Over the last few months I’ve been looking at various ISPs to sign up to, since I use a lot of bandwidth since I am self-employed.

I called O2 (since they provide my mobile phone contract), and they advised me that they have a Fair Use Policy. I gave them full details of how much bandwidth I use – around 60GB during the day over a