soledad penadés

My laptop is running Mac OS X 10.5.7 –i.e., the seventh revision of their overhyped operating system– and Apple still doesn’t know how to deal with network issues properly. If it’s not the dreaded “Your wireless network has been compromised” error, it will be this new and absurd behaviour: you close your laptop’s lid, leave it to sleep, come back the next day, open the lid again and… surprise! the laptop is unable to reconnect to the same network it was connected to some hours before! The only explanation: Connection timeout, once and once again.

As you may easily deduct, there haven’t been any changes at all to my router’s configuration, so with all other factors remaining the same, why should it stop working?

Searching for answers to that question unveils a crazy painting spattered everywhere with mystifying cargo-cult affirmations. First comes the number one mac-advice:  repairing permissions, which seems to be the magic fix-it-all for all mac-pains (although it doesn’t seem to be related to anything else than applications which are not properly installed). There’s also the classic it’s not me, it’s you argument, also known as it’s probably a fault in your router’s configuration, and that, as expected when trying to give subjective explanations to an objective fact, can be translated to a myriad of reasons:

• you’re using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 } but you should be using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 }
• you need to update your router’s firmware
• you need to select a different wifi channel
• your router is incompatible with your computer
• you need to reset your router’s and computer’s configuration and start anew

Obviously all of them are useless, since the fault is not in the router but in the computer itself, miserably unable to rejoin the very same network it was using before going to sleep.

However, since cargo cult is so tempting, solutions multiply, like loaves and fishes. No one seems rational, and worse of all, you feel like there’s nothing else you can do but surrender and try them all, or at least consider them for a second — such is the absurdity of the Mac world:

• You can’t have Bluetooth activated at the same time than an Airport card. “Then I will need to sacrifice my wireless mighty mouse”, argues another person whose mac doesn’t behave as expected. But Jobs sayeth: “in life, thou shalt need to make choices, painful as they are”.
• You need to archive and reinstall
• Or even worse: you need to start from scratch, and reinstall Leopard in an empty disk
• You need to create a new user, log in with that account and then try to connect to the wireless network, to discard it’s not a problem with the former user account (like if the router had developed a certain animadversion to that user)
• You need to activate and deactivate Airport (probably inherited from Windows)
• You need to open Keychain Utility, delete every appearance of your Network passwords, log out and try again
• Same but restart and try again (very Windows style)
• You need to remove some arcane com.apple.* property lists from the /Library/Preferences folder. Oh wait, or was it in ~/Library/Preferences? Never mind, log out, or restart, and try again.
• You need to make sure that System Preferences.app is in the /Applications folder (I would have thought that the main point of bundles was to be able to have apps wherever one wanted to place them, but if this one is true, it would prove another of their magic features false)
• Then there’s the most bizarre solution of all: open Safari and type in your favourite address. Since the computer is not connected to any network, it will suggest you to run the Network diagnostics utility. Then select Airport, and choose your favourite network name, and it might connect. In fact, I tried this one, and it “worked”, but just once, and I think it was just a coincidence, because the next time I tried, following the very same sequence of steps, it didn’t work again.

And it’s not like my computer’s hardware is new  and the drivers aren’t totally fine tuned yet (Apple is well known by the unreliability of the first versions of each computer model). It is a 2005 PowerBook, which is one of the last models in that family of products, before they got replaced with the MacBookPro. I would expect Apple to know an awful lot about their own hardware — after all, that’s their whole selling point: since we are the ones that build and program it, It Just Works™.

But they don’t seem to know that much (maybe their China assemblers are keeping some juicy bits to themselves), and it just doesn’t work.

Much to my dislike, there’s still some software which doesn’t work yet with Linux, either natively or using the fabulous Wine, so for those cases where I still need to use win32 software, I use VirtualBox and a virtual machine running Windows XP.

My copy of XP is registered; I payed for it simply to avoid getting all those annoying warnings and various disgusting issues one can run into when using a pirated version of XP.

But still I get this idiotic update from time to time:

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

Do they mean that this already genuine copy is going to turn into non genuine, just like that? Ta-daaaaaaaaaa! today I’m genuine, tomorrow I’m not? surprise! And that’s why they need to check every month? Didn’t they check the first time I entered my serial number?

