Luke Sheldrick’s Blog

So I am meeting a friend for coffee and lunch today, unfortunately she’s running a bit late, so decided to grab a frappacino and be one of those geeks in Starbucks with their laptop/netbooks out.

I’m in the process of swapping out the wireless card in my netbook (for osx86) so don’t have any drivers or modules setup in the OS’s at the moment.

Luckily though, I do have a vodafone data sim, and the 4213 has an inbuilt 3G modem.

Here comes the fun part, the data tariff is on Vodafone business, so you would think they’d be slightly reliable… erm nope.

Every month, without fail, they mess up the billing. Apparently my Direct Debit fails, it doesn’t. A few ways I know, is it’s gone through a couple of times, so we know that it’s got the correct details. The other being when a DD does bounce, my Bank arse rape me on charges. Third being, there is always funds to cover all my DD’s.

Now vodafail, are funny people, because you know how I said it’s a data card, well how do they try to contact you… by txt message. That’s a big clever idea.

I can sort of see the idea, in that their app for windows, does have a sms function, but I would at least have thought an email may be a better option? or even both. However, I don’t use windows, instead my netbook is running Fedora 10, and NetworkManager doesn’t support sms… FAIL

The best one is when I do look at the missed call txt’s, from their sales drones. WTF? do they talk binary? no, well don’t call a datacard then!

Bah, alas, I phone them up, and go through the usual crap of, could we take your mobile number (No, I don’t know it, I never have, and have no intention of, it’s a datacard.) Can I have the account number, it’s on your bill (No, it’s a datacard, I use it when I am out and about, I don’t carry a copy of all my bills with me)… so we eventually get there, and they say to switch my PHONE off and on… FAIL.

Alas I am mobile again, thanks to the friendly folk at vodafail.

Hmm, the contract runs out next month, who should I move to?

This is an admittance of failure, by one party, me. Today was working on a load of issues at work, and lost access to my home IM server. This usually means network manager on my laptop has dropped the VPN, and just need to redial.

However today, slightly different, in that my VPN GW had fallen over. Luckily this is a virtual machine on one of my servers in London, so just have to reset the guest via VMWare. Unfortunately, this is on one my older servers, still running VMWare Server 1.x, and also for added fun, I can only access the Host via the VPN, seeing the problem here?

Well I do have a ‘backdoor’. Anyways I digress, whilst I was resetting the guest, I thought I’d take a look at what snapshots I had for it.

After clicking the second button, I quickly remembered, VMWare Server 1.x, only has one snapshot. Oh dear, within  a blink it was restoring to the previous snapshot, with no way to stop it.

Checking further, this snap shot was old, very old, about 3 months old. So it booted back up. Here comes the second fail. The server in question, happens to be the master, of my MySQL servers, so decided to quickly replicate it’s self, wiping all the new data from the other nodes. Is also my primary NS, so replicated those too. It also does a shit load of other things, that I wont go into, but that broke lots too.

Alas, shouldn’t be a problem though, as I have a four hourly rsync of the configs taken, and replicated off site. Here comes the third and forth fail. 3) the MySQL dumps, appear to have stopped working, looks like there was a regression in one of the scripts. 4) I’d been working on the offsite nas a few months back, and didn’t want the rotation of backups to occur whilst I was doing the work. You guessed it, I forgot to switch it back on. Fuck!

These are all my own fault, I have no way to deny. I spend most of my working day fixing other people’s silly mistakes like this, and setting up systems / procedures so this doesn’t EVER happen, you’d think I’d actually tick a few things off my personal to do list, huh?

Nevermind, managed to fix it all in the end, well mostly… fail fail fail fail fail

You know the way sometimes someone will say to you, oh you’re from London [or whereever else] you must know xyz. Even if the place, i.e. London is huge, and you’d never even 1% of the people.

Amusingly facebook, has taken this approach now

I am starting to think, a big box of money under my bed may be a better idea than using Bank’s. Now I used to work at a Bank for a number of years, and saw my fair share of fu-bars, but some other Bank’s just take the piss.

I’ve always been a fan of not keeping all your eggs in one basket, so I have my emergency account & savings with a different bank to my usual current account. The emergency account happens to be IF or Intelligent Finance. Opening the account was a nightmare, but that was largely due to muppets at Halifax. All that set aside they’re not too terrible.

Apart from their online service, which is the only way you can manage your account. I must say I only ever check ever couple of months, and I need to at the moment, so I log on, and because I rarely use it, I have all the details recorded. What a supprise:

It seems everytime I log on, I’ve been locked out. No doubt due to one of those nice chinese hacker folk. So I duely phone up the number provided, and get an IVR, pop in my details, then get connected to an operator, who I have to go through all this again… the joy. The chump then informs me that, the only way I can unlock my account is to be sent an unlock code, which is sent by second class post. Being Friday, it’ll be quite a few days then.

I asked why it had been locked out, and due to excessive log on attempts, which backs up what their site says. No I know it’s not me who has tried to log in, baring this once, so there isn’t really much I can do here.

So there we have it, everytime I want to check my IF account, I’ll have a weekish delay.

Just catching up on my mountain of RSS, saw this on the reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/30/faraday_train_windows. It would seem the train operator that runs my daily commute train is embrasing the 21st century by blocking wifi / mobile transmissions, by coating the windows with reflective film.

This is in an attempt to make the quiet zones, quiet. One word…. FAIL. The noise in these carriages is usually a screaming 6month old, or some 13 year old chav, playing eminem, out of their tinny Nokia music player… I hardly thing cutting the business world off from their crackberrys is going to do much.

Also interestingly they don’t mention that they will cut off their ‘in-train wi-fi’ which is run by t-mobile, using their ‘cloud’.