terrible thursday

been posting day-related items lately, but they usually cover the later part of the previous day. like how i’ll start this post by talking about the problems i faced wednesday night.

actually it didn’t really start with problems. it just got problematic when i got home to WoW. 🙁

anyways, the evening started with me thinking i could WoW before picking up my bro from class. but mom had to get some work done at the office, so i had to teman her there. there wasn’t much chance of WoWing after either, cuz we had a yum char session in Bangsar at Starbucks in Bangsar ViIIage. t’was the usual crowd: me, fish, zoe, henry, nd, aly, merv, viv and az.

so we had a good look at henry’s new toy, his sony k800i, and then merv’s new toy, his nokia 6300. then we talked abt all sorts of other things, including a discussion with regards to this. i’ll leave it to az to decide whether he wants to divulge the explicit details, such as the “wow exchange”. 😛

then it was back home at 11.30. tried to WoW, but experienced bad packet drops with streamyx’s 219.* ip range, and couldn’t secure a stable 218.111.* address with constant dsl reconnections. couldn’t even hold a decent guild conversation.

so today i dedicated a lot of my time looking for solutions to get me back on Tichondrius. already in a bad mood carried over from the day before, it didn’t help that i had to encounter the usual malaysian drivers, and get calls from lame users and vendors who can’t remember what they agreed upon last year.

first of, i looked at Tor, an anonymous network of routes of sorts. basically any traffic you connect via Tor goes through a series of random jumps on the internet (called a circuit) and ends up at some other end of it to connect to your target destination. doesn’t really help my problem, so it’s a no go. but i have the daemon up and running, so if anyone who can access my VPN can try it out on port 9100. it acts like a socks server btw.

then i just looked at one portion of the Tor package, which is the socks part. maybe i can find myself some open proxy using 218.111.*, or maybe a proxy in a neighboring country. couple it together with a transparent proxy like FreeCap, i can then connect to WoW via that proxy. problem with this is i need an open proxy somewhere. and it’s very insecure. but it’s still viable, assuming streamyx’s routing problem is only international.

another interesting solution, which some LYN-forumers have done, is to route traffic via VPN to a location not affected by traffic shaping. there are existing VPN services that do this, such as Sweden’s Relakks, some local people have taken it a step further by setting up their own servers in Europe or wherever and charging for VPN services.

their main goal for doing this however, is to circumvent streamyx’s bittorrent throttling (with applaudable success). so far their setups aren’t really geared to doing anything else. one interesting thing to note is, they’re using OpenVPN, which is what i’m using for our Hamachi-gaming alternative. i think i can easily create such a service on my own, and possibly add a lot more function to it.

maybe if the guys are interested, we can just share a private server for everything. have it hosted locally on tmnet’s non-throttled routes for fast vpn-gaming, and at the same time use the bandwidth for p2p. so guys, let me know if interested. otherwise, i might make it into some chump change business plan.

OR, if the problem continues long enough, i’ll ship a small server to my sister in Sydney and route all my WoW traffic through there. 😛

OR, i could just wait. maybe TMnet isn’t as hopeless as most people think. fortunately i still haven’t watched yesterday’s episodes. and now i also have House and My Name Is Earl to watch.