Safari (for normal browsing), Firefox (for development) 

IM - Adium, Skype

IRC - Colloquy

Media - iTunes, VLC 

Photos - iPhoto

IDE - Eclipse

Office Suite - Mac Office 2008 (I have to admit that M$ got something right with office)

PDA Sync -  Missing Sync (yah yah I know, windows mobile )

Virtualization - VMWare Fusion 

 What are you using on your mac? 

Podcasts are a really nice way to make use of that idle time when standing in those ubiquitous queues, waiting for an appointment, when on the commute…

The BBC World Service have a really nice podcast of their documentaries covering various current affairs topics. These two I found  especially interesting since they are about Kenya and give some insight into the post election violence.

This week’s Assignment reports on the post election violence in Kenya which has claimed the lives of up to 900 people.  The opposition claim that the poll was rigged and the violence, which began in Western Kenya, has  spread to other parts of the country. Pascale Harter travelled to the town of Eldoret in western Kenya to trace the roots of the tribal violence that has pitted neighbour against neighbour.

Link

In this four part series, Mike Wooldridge looks at what it’s really like to have to live on one dollar a day. The first programme focuses on Kenya.  

Link

See part one here.

Figured out what was causing downloads to timeout after 2-3 minutes and sorted it out. To understand what the problem was, it is important to understand one aspect of the login process.

When you fire up your browser, you get automatically redirected to their portal page where you can select your login method: isp account, scratch card… Until you login successfully, you get short dhcp leases of ~2-3 minutes. I’ve been using the 200/- scratch cards which give me 12hrs of access and when I login, I get a dhcp lease of 12hrs. They also use these leases to disconnect you when your time is up.

What was causing me to get disconnected ever 3 minutes or so was that the linux box was the one acquiring an ip address via dhcp and it had a different mac address from that of the wireless interface of the ap which is the mac address that was visible on the Butterfly network. So even after logging in successfully on their portal, I wasn’t getting the 12hr lease and thus the disconnects every 3 minutes. To sort out this issue, I just set the mac address of the wireless interface to match that of inteface on the linux box and that was that. Doing the revers i.e. changing the mac address on the linux box to match the one on the ap’s wireless interface would not work since the wireless and lan interface mac addresses on the ap were the same.

Changing the mac address on the AP happened by fluke. I’d figured out that the AP is an atheros based device which is supported by the OpenWrt project, and I was already compiling the firmware(figured I need to get linux to change the mac), when I accidentally stumbled onto the factory menu in its telnet interface and found a command for changing the mac addresses. 

I was just typing random commands hoping(rather half heartedly) I could get some engineering menu and when I typed “admin”, I was prompted for a password and after a couple of attempts(1234, password…), I got in with password “atheros”. The command for changing the mac address once in the factory menu is “netifMac”.

Now I’m able to sustain downloads. I’ve tested by downloading the 45mb linux kernel from kernel.org and that came without any hitches. Download came down at ~13KB/s which is 128KB/s net speed. Below is are speed test results form testmy.net:

 Something else I realized over the weekend is that I was getting really fast speeds for local traffic. I was able to apt-get packages onto my linux box @131KB/s (1 Megabit) from the skunkworks mirror!  

AOB: Looks like I’m not the only one who has found it difficult to get the scratch cards. Many of the dealers listed on their portal page(at least the ones I’ve called so far) are no longer selling them. I’ve had to go to the KDN offices on Mombasa road to get them.

EDITED TO ADD: I could have sworn I had published this post. Anyway, it has something to do with the wp-database-backup plugin because it was doing a dump when I published this last night.  

As part of my search for a new provider, I tried a wifi isp(lets call them WISP) but that turned out to be another nasty experience on its own since I happen to be 1 kilometre away from their base station. I had invested in an outdoor access point which is sitting on a pole on the roof and it had been mostly idle till now.

The access point is a level one wap-1001. For some time I couldn’t get onto the Butterfly network despite their mast being ~70m away and in direct line of site. Someone at WISP had tried an unclean firmware upgrade on the wap-1001 which brought with it all sorts of strange behaviour. Downgrading to version 1.70 sorted things out. I can only use Butterfly if I have the ap in wireless client mode. Wireless repeater doesn’t work at all.

