Blog

internet

Viewing posts from the internet category

zombified

only slept for 4 hours last night. was up trying to setup some kind of proxy on andy’s server. and i think i was almost there, but not before his sysadmins blocked my connection. guess not all types of cgi scripts are allowed. 😛 wonder if it’s specifically written anywhere in their ToS.

the lack of sleep and the huge amount of food we had last night (Beef lasagne and ribena lychee!) didn’t help me wake up this morning. but i did wake up. 😛 one my resolutions this year: reduce EL usage.

i fecking hate tmnet

yes. i do. i really do.

first, they throttle p2p. fine. no big deal. i can wait for downloads to finish. even if they take days, or months.

then even after that, quality of service still sucks. i can’t get a decent ping on wow. the lag spikes are frequent and makes the whole experience unbearable. and it’s not just me, many other people are experiencing the same goddamn problem.

so i try explaining this to tmnet’s tech support. Rimal was his name. told him how my wow connections are unstable, and altho it’s not just me, there are still many players who do not have the same problem, of whom many are also streamyx subscribers.

sez he can’t do anything and can’t tell me anything. as far as he is concerned, i have a connection. i tell him it’s not just wow, it’s also other things like downloads and whatnot. we argue for a bit and lastly he tells me to do the speedometer test.

so i did the test a few times and only got 450kbits, average. called them again and told another person this and they were more than willing to open a report ticket.

moral of the story: them support people can’t think out of the box. that’s why they’re forced to work sundays. just get evidence that they’re familiar with and be done with it. leave the technicalities to the tech people who’ll be assigned to your problem.

well, i may have to change that conclusion depending on how this issue develops. 2 working days for them to get back to me.

it’s things like this that make me want to go back to the US.

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.

undisciplined tuesday

went to bed really late this morning. no thanks to a book, Darren Shan’s Demon Thief. so those close to me knows what happened. 😛 it sucks though. i’ve succumbed. but sometimes a good book is just too hard to put down. at least it’s not because of WoW. but mainly that’s because i had lag spikes last night.

tried again this morning and still had spikes. decided to try what some people do and try and get myself reassigned to another dynamic IP. true enough, now my WoWing is fine. i don’t really know how this works, but TMnet must be really screwy to have splotches of bad IPs here and there. think i’ll start keeping a log.

liquid fire

the title of this post sure sounds cool, but it really is related to a stomach ache. 😛

must’ve been the food last night. we bought back nasi goreng padprik ayam and prawn tom yam to merv’s place last night. was there playing mahjong up till 12.30am.

or could’ve been lunch, where i had nasi lemak rendang meant for breakfast. 😛

or maybe the dinner the night before, an old timer at chili’s. nah.

tummy still hurts even after numerous trips to the loo. need some tea, but water’s still boiling.

anyways, i mentioned in the scratch board earlier that my domain, bangsar.net, is being forged by spammers. seems that there’s nothing i can do about it, except hope that spam blocking lists will be smart enough to block the spammer’s sending IP instead of the forged domain.

on the other hand, it means that the domain is getting somewhat popular. we’re at google pagerank 5 now. 😛