Tag Archives: rants

hetzner.de hardware policies

by R.I. Pienaar on 24. Aug, 2009 in Rantings

So I use Hetzner a lot for my machines, I’ve about 10 to 15 of their machines now across various clients and am mostly quite happy with them.  They provide a service that matches the price – ie. good enough.

One area of their service though really grates me, they give you old machines, when those machines fail they replace them with other old machines similarly for drives etc.

On more than one occasion now have I had hard drives fail only to see them replaced with other shitty drives.  Each time they claim the drives are well tested and each time they pull the old ‘it could be the cable’ trick and then replace the machine and the drive.

Since this has happened to me every single time I’ve changed a disk so far I have to wonder if this is everyones experience? 

From where I sit its simple.  They made a choice to take out drives reported broken by someone, they then test it and put it back when their tests fail to find any problem, they do this to save them money knowing full well that drives will fail and all they’re doing is shifting the risk onto their clients, while the clients keep subsidizing their expansion. 

So given this is the quality of service they’re aiming at, surely once this policy bites a good long standing user offering some kind of payback for the inconvenience would be good business practice?  Apparently not.

This is pretty poor, even after complaining to them they swapped my chassis and again put a disk with > 6000 hours under its belt in my machine.

So I guess you need to be pretty sure your softraids are setup properly when you want to use this company, their support stand is clear:

I’m sorry but we don’t promise anywhere that we built always new hardware into our servers. I can only ensure you that all hardware is always well tested and without any problem before we build it into a server.

Ie., screw you, we don’t care for any evidence and repeated failures, and we take zero responsibility for our equipment, we’ll just keep taking your money.

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WIRED UK

by R.I. Pienaar on 02. Apr, 2009 in Rantings

I was quite excited about the new UK edition Wired.  I’m not anymore.

I got my first exposure to the Wired while in school in South Africa, I think the ones we got were months behind the time and stupidly expensive, but hey we had no internet so it all seemed awesomely futuristic and ahead of its time.

The thing though that always stuck in my mind about the US edition Wired were the ads, I can clearly remember ads for Harleys, or weird american Fugly cars, even from the editions I read back in school, the ads were of products we never saw in South Africa, they were kewl, done in a style unlike anything we saw there and all just seemed so, idylic.

Fast forward a few decades, I still buy the US Wired now and then, and I still only remember the ads?  Few months ago I bought one, I can clearly remember the ads for Dexter and Californication, but can’t really say much about the magazine content otherwise, eventhough I read it end to end and felt interested, even drawn to it at the time.  I recall something about malware peddlers? who knows.

Why is that from a magazine that costs 6 pounds I don’t remember anything of substance other than the ads? It’s because they were different from what I see on the tube, in the cinema, on the tv, on the billboards, they were off far-off kewlness.

Enter Wired UK.  The editorial content is still pretty shoddy, the signal to noise ratio is still shockingly poor for a £3.90 magazine literally filled to the brim with ads, except, now they’re the same shitty ads I see on the Tube, Train, Cinema and TV.

I read the whole thing, a day on I remember some vague predictions – one prediction sticks to mind, male birth control only around 2021? I dont think so – but mostly I remember how the ads pissed me off as instead of interesting, they’re just dominating and a reminder that I paid too much for something whose main purpose clearly is to sell ads.

I’d pay £12/month for a Wired UK without the ads, someone need to develop Tivo for paper.

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Warranty service compared

by R.I. Pienaar on 19. Mar, 2009 in Rantings

I had a thought recently when dealing with Apple and Microsoft on warranty fixes just how different things are, thought I’d sum up my experiences here:

Dell
I had a 15 inch Dell laptop, 3 year extended on-site warranty that I purchased to cover any issues.  During the time I had the laptop it all worked well except the battery died after about 2 years. 

Contacted Dell about this, they pointed out batteries are consumables and so not covered, that was expected.  The kicker though was that I couldn’t even buy a new battery from them because since they only covered batteries for the 1st year, and the machines has been off the production lines for more than a year they simply stopped making them.

2 year old laptop, 1 year left on it’s warranty and it was useless, awesome.

Microsoft
My Xbox 360 is showing the dreaded 3 red lights of death, Microsoft has admitted the problem and offers a 3 year extended warranty for this problem.  I went to their site, saw I can book the machine in online for fixing, after filling everything in the page said it’s not available in my country, contact support.

