Luke Sheldrick's Blog

I bought a MacMini the other day to replace my old nettop at home. Until I get the new storage for it, I figured I’d quickly setup a LUN on my NAS for it. It seems OS X, even Lion, still doesn’t include an iSCSI initiator (wtf, really?). Anyway the typical freebie that you’d use on Leopard/Snow Leopard was GlobalSAN’s free initiator. However seems that as of version 5, it’s not a freebie.

I gave it a try, and went through their process (read giving them my details twice – once to download, then again to get a trial key)… tried it out, and didn’t rate it. So using their provided uninstall script I see the below:

WTF is that all about? Their uninstaller is trying to delet / . .. /sbin ..etc, someone really hasn’t QA’ed their code.

Have emailed them to see what they say about it. Poor show.

So, it seems, on Friday I accidentally left my personal mobile phone in a taxi, and that $nicetaxidriver decided to remove my sim/switch the phone off when I called it, rather than return it.

As such, currently my personal phone number isn’t routable. This happens when a new sim is ordered on a line, and is unrouteable until the new sim is assinged. Three seem to be having some issues actually getting me a new sim, so if you try and call me at the moment, you’ll get a number not recongised type alert. Annoying!

As soon as the new sim is assigned, I’ll forward the calls to my temporary number, so I can at least get voicecalls.

As for getting a replacement iPhone, seems I need a 101 documents, for the insurance claim, which will take some time to gather up.

If you need to get hold of me before then, drop me a mail, and I’ll get back to you.

Argh!

Update 14/06/2011: New SIM has been assigned, but still cannot divert calls from my personal number to temporary number. Getting docs for insurance is a Royal PITA.

Update 15/06/2011: After numerous calls to Three, I finally have a working sim, and can take calls again. Now onto the saga that is getting the documents needed for the insurance claim.

So I am greeted today with even more PayPal fail (they’ll now be known to me as payfail).

A few months back, I had a letter from Natwest, who informed me they were charging me £25 a day for being over my overdraft limit. Interesting, I don’t have an overdraft, nor have I used that account since I worked for them quite some years ago.

Checking my online banking with them, and noticed ~£450 worth of PayPal direct debits. Interesting, these transactions were not listed on my PayPal account. Sent them a few emails explaining this, and they then said I had to call to discuss further. When I called they had no knowledge of the email correspondence, so I had to go through it all again. They basically said that they could not help as the transactions were not listed on my account, and they could only talk to me about MY account. They advised I talk to my bank.

Called up the bank, and explained the situation, then got put through to fraud, explained, then put through to another department, who said as I had given my bank details to PayPal years back (to deposit, not debit), it wasn’t fraud, and it was something I’d need to take up with PayFail. Back to step 1.

I then explained they can’t help, and it’s up to the bank to resolve. The only thing they could do was advise me to go into a branch, and fill out a direct debit indemnity form, as these were direct debits, and they could return them that way.

Off to the branch I went, to then be told, that form is for modifying a direct debit, I.e. you’re paying £50 a month to sky, but should only be paying £45. It wasn’t for historic transactions. They suggest I talk to PayFail. Awesome! nobody wants to take ownership.

I then asked to talk to a manager, who apparently was busy for the afternoon. I advised I probably wouldn’t be leaving the branch until I spoke to he/she, so I’ll happily wait. I had the paper, my iPad and my Macbook, so I had plenty to keep me busy. Within 10 minutes, that very busy manager was then available.

She was very helpful, and talk to the fraud team, who had earlier said they couldn’t help. They agreed to take on my case, and would give me a call by 16:00 (it was 14:00 at the time) to confirm the refunds were in place.

At around 17:00 I thought, hey, where is my call? I gave the fraud team a call, and the person I spoke to had advised the chap who was dealing with my account had gone home. I then proceeded to ask for a manager, as I had been given the royal run around. Spoke to a very nice lady who was the supervisor who advised the handling team had rejected the case, as I had at some point given my details to PayFail.

As you can imagine, not the best of responses to give to an already peeved customer. She was pretty good, and said that department was now closed, but she was in at 09:00 the next morning, and would personally go talk to the manager of that department. She advised I check my account in the morning, and if there weren’t refunds on the account by 10:00 to give her a call directly.