Most probably they fear someone buying a license and then installing it in several other computers, but this way of fighting their fear is stupid. Just leave alone the nice chaps that installed and registered this weapon of mass destruction and go annoy people who haven’t completed your verification process or however it is called at this time.

Whenever someone asks me why I don’t want to use Windows again unless it’s caged on a (virtual) box, I’m so going to refer them to this!

2004: Bulldog

When we moved to our first flat, we signed up for a DSL connection with Bulldog. It was really good: reliable connection, the corporate image was quite decent, and the online clients area (the lounge, as they called it) was usable.

Since then, several disastrous things happened with Bulldog. It was first sold by Cable and Wireless (its parent company) to Pipex, a company whose business was internet hosting. They then began to apply throttling to secure (encrypted) connections like https, scp, ssh, etc, and speed capping if you used a certain amount of bandwidth. But it could get even worse: pipex’s broadband division was then acquired by Tiscali, which is close to saying that our broadband service was provided by one of those crappy y2k web 1.0 portal companies.

We hadn’t sign up for anything like that, so we decided we would change to a new provider.

November 2008: the month of emails

So I sent an email to pipex customer care, asking them for information in order to migrate from pipex to a different phone and broadband company. We had a long exchange of e-mails which led me to believe that pipex’s internals were way worse that anything I could ever think of. Each e-mail was replied by a different person, at horrible hours in the night like 3 or 4 AM, and apparently didn’t bother to read or understand the full history of the ticket, so I had to repeat myself several times. Probably the customer care service was located somewhere where our 3 AM is their office hours.

At the end of that useless thread they said they would send me my MAC by post. Now for the non UK residents, it’s not that they had kidnapped my powerbook, but they were going to send me a number which I would give to my next broadband provider so that they could complete the migration.

I then went on holidays and when I came back at the end of December, there was no sign whatsoever of the MAC code.

It’s 2009 and I’m fed up

So I replied to their last e-mail, saying it had been more than one month since they promised to send me my MAC number but I failed to see it. This time they finally gave up on trying to keep me as a customer with lies, and admitted they could never send me a MAC because I was on a Pipex enabled exchange. I would need to cancel my account with Pipex in order to migrate to a different phone and broadband provider.

Instead of dialling the cancellations number they provided me, I looked for an alternative one in saynoto0870. I found a local one, dialled it and had to wait for 15 minutes because they had a high calls volume, although I’m pretty sure there was only a person in the call center, and she was having lunch.

After I expressed my desire to cancel their service, she tried to scare me, saying that if I left pipex, BT could charge me with a pricey connection fee. Since I knew that didn’t apply to working phone lines, I ignored her menace and rejected her offer to stay in pipex even if they offered me an special price.

She said I needed to call BT and ask them to do something called Return to donor, which I guessed meant something like BT disconnecting the wire which goes to my house from Pipex’s sytems and reconnecting it to their equipment at my local exchange.

Fasten your seatbelts!

I called BT and explained my situation. Everything was dealt with rather quickly (and without menaces). The guy on the phone let me know what my new phone number would be and when could we expect BT to activate their service. We still had to wait around 15 days but that was an unavoidable minimum.

Two days later, to my surprise, I got a letter from BT confirming again my phone number, the account plan details I had signed up for, when would my service be activated and several more data. This was great, considering I had had to call myself to my mobile to find out what my pipex phone number was, because they never sent us a letter like BT’s one.

The big day arrived and effectively at around 11 AM the broadband service stopped working. I called myself again to confirm it and yes, we had the new number. We could order Be already!

Faster, faster!

Be is a company which offers broadband at fantastic speeds, up to 24 Meg for £17.50/month (VAT included). Ironically the owner of Be is O2, which is owned by Telefonica, or the equivalent of BT in Spain, and they don’t seem to have a problem with charging €44.90/month for up to a ridiculous 10 Meg in Spain. That, to me, is outrageously stealing. But I’m digressing…

We ordered the Be service on a Wednesday evening. They said the maximum speed we could reach, taking into account our distance to the phone exchange, was 23 Meg, which wasn’t bad at all! They also said we had to wait 2 to 4 weeks to get connected.

