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.

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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.

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• 16 May 2008 -- Changing Mobile Provider (0)

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!

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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>

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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?

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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

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Amusingly facebook, has taken this approach now

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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.

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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’.

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The story with Barclays continues. You know how I had written back in Janurary, about how the saga of them cocking up my account, was a bit of a joke, but they had promised to fix their mistakes. Well they’re still on going, the latest being that they had setup a £200 payment from my current account, every month. Well the ‘Account Manager’ that set it up, set it up for 2 days after the due date, so immediately this was classed as a late payment, with all the natural charges and interest attached.

I thought enough is enough, so tried writing to the Chief Exec, usually you get a better class of monkey typewritter operator. On this occasion, I thought I had, got a letter back a few weeks later, stating that they were sorry… blah fee’s refunded…etc I thought, at last hopefully it’s setup correctly.

Nope, wrong! I checked my current account this morning, and what’s this, seems a bit lighter than I had thought it would be. FUCKWITS, they’re now taking the payment as this regular £200 jobby, and now a DD as well.

So it would seem, even the Chief Exec’s team, can’t even manage a simple task. Barclays, you suck.

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Example

Me: did you reseat the hard drive in server xyz?
Fuckwit: ?
me: what are you asking here fuckwit, you know you have to put a question in front of the ?

Enough said. When people do it to me now, they will be referred to this entry, as I think 3 fuckwits today have done it.

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Called up the store, and they said they would look into it and get it repaired. Hmm would they have repaired it if I hadn’t called? me thinks not, even though apparently a ‘Second Repair’ has priority. Later this afternoon, the store called me back, saying it had been fixed, would need to be tested tomorrow, and then shipped out, for delivery that evening. When I asked the ‘Genius’ to check the address, he correctly identified it was my work address, and couldn’t see a problem of it being delivered in the evening. Anyways.

He also said the squeaky hinge problem was not covered under the warranty, and there would be a charge normally, but as I asked for this to be repaired at the same time as the back being fixed, they would do it for free. Hmm this is interesting, as I have never mentioned a squeaky hinge, didn’t know it had one to be honest.

I am thinking these ‘Genius’s would fail an interview for McDonalds at this rate.

Saga continues… maybe on Monday they will launch a Genius v2 rather than a 3g iPhone… that would be nice

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If only everything could be that easy

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Then I got a couple of messages on facebook, but no email notification. Very bad.

So ssh’ed on to one of my exim frontends, and the logs look pretty bad:

2008-06-03 21:39:59 1K3cFY-0004zM-Nt == <snip> R=internal T=remote_smtp defer (-45): SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM: <snip> SIZE=10797: host backend [x.x.x.x]: 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources

Hmm this is bad. Basically I have three exim frontends, all feeding to my Exchange 2008 back end. Unfortauntely as this is my personal mail server, my pennies don’t spread to contingency on the backend, i.e. clustering.

So all the mail at the moment is safely queue’d on the frontends, until I fix the Exchange server.

Think it may have 1) run out of space 2) as it is M$ and been up a while, need a reboot.

Sending this via mobile (well via email hosted elsewhere) will be fun to see if it get’s into the exchange, and then to the blog. This actually wont post until I fix it all

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Pft. I retract my last blog entry regarding my MacBook.

You know I said it would be fixed next day, well the Apple Store called me this morning saying that it had been repaired, only 4 days late. I thought well, wasn’t really a huge problem.

Got up a couple of hours early (am on the night-shift at the moment, so sleep during the day), and thought I would take a detor on the drive to work, via Bluewater.

Got to the store, and had to wait about 15 minutes for someone to ackowledge I was there (the two people in the Genius bar were clearly too busy with their iPhones). Anyways a nice lady genius took my details, and presented me with my ‘fixed’ MacBook.

Well fixed, as in half-fixed. They had only changed half the case, so I still had cracks all over the bottom half. When I pointed this out, the genius said they had just carried out what I asked for. When I said all I said was here is my mac, fix it please, I didn’t specifiy what part of the case. I also pointed out that it said on the repair receipt to replace all panels. Grrrr, see seems quite nice about it all, but still the point is they cocked up.

She said she would need to take it back in for a 2nd repair, but they didn’t have the parts in stock, and don’t get a delivery until Tuesday. woop!

Naturally not happy at this point, as it’s quite a drive their from my house, and it’s always pissed me off that I bought the mac online, yet they don’t seem to offer any ‘mail’ support.

I had a word with one of the managers, and she said she could get it couriered back to me, once it had been repaired. Still super-chuffed off, such a waste of my time. GRRR

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It seems everytime I go through the drive though, I get the wrong order by the time I get back to the office, grrr.

Today was no exception, so thought I’d email them using the email addy from their site. So string a big email together, and send it off.

Oh guess what, it bounces. Should’a guessed!

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From BarclayCard, stating I have missed 3 payments. Well from my banking experience this is something I would NEVER do. Just to prevent this kind of thing, I always have a direct debit set up on any of my bills.

Well it seems they have not taken a direct debit since I lost my card in September. Weird I am thinking. Especially as they haven’t even told me any of this as yet, and are charging me for it too. Grrr

Phoned up the New Deli call centre, who were as much help as talking to a… well I don’t know. Very unhelpful. Apparently BarclayCard dont have any managers outside 9 to 5.

So I have faxed over a very snotty complaint to their cheif executive.

Grumble Grumble Grumble.

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