I’m sharing the connection on my network through a debian linux box with two network cards. One card is connected directly to ap, and the other to my lan. I have shorewall on the box and just plain old nat.

 Firing up my browser takes me to the butterfly portal page where I’m logging in using scratch cards. 200/- gives me 12 hours of access. There are options for isp accounts and I’ve been told kdn are offering monthly subscription for 2,900/-.

Initial impressions are good. Speeds are in the 128Kb/s range, no page timeouts, ssh to servers in the uk is good and no choppy sounds on skype(actually the skype call quality is fantastic).

One problem I’ve identified so far is that I’m unable to sustain downloads for long. For instance, when pulling down a 3meg file,  I get a timeout after a couple of minutes. I’m not sure whether this is a retarded AFOL-like move or just an artefact of the wifi. 

I’ll like to evaluate it for a couple of weeks then post a more comprehensive review but so far, I can give it a thumbs up. 

I’ve been mostly offline since September last year. Ok, I have Internet access at work or I could just go to a cyber or a wifi hotspot but its just not the same. I want access from the comfort of my home. I don’t expect much knowing full well that international bandwidth costs are freakishingly expensive. In fact all I want is that the link be usable and always up when I need it. Africa Online’s iBurst service, Infinet, fulfilled both of my key metrics, for some time.

iBurst 

It was August last year that I noticed some strange things. I would be surfing ok(the normal stuff, mail, feeds, pdfs) for some time then things would get so slow that even gmail wouldn’t open. I was certain it wasn’t signal strength since I had invested in the external antenna (after being with afol for some time I assumed this was going to be a veeerrryyy long realtionship) a couple of months earlier and their webmail was opening ok. I was getting 384kb/s speeds easy on their webmail; they give 3x speed for this. No one in the house was torrenting or doing large downloads either.I had not been using the link much for a few months but the other people in the house had been complaining about speed and I’d just assumed they’re expecting real broadband. So when I sat down for the first time and saw it for myself, I was stumped. I didn’t have the customer care number since I hardly and probably never even called them in the whole of 2007 and since the net was incredulously slow, I had no way to pull down the number from their website. Next day I saved the number on my phone and when I got home and the problem showed up again I got customer support on the line pronto.

Customer support was a complete waste of farking time. I got all sort of answers from “I need to carry out some tests” to “you need to get an external antenna”. Basically I was being bounced around until finally in the last week of August, fed up with the games, I refused to take any more b.s. answers from the guys and demanded to know what was happening. What came out was the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.

It turned out, AFOL had some new policy in place. Customers who have downloads lasting for 20 minutes or more get caught by some system that slows down the entire link and it would remain slow for somewhere between 30mins - 3hrs.  This explains why when I would try to update my debian box of the skunkworks mirror(this is on the kixp so it is free bandwidth people) it would start off by maxing out my connection at 16KB/s and then eventually slow down to 200B/s or even timeout.On learning this I quickly checked every single document I put my signature to and the only thing that came close was their Fair Use Policy but that only affects users who are doing P2P, spamming or have worm infected computers and I fell in none of those categories. 

Last Friday of August 2007, I get a call at work. They guys can’t get to the net. The modem shows there is a signal but nothing (BTW, this was also happening a lot and it was some how related to the new policy). I call up the customer support guys, make some noise and the link is up within minutes(wth). After this I call my account manager and basically tell her that I am fed up with the shit they are pulling and if AFOL can no longer give me the service I’m paying for I want the account closed immediately. I got assurances that the problem was solved and they would send some people on Monday to check stuff out.

Weekend came and the problem was still there. That was the last straw. I just opened my mail, told the AFOL guys to close the damned account since they were no longer providing the serviced I had *signed* up for and was *paying* for. That was that and AFOL got into my personal blacklist of companies I will never deal with personally and professionaly again.

RIP Africa Online iBurst August 06′ - August 07′ 

The Long Road 

Initially I had intended for this post to be about the search for a new provider, and I have been to most of them, what is out there and just a brief background on what happened with AFOL but I guess I just had to get that out first. 

That bit about the search I’ll fork out into the next post. Later People.