Since I had signed up for SMS alerts, on Thursday morning I got an SMS confirming my order had been placed and the maximum speed we could reach again. The rest of the day was very exciting. A mere 20 minutes later I got another text saying my payment method had been properly configured, and 2 minutes later they said they expected the service to be active by Monday. I was really impressed with this speed!

Three hours later they sent me another message which confirmed that the “welcome pack” (i.e. the modem) was in its way, and another message which said something like: your welcome pack will be delivered on Friday, but if it does not suit you, reply this message with 1 for Monday, 2 for Tuesday or 3 for Wednesday. Now that’s what I call efficiency and living in the 21st century! I was delighted.

Friday arrived and I received the pack as expected, but since the service wasn’t going to be activated until Monday, I didn’t bother too much. Ha, but I wasn’t aware that Be meant FAST… ten minutes later they sent me another SMS saying our line was now activated and we could use the modem already. WOH! So their 2 – 4 weeks in fact means 2 days.

The BeBox is disappointing

Obviously, I had to try the modem – christened the BeBox by their marketing department. It looks a lot like a mac mini, only with several leds with labels that can only be read if you skew the box at a very particular angle and look at it from a certain distance. In short: it provides close to zero information from the outside.

The inside is not better. Internally it is a Thomson speedtouch router, and I can understand now the pain of Thomson owners in order to configure simple stuff. My first attempt at changing the internal ip range to something more sensible than the default (192.168.254.x) just got me kicked out of the network and totally unable to access it again. It’s the first time I have ever had to reset a modem to restore its factory settings. Not nice.

At the end, I gave up on the internal ip since mrdoob said he had dealt with a similar router at work and I didn’t want to keep fighting with that absurd, out of this world, interface.

I then tried to configure some firewall rules, but they had been rebranded as something like Gaming and applications sharing. Eeew. Editing those was also a pain: if you wanted to edit a rule which was in use, you had to deassign the rule, edit it, and then assign it again. Also, you couldn’t apply the same rule to more than one computer: you had to create another one, even if the settings were the same.

All very silly, and I guess that box is suitable only for people who connect only one computer to watch HD youtube videos, and never ever try to configure anything. I was already missing the interface of our old Netgear DG834G.

Trying with the DG834G

Then I thought that maybe a firmware update could help our DG834G to work with ADSL2+ (which is what Be uses). So I downloaded the latest update, applied it, and changed the connection settings in the old good Netgear to use Be’s. I also told it to use the same MAC address that the BeBox used, so that the DHCP lease would not need to expire. It is wonderful how easy it is to spoof devices!

It then connected and synched to the line but it couldn’t synch at more than 7800kbps downstream. I tried several times, even turning the router off for a whole night, and it never exceeded that limit. Trying with DGTeam’s custom firware didn’t help to get higher speeds either. Since its firmware version is v2, it has a Texas Instrument chipset, whereas newer versions of that router (v3 and v4) incorporated Broadcom chipsets, which are the ones which are able to connect at full ADSL2+ speed. A real pity, because I thought I liked its admin interface, but I realised that I LOVED IT TO BITS after using the BeBox’s one.

What also annoyed me about the BeBox is the fact that it had telnet enabled so that Be technical support could log in and solve problems for their customers. Right, but it could also help them to do something else if there’s an immoral employee wanting to have a peek at customer’s internal stuff. No thanks, if I want to have open ports in my router it’s going to be me who decides what is open and why is it so.

DG834N

So I ordered a Netgear DG834N, which is an advanced version of our very reliable DG834G. There were several forums suggesting to get one second hand from ebay, since it seems Sky had been giving them for free to their broadband subscribers, but I preferred to get one brand new.

The installation was as simple as it can get, and I was getting a good downstream speed immediately (as testified by this status update).

As expected, it has been working without having to be reset since then. We have been using both the wireless and the wired networks without any of those odd manoeuvres we had to perform with the BeBox, and I’m pretty sure it is going to do such a great work as its older brother, which has been doing its job more or less continuously for four years.