The refunds were on there. Awesome. Later that afternoon, I started to get emails from people on eBay I had previously purchased things from. PayFail in their infinite wisdom, had not just looked at the amounts I had contested, they had rejected all payments I had made, all the genuine transactions. I can only imagine they couldn’t find the actual transactions that had been posted to my current account, so made up the funds from the genuine transactions. So lots of irate (and rightly so) people from eBay. I explained the situation, and most of them were fine. They just had to give PayFail some docs to prove they were g transactions, and a copy of my email.

I thought that was all done and dusted. Until someone sent me some money today, I had totally forgot they had an annual auto payment to my account. The money has been accepted, and now cannot be returned. So I have funds in my PayFail account, and oh, I can’t get hold of them.

See above, my account has been ‘limited’, funny, as it was them that had made all the errors, but they feel the need to limit my account. Interesting.

The only way I can get my account working again, is to confirm my details. One of the things I need to do, is confirm 2 transactions to my bank account. They put two transactions through up to £1, and I need to tell them how much they were for. Except, my bank have blocked all transactions from PayFail, and I do not particularly want to give them the details of my actual current account, just in case they go on a frenzy again.

Arse!

So BT, arguably the UKs biggest ISP/telco, in my opinion are a complete bag of fail. Now I guess writing this means, that I’ll probably never work for them, but hey, who would want to?

I’ve dealt with BT whilst working at $dayjob-1, and the incompetence I saw there, was shocking to say the least. That I can deal with, I got paid to deal with it, but when it’s in my time it’s a different story.

BT or rather BTOpenzone serve a huge amount of establishments with their Wifi ‘Cloud’ offering. Most places like Starbucks, if you have a registered account with them, will happily let you use it for free.

However before you can do this, you need to go through the authentication process with BT. This basically hijacks any DNS request you send, and redirects you to a the auth page. That’s kind of ok, for most users.

However most times when I use it, it’s a complete failure.

• They use port 8443 for SSL, instead of the standard 443. This can play havock with local firewalls.
• The certificate they use for www.btopenzone.com is not valid for that domain, so most browsers will flag a massive security warning.
• Their DNS often is broken.
• If it is working, the webserver you try to connect to, isn’t running (connection refused).

The last two are especially annoying, like today, in Starbucks (Whitechappel Road). I switch the macbook on, join their wifi, get an IP and DGW, then any page I go to, should redirect me to their auth page. However seems it is slightly broken, as normal.

So this is telling me that Safari cannot connect to the server. This can be a bit vague, so you need to dig a bit deeper. Open up your terminal and try to simulate what the browser is doing.

So you telnet to www.btopenzone.com on port 8443. You get a connection refused. This means that from my macbook, I got over their network, right to the end server, which is saying ‘Hey, that port is open, but I don’t have anything running on it’.

I’ve no idea what is on the backend of btopenzone.com however looking at the DNS resolution:
Luke-Sheldricks-Mac-4:~ luke$ dig www.btopenzone.com
; DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> www.btopenzone.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15147
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.btopenzone.com.        IN    A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.btopenzone.com.    17378    IN    A    217.41.225.106


It’s only returning a single IP, which could be the IP of a load balancer, and then a number of servers behind that IP. However I wouldn’t expect all of them to fail.

With the helpful tool nmap, we can see:

PORT     STATE SERVICE  VERSION
80/tcp   open  http     SunONE WebServer 6.1
442/tcp  open  ssl/http SunONE WebServer 6.1
443/tcp  open  ssl/http SunONE WebServer 6.1
8443/tcp open  ssl/http Apache Tomcat/Coyote JSP engine 1.1


So using an old Solaris 8 server (the current version is 10) to run their authentication services. Can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surpised if there is only one server back there. The amount of times I’ve seen this, really does go to show how under speced their ‘solution is’. I look after massive solutions in $dayjob, and this kind of thing would never happen, and if it did, certainly wouldn’t for long.

To sum up: BT you suck.

</rant>

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?