This Geek

My ADSL line at home has been dead for the past 11 days now. It took me 35 minutes on hold on the 27th March before I could get through to a call centre agent to log the fault. I started receiving daily 9am SMSs from Telkom telling me that they were “still working to resolve the fault”. Funny though, the SMSs stopped coming through last Saturday, so I’m guessing they’ve closed the call without resolving it.

I escalated the call on the 1 April (April Fool, me!) at 06h33. Yes, in the morning. Funnily enough, I got through instantly.

I escalated again on the 4th April at 06h39. I don’t think “escalating” actually does anything. It certainly hasn’t done anything for me

I tried to get through to help desk this morning. I was on hold from 08h15. I eventually gave up at 11h45. Three and a half hours. On hold. Trying to find out what the fuck is going on with my dead line.

What cheeses me off is that while I can request a refund from Telkom for the down time - I can’t request a refund from Blizzard for the days I haven’t been able to play WoW.

It also pisses my wife off, because she’s been on holiday for the past few weeks, and she was looking forward to finally getting a chance to play WoW for a change. Hahaha. Shoulda known.

Argh. I hate frustrating issues that make me want to pull my hair out. Not that I’ve got much hair mind you. I tend to keep it short. Number 1 short. It adds to the mean don’t fuck with me look. Which also means it’s too short to actually grab. So my point is moot. Gah.

The DNS servers provided by my ADSL link are pretty crap. They take ages to update, and sometimes give shit, so some kind soul pointed me at Open DNS. I immediately configured my LAN to use them, and I was A for away.

Now my only niggle with them is whenever I configure a new sub-domain on my name server, it takes a little while for it to propagate - which is normal in DNS systems - however, with one particular sub-domain that I configured for one of my brother’s domains, I just could NOT access it from my own machine. It was seriously pissing me off. One minute I’d get resolution and the site would load, and then next I would just get DNS errors.

Doing a local lookup kept returning an IP that belongs to OpenDNS - wtf?

So I browsed to their site and searched around a bit. Eventually I happened across this link which allows you to query the status of their DNS cache. So, I do the obvious. Of the 4 servers (or so) that they have, one of them was showing invalid data. And typically, it was that fucker that I constantly seemed to query. Fortunately they provide tools to fix the problem, so in less than 5 seconds, I had resolved the issue.

Now, grasshoppers, what does this lesson teach us?

RTFM - Read the fucking manual.

Where have you ever heard about an INCREASE in bandwidth prices lately?

In South Africa, Internet users are feeling the boot of the monopolistic telephone company on their necks. I’m referring to ADSL specifically now.

Here, we have to pay an excessive ADSL “line rental” fee, on top of the normal telephone line rental.

The ADSL rentals are as follows, US $ conversions in brackets:

• 1024 = R680ZAR per month ($103.29)
• 512 = R477ZAR per month ($72.52)
• 384 = R359ZAR per month ($54.53)
• 192 = R270ZAR per month ($41)

Yes, they think 384 & 192 are broad band.

Add on to that price an additional R92.28ZAR ($14) if you’re a residential user, or R122.60ZAR ($18.61) if you’re a business for the telephone line rental, regardless of whether you have a telephone attached. (Note that this is the same copper pair!)

And THEN you have to get your ISP account so that you can actually use your ADSL line.

Prices vary from ISP to ISP, but it’s not by much. (In this case, I’ll use the same telco’s ISP prices)

• 3Gb R269ZAR ($40.87)
• 2Gb R199ZAR ($30.20)
• 4Gb Unshaped R699ZAR ($106)

Note that each package is the amount of bandwidth that you can use. For the most part (currently), once you reach the 3Gb limit, you get CAPPED. This means that they route your traffic through a very slow international link (so slow that it is unuseable), but allow you unlimited “local” (same network) traffic.

(3Gb is enough?? I used that in the first 3 days after getting my ADSL line installed! - And that’s just normal browsing / email and a couple of downloads on 384! Can’t afford faster!)

Some ISPs have been using a loophole with their bandwidth resale agreements, and have been offering up to a maximum of 30Gb accounts for R299ZAR ($45).

In order to counter this, the telco is now restructuring their bandwidth pricing as from 1 November 2005.

Now, the bandwidth costs are insane!

That same 30Gb package that could be had for R299 is now going to cost you in the region of R2000ZAR ($303) !!!! If you don’t like the preset packages, by all means, you may purchase bandwidth on a per Gb basis - at a cost of R75 ($11.39) per Gb.

Also - there’s going to be a hard cap. If you reach your bandwidth limit, you get disconnected, and that’s that. No Internet until next month.

Now that’s just insane!

If you’re a foreign company looking to invest in South Africa, fuhgeddaboudit! Or make sure you bring a large jar of KY jelly, cuz you’re gonna get screwed.

I ordered ADSL from our monopolistic telephone company in mid March — It was installed this morning.

Not bad that, a 6 month wait.

One of my 120gb drives failed, so I thought I would finally get around to reorganising my system to the way I want… Linux as primary, and Windows as secondary for gaming etc. It makes sense, since I’m getting ADSL in the next couple of days, and I won’t have the driver issues with my USB isdn adapter under Linux anymore. Now I can finally get rid of this shitty Microsoft platform as my every day OS.

So anyway, I reload, and I realise that I don’t have my LAN drivers handy, so I connect to the website to download them. I eventually find them, a 5mb or so download.

While it’s downloading (yeah yeah, slow ISDN), I’m browsing the site, and I discover this thing called ‘Download Center’. So I check it out. It apparently scans your system, and shows you what drivers you need to download. So I do that, just for the hell of it.

It basically says ‘LAN driver’ - Intel - size: 89Mb. I did a double take. What the fuck? 89Mb for a fucking LAN driver? You’ve got to be shitting me! Jesus, I need a LAN driver, not a frikkin’ operating system. Holy motherfuck, what the hell are these people thinking?!?

And then to add insult to injury, when I closed the window for that ‘Download Center’ software, Internet Explorer crashed. Luverly.

Have I mentioned that I fucking hate Windows?

Can’t wait until the frikkin’ LAN driver is loaded so I can get my faithful firefox running. Sheeee…