Contact support, tell them the problem and clearly point out I have filled in the form and that I am in the UK and thus not covered by the service offered by the form.  Support droid points me back to the same support page, but warning me that its not covered in all countries and that I should contact them if I am not covered. 

I’ve gone through this little circle jerk 4 times now, each time with the same circular logic applied by the drones, I’m about to just towel fix the 360 or upgrade to a 360 Elite.

Apple
I have a black 1.5 year old macbook, it’s pretty sweet but so far I’ve had a HDD and a battery die on me.  It too is on 3 year extended warranty.

The HDD dying was inconvenient, I had to book in with a Genius but they swapped it witout question or cost, I just had to reinstall my stuff – easily done with time machine.  I walk past an Apple Temple daily so no biggie there, they kept to their time schedules and the booking went smooth as can be, 3 days later my macbook was fixed.

When the battery died they first said its a consumable and not covered, I pointed out it died suddenly and not gradually and so it must be a fault rather than consumption.  They posted free of charge a new battery, and paid for the old one to go back.  The next battery arrived the next day without fault.

So all things considered, so far the Apple tax has proven a absolute bargain to me.

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Cogent

by R.I. Pienaar on 19. Jan, 2009 in Rantings

I’ve not posted here for a while, been insanely busy but today those lovely people at Cogent kicked me out of my blogging slumber with a shocking display that I simply had to share.

Cogent for those who do not know is a very large Tier 1 ISP, known mostly for many disputes with other ISPs about peering, it has become so bad that in the UK at least they are basically a complete no-go zone for anyone. 

I’ve previously delt with Cogent when a client signed up for a few mbit of Cogent bandwidth on the basis of a £5/mbit pricing structure, they soon realised that you get what you pay for.  Even between racks in the same Data Center you could not reach each other without first hopping over to Europe.  I’ve attempted to resolve this at the time with Cogent and the other ISPs and  both confirmed that it is essentially a waste of time.  Cogent said they can’t speak to the ISP in question since most of the UK ISP industry can’t stand them.  The other ISP basically laughed out loud about being ‘suckered’ into buying Cogent bandwidth.

This is confirmed elsewhere, search the Renesys Blog for Cogent and you’ll find a lot of information about Cogent, mostly bad news.  From an article on their blog about Cogent in the UK you will see this:

Firstly, Cogent has a fairly serious Europe problem right now. They
have been aggressively attacking the European market for a few years
now and making some solid headway. They bought a couple of carriers
(Lambdanet Spain and France, Carrier1 in Germany among them), ruthlessly
integrated them and then proceeded to undersell the market by a factor
of 50-80%. This has made them many enemies.

As a result of this approach to business, Cogent has much less
effective peering in Europe than do many of its larger competitors.
Most of the European PTTs refuse to peer with Cogent anywhere on the
European continent. Recently, some large US carriers (among them
Level (3) ) seem to have adopted a similar approach. This means that
when Cogent sells capacity in Europe, it is forced to drag that
traffic back to the US to hand it off to its peers here. Of course
that means that if the ultimate destination is European, the traffic
has to travel back. This is a burden on both Cogent and the European
carrier and, of course, the customers on both sides. But it’s
unlikely to change because of just how much hate there is for Cogent
among European networkers.

This basically confirms my experience with Cogent and those of many I have spoken too.  As such if you choose to support Cogent you will basically be forced to:

  • Buy a lot of other bandwidth since if you’re hoping to serve UK customers, Cogent is a terrible sole carrier to have
  • You will need to invest in extra hardware, extra admin time, extra complex routing infrastructure and additional overhead on your teams
  • You will forever be at the mercy of everyone who hates Cogent, you will find your self randomly falling off the internet, randomly de-peering with vast swaths of the internet and basically the whole thing will be a pain in the behind.

For these reasons, everyone who I know with Cogent bandwidth use them as last resort backup carriers, they are cheap and basically shit, but ok enough to use as a backup when everything else failed.

Over the last few years Cogent has contacted me direct via email to attempt to sell their wares, always the threads end withe me saying something along these lines:

Furthermore we’d prefer to use companies who do not directly
contact us with marketing material, please remove us from your lists
for future contact.

Today again one of my clients got a mention on Techcrunch which resulted in more spam from Cogent, again to an email address totally unrelated to my business activities, not listed in whois records for the client or anything like that.  The sales person even had the nerve to copy the email that the above quote is from in his mail to me asking if I can have a conference with him.

My response was the usual, no we don’t deal with spammers, you were told to leave us alone now please stop bothering us.  Which resulted in an amazingly pushy email from the sales person, quoted below:

No doubt that writing when being asked not to is, well, borderline. That
said, it is both of our responsibilities to make sure that all options
are explored. You need to confirm that you are aware of all vendors
information, and mine includes getting it out there. 

.

.

Admittedly, this is difficult to resolve via email. However, if I didn’t
think that we could compliment your service, I wouldn’t persist.

This is just amazing, this person really think he can presume to tell me what my responsibilities are, what I need to do, and that I have to indulge his blatant b/s.

After I again pointed out that they were asked to stop mailing me and I pointed out that they were using a private email address held by a UK citizen and as such under the data protection laws they need to stop contacting me when asked, they once again mailed me demanding further information about my customers.  They really are on par with simple Viagra spammers.

Does anyone really think this kind of heavy handed tactic gets them business?

The worst part of it is the ISP who currently provide a large part of our b/w are Cogent customers, Cogent Sales people do not think twice to approach clients of their clients and try to undercut them – effectively trying to steal their customers business away from them. 

Why would any business support such a company?  I would not, I would effectively be negligent in my duties to my clients to ever recommend these clowns for anything since they are just a nightmare waiting to happen.

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Layeredtech’s thanks to old customers

by R.I. Pienaar on 01. Oct, 2008 in Front Page, Rantings

I have been a customer of Layeredtech for years, at present I have only 2 machines there but at times I’ve had 7 or 8.  My one machine is pretty old, I think I got it circa 2002 or so and it’s been doing well, same hardware etc.

Yesterday I received the following email from them:

Layered Tech is committed to being the leader of the Hosted
Infrastructure market by providing our customers with the best products
backed by the best service.  In an effort to improve our customer
experience, we have determined that a small number of existing servers
will need to be relocated from their current data center.  As you are
receiving this message, we have identified that you have one or more
servers in the in area of the Savvis facility that will need to be
moved.  It is our intention to minimize any interruption in service and
we will do our best to work within predetermined time frames that are
convenient to you.

Due to the form factor (chassis type) of
this server, we will need to migrate your data to a new server. We will
work with you so that the impact is as minimal as possible.  

Below
are the servers that are affected by this migration.  Please respond to
this message acknowledging the need to relocate your server(s).  At
that point, we will move this ticket to our Operations Department where
we will work with you on a migration schedule.

From reading this you might assume they will assist you with the migrate and this is a notice of an impending change, perhaps a month or two from now?

In reality the situation is that no, they will not help you migrate your data.  They want you to take out a contract for a new machine and then migrate your data yourself – something which even at best will take 5 to 10 hours on oldish machines like this.

They do not offer any compensation, and when pressed on that point only offer 1 month…the cherry on the cake is that all this has to be done for 18 days from now, in effect they are terminating your old machine forcing you to take a new one and doing it with less than the agreed 30 days notice.  Like it or not.

The sales person who has been coordinating this from their side is incredibly unhelpful and frankly useless, only after much pushing back by me do I even get a hint that anything other than do-it-yourself migration is an option, at this point still waiting for details.

This kind of disregard for customers is typical of large hosting centres, they have thousands of customers and their hard handed handling of their customers is acceptable because at worse they’ll loose a fraction of a percentage of customers, so being unhelpful really does pay off for them since most people will probably just take this crap.

This is shockingly poor service, if you value your data, avoid Layeredtech.

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Nasty PHP Authentication Handling

by R.I. Pienaar on 18. Mar, 2008 in Code, Front Page, Rantings

Sometimes you come across things that just make you wonder what is going on in peoples minds.

For years everyone who wrote applications compatible with the standard HTTP Authentication method has used the REMOTE_USER server variable as set by Apache to check the username that was logged in by the webserver, this has worked well for everyone, CGI’s and all would just grab it there and everyone would be happy.

Along comes PHP and they make great big mess of it, PHP suggests that we use $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] instead, and they give some good reasons for this too, except they have severely crippled this for all but Basic and Digest authentication, the following code from main/main.c


        if (auth && auth[0] != ‘\0′ && strncmp(auth, “Basic “, 6) == 0) {
                char *pass;
                char *user;

                user = php_base64_decode(auth + 6, strlen(auth) – 6, NULL);
                if (user) {
                        pass = strchr(user, ‘:’);
                        if (pass) {
                                *pass++ = ‘\0′;
                                SG(request_info).auth_user = user;
                                SG(request_info).auth_password = estrdup(pass);
                                ret = 0;
                        } else {
                                efree(user);
                        }
                }
        }

As you can see above, they only import the user and pass from Apache if the AuthType is Basic, this makes no sense at all.  Why not just check with Apache, if it set the username then import it? Surely Apache know if a user has authenticated? Ditto for password.  It is so broken in fact that PHP in CGI mode also doesn’t work since those headers don’t get set for that either, countless comments and nasty hacks can be found in the PHP user contributed notes about this, but it is all just sillyness.

The reason this is annoying me is that I have written a Single Singon system in PHP, you can host a identity server on any domain and hook any site in any other domain into the SSO system, its a bit like TypeKey

Of course it’s nice to have a easy to use SSO system in PHP but what is the point if you can’t make legacy apps like Nagios, Cacti, RT etc play along with the SSO?  So to solve this I extended Apache::AuthCookie with a new mod_perl module that plugs into Apache and does authentication using my SSO and a small bit of glue that you put on your RT/Cacti/Nagios box.

All’s great, I have SSO to Nagios, RT and countless other things working flawlessly, except of course Cacti because it’s written along the lines of the PHP manual, uses PHP_AUTH_USER instead of REMOTE_USER and so my new fancy AuthType in Apache does not work with Cacti.   As it turns out its a quick 2 liner fix in the Cacti code but you would think PHP would be a bit more generic in this regard since as it stands now I think a lot of people who want to do SSO using hardware tokens and such have issues with PHP being silly.

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Ubuntu is great.

by R.I. Pienaar on 26. Jul, 2006 in Rantings

So world and dog is nagging on about Ubuntu, how great it is and how they are switching from <insert anything on the planet> to Ubuntu.
I happened to have a spare 300gig drive lying around so I gave 6.06 a go. My machine is over 2 years old, its practically from the ark, you’d expect things to Just Work.
After install, screen resolution is absolutely dismal, slow refresh rate and random crashes while trying to set to a better resolutoin. Already here you’ve lost a large chunk of users.
Anyway, so I go off looking on Google using Firefox, it opens up with the familiar look of Firefox complete with Mycroft search box, except the search box does nothing by default, you can type into it, hit enter but nothing happens, by default it doesn’t search, have to go fiddle with it to get it working.
Came across a post, that points to another post that points to Wiki for getting ATI cards going. I basically had to do this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

and then reboot.
Yes, this distro is going places if it can’t even support a crap old ATI Radeon card out of the box and require new users to do stuff in terminals just to get rid of a headache inducing low refresh rate.
Get Real, your grandmother is not going to do this. Give her a Mac and the thing just works.

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Podcasts and Video Podcasts

by R.I. Pienaar on 29. Jan, 2006 in Rantings

Podcasting is all the rage these days and I can see why, there are some really good stuff out there, at the moment I really enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast. Mostly its 3 guys talking absolute bollocks while being pretty funny about it, incredibly mindless fun.
On the video casting side there isn’t as much that I enjoy though I’ve only really checked into 4 or 5 shows. Now everyone seems to think that this is the future of entertainment, independent guys making tv shows or radio shows bypassing all the networks, syndicates and all that crap. I can see the value in that argument as well and for most of the videocasts this holds true, short, focussed niche type shows that you either enjoy or don’t and it’s very easy to just move on to the next thing.
One show though stands out to me in it’s incredible level of annoyance and outright insulting of its viewer base and that is the Photoshop TV show. Now this show has received a lot of raves in the past and this is the 2nd time I tried to watch it. The Photoshop related content is great, the tutorials are at many levels from beginner to advanced and the guys know their stuff, they’re a bit keyboard shortcut happy which makes it hard for people to know how what they are doing relates to the tons of Photoshop menus but that not the end of the world.
So what’s the problem? Like all of the podcast world they obviously have massive bandwidth bills to pay and they do this by promoting a number of sponsors, nothing wrong with that at all. The problem though is that the signal/noise ratio of the show is off the scales. As a little investigation I took their latest show and cut out all the advertising related content but leaving their inane chatter in. I was left with 2/3 of the 30 minute show. Cut out the chatter, startup jingle, ending jingle, competitions etc and you end up with less than 1/2 of the 30 minutes.
Apart from the signal/noise ratio they are obviously trying hard to look professional in the editing together of the show, things flow nicely into each other and so forth. Problem again is that the continuity of the thing is just crap. Person A hands Person B a PowerBook to do a Demo on, screen movie shows a XP box. Person B is done with the presentation and he is stood with a Windows Laptop in-front of him. Why? Why do they need to go and do silly things like that just put the box you’re going to use in-front of you and get it over with, don’t show of Apple kit cos it’s sexy or is this just another product placement deal?
Each week they give viewers some kind of homework assignment to review websites etc, well this week there were 3 websites – one from each presenter. The 2nd recommended website was from a training center where the person recommending it is teaching a class. The 3rd one was a recommendation of the website for one of their sponsors! Immediately followed by a ad for the particular sponsor as well. During the show the one guy was constantly pushing a book he wrote, giving copies away telling you to buy it, where to buy it etc. Shameless self promotion.
So I left a quick comment on their blog, something along the lines of:

The photoshop content of the show is great, pity its spoiled by the 1/3 advertising content, not even the worst of TV shows are that bad with advertising.

Naturally they didn’t approve my comment and it never showed up, nice one. I’d love to see how far television would get if for a hour show you end up with this level of absolute noise? The slashdot/digg crowd always go on a total freak out about the likes of Tivo moving towards not letting them skip over ads but then they stand for much worse from this grass roots tech that is supposed to save the video/audio entertainment world? I’m not sold.

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Friends don’t let friends use Feedster

Friends don’t let friends use Feedster

by R.I. Pienaar on 03. Nov, 2005 in Rantings

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while know that I’ve got no time for Feedster and don’t mind saying so. My previous posts on this sad sad service:

So why do I rehash all this again now? Because if you look at those entries you’ll always see someone from Feedster post about how they’re improving, how I shouldn’t give up on them etc, but really it’s all just talk.
Tonight while trying to figure out why BSDUpdates is down I tried a Google blogs search but found little recent info, so I figured I’ll give Feedster another try, big mistake.
It also had very little useful content so I’m inclined to think people just don’t blog about BSDUpdates – fair enough. The problem is though Feedster is still broken!
First I do a search for ‘bsdupdates’ using the main feedster page, that went well and I found some stuff, then I tried the blog search button which will restrict the search to just blog posts. First there is the fact that the user experience is crap, if you do a Google search for whatever and click on one of the other search modes – like Images – it will know you searched for whatever and show you results immediately. Not feedster, no way, you have to just type your query in again.
So I type it in again, and get a page full of result, it looks like the screenshot below, all good so far.


See, next page, more results, all good there is hope for finding something useful, so I press on the next button.

Wtf? Maintenance? Seems more like their default internal server error page is claiming every problem is Maintenance related because this is not the first time I’ve seen it, and I don’t use this service often. It’s a bit like when the Underground in London says something is ‘Signal Failure’ it’s just something they say. The real problem seems to be database related.
So back a page, reload, do the search again which gives me (immediately, right in the middle of their ‘maintenance’ no less) a page similar to the first one. Try the next button again to get the promised more results:

And there it is, nothing, empty page, no results. Complete. Waste. Of. Time.
If you are still using Feedster you really should be doing yourself a favor and jump ship. There are a number of competitors, I can’t even list them all but here are some: Clusty, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, Daypop, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! and many more. Natural selection on the internet is a great thing, Feedster had a chance to do it right but they didn’t. The big boys will run over them, rejoice.

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Movie Classifications

by R.I. Pienaar on 05. Jun, 2005 in Front Page

I’m always intrigued by the classifications of movies on the websites of cinemas here, you can almost use them to decide what to see never mind the titles of the movies.
From the movies currently showing at my local cinema:
Contains strong bloody violence
Contains moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes
Contains mild bad language
Contains strong language, horror and violence
Contains very strong language and drug use
Contains strong bloody violence
Contains moderate language and sex references
Contains moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes
Contains mild comic action violence
Contains one scene of drug use
All the ‘strong bloody violence’ movies are on my list of movies to watch, great.

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