No one can dislike stories with happy endings! :-)

Believe it or not, here’s yet another stupid feature of Leopard! Whenever it decides it’s a good moment to stop your workflow, a little window will pop up and tell you that because your wireless network has been compromised, it will be disabled for a minute.

What it doesn’t tell is that it won’t connect by itself automatically when that ghostly compromising menace disappears, even if the network password is stored in the keychain. So if you were doing something which depended on the wireless connection, it will never finish unless you’re there and make sure you manually connect again to the network.

There are lots of speculative solutions such as changing the encryption method in the router from WPA to WPA2 and whatever… but why should I change anything only because Leopard’s wifi support is defective and can’t distinguish between failure and attack?

So far, these are Leopard’s good points:

• better VNC support
• tabbed terminal
• some tools are preinstalled (svn, ruby… although it’s nothing one couldn’t get done dedicating a few hours)
• nicer XCode

And these are its annoyances/weaknesses/useless features, plus some more that I can’t remember right now or have been fixed in system updates (such as file uploading in the flash plug-in, which was broken from day 0):

• “Your wireless network has been compromised” – and it has just happened again while I wrote this! OH YEAH!
• continuous errors with firewire disks such as my ipod mini
• intrusively inquiring about what do I want to do with what I download
• absurd behaviour after returning from stand-by: on my mac mini left click acts as a right click until I do a control+tab and switch to a different application, on my powerbook the trackpad works like at a 0.00001% of the normal speed and accelerates progressively until it reaches normal speed – even after a completely clean reinstall
• horrible wireless performance. How come the signal strength is only 20% when another computer, side by side, has 100%?
• no more decent mp3 preview – if you switch to a different application while previewing it will stop. It sometimes does not work at all, instead. And there’s no way of going back to the previous interface.
• amazingly it still hasn’t a decent image viewer which can operate fullscreen
• super ugly folder icons

I wonder if this can be considered a defective product… by all standards it looks like that: these errors are recurrent and I’m experiencing them every single day.

I’m tempted of going back to Tiger but I’m just not willing to spend a single minute of my life re-installing software for the n-th time.

Instead, I hereby demand an immediate fix for these bugs!! I wonder if there’s an open case in petitiononline for this…

It has taken longer than it should have done, but at last I can say that my domain (soledadpenades.com) is registered and managed in a good place – that is: CDmon!

I registered it for the first time around seven years ago. By that time, I hardly knew anything about domain registrars and so just went for the first one that someone recommended me – directnic. It was also the “it doesn’t matter if it’s hard to use” times, so even if the interface was a bit clunky to use, it didn’t make any difference. At the end, it was a place which you just visited once a couple of years, for renewing the domain.

I also didn’t even have my own hosting, I depended completely on free hostings like geocities first, and the nice hosting provided by scenesp later, so my domain acted basically as a redirection to whichever my current hosting was.

But then I moved to textdrive and started learning a lot more about server side configuration and tweaking. Directnic didn’t provide much functionality, so I decided to switch to cdmon as soon as possible, since they have been giving me an absolutely excellent service for domain registrations and hosting (see xplsv.tv for an example of cdmon-hosted site).

I went to directnic and modified the contact details for my domain, since they were still using my old university account (which was cancelled some years ago). I clicked update and began all the procedures for transferring the domain.

CDmon warned that I should pay special attention to a confirmation e-mail that I should click for beginning the transferring process. Days passed, nothing ever reached my inbox. I was like crazy scanning all the folders, just in case it had gone to the junk folder. Where was my e-mail? Almost one month later I wrote to cdmon. For some reason they had sent the confirmation e-mail to my old university account. How come? Hadn’t I just updated it in directnic prior to beginning the process? Weird…

I apologised to cdmon (since it was none of their fault) and went back to directnic control panel. Shockingly, my old university e-mail was still there. What’s going on here?!, I asked myself. I repeated the process, entered the data again. But before asking cdmon to request the transfer again, I checked again the data. Guess what: the old e-mail was still there. I was beginning to get angry. Quite angry actually. But I managed to control my anger and opened a ticket in directnic. Enter the absurd world of directnic:

Me:

I’m trying to modify the contact details in order to have a working e-mail address in it, but each time I try to update it, it just rejects the changes and shows the old values in the form, without giving any error whatsoever.

Since this is really urgent, I’d really appreciate help in this topic.

Thanks!

Answer:

To modify your Account Information, please follow these directions:

1. Log into your directNIC account at https://secure.directnic.com/myaccount/
2. Select the ‘Customer Settings’ tab on your main menu.
3. Click on the ‘Account Information’ link
4. Enter the changes in the Account information that apply
5. Click on the ‘Update’ orange radio button toward the bottom of the page
[...]

At this point I felt like: Ok, did they really read my question? Ok ok ok… let’s calm down, they aren’t assuming that I know how to use a form, maybe they have really clumsy tickets to solve, or whatever… let’s explain them the problem again, more wordily:

Me:

Sorry, this does not solve my problem. What I can’t change are the contact details for my domain soledadpenades.com

If from here (https://url1) I click on “Modify contacts” and then proceed to modify the contact Soledad Penades (at https://url2), no matter what I do, it doesn’t get updated. I click the orange button at the bottom which is labelled as “Edit Contact”, the form appears again with the newly entered data but if I repeat the process, I still get the same OLD data which was at the beginning.

There’s something wrong in your system which is rejecting my data, I don’t know why, since I removed all “strange” characters like accents and so on from the inputs.

If you need any further information I’ll be glad to help you in order to solve this issue.

Thanks!

Answer again:

Hello

Try removing the “+” out of the phone number. Often the change will be rejected because of a strange character or the system cannot recognize the number format (like a phone number). Also where you changed your name, I see a “?” where an “e” should be in your last name.

The system is functioning properly because it shows an attempt to modify, unfortunately, it is rejecting the strange characters or the format of the phone number.

Hope this helps, please don;t hesitate to reopen the ticket if you are still having issues and we can revisit the problem.

Hold on! Read that one again: The system is functioning properly because it shows an attempt to modify, unfortunately, it is rejecting the strange characters or the format of the phone number.

At this side of the world, a system does not work properly when it can’t do what it’s expected to do and even worse, it doesn’t give any feedback at all. If I was the developer for that back-end my cheeks would be flushing in red just by reading at this ticket.

First they change their encoding so that my surname mutates from Penadés to Penad?s, and then they decide that +’s in the phone numbers (which are international phone numbers) aren’t going to be acceptable anymore, all of this, without giving any note of warning whatsoever.

I couldn’t believe it.

I really mean it, I read their answer like three times, thinking: they are an internet company, they do not sell any physical goods, they may have lots of international clients, they may know there are things like accents, they may know that there are more countries other than USA, or was I expecting too much from them? This can’t be happening but it is indeed happening, so let’s try again.

After removing all “strange” characters and leaving it all with just plain alphanumeric characters, I could finally save the data and get them really updated. Funnily enough, it did confirm that the changes had been saved.

Wrote them again:

Hi, seems that it worked.

But I really think you should consider to give *at least* a note of warning. Something like “Hey, could you please remove what are not numbers from the phone field?”, instead of just returning to the form again, which is not what I would label as “functioning properly”. I couldn’t change my “?” because your system was rejecting any single change I did, but wasn’t able to tell me what was wrong (which was the + in the phone number).

It would really help people in this situation, since it’s not weird to enter the number with a +, specially for this type of international businesses.

Thanks for your help!

Never got any response.

Yesterday was supposed to be the D-day, my domain was going to be at its new home (cdmon) definitely and so it showed in the control panel. There it was! my sweet little domain… I could modify it and block it again, using cdmon’s interface. But then I thought: will it still show at directnic?

I logged in again at directnic. Guess what: the domain still appeared there. And it might have stayed there forever if it hadn’t been because I have sent them a ticket asking why was it still there if I had transferred it to another registrar, then they have deleted it.

Conclusion: CDmon rules. If you need domains or hosting, buy them there. They are professional and they care about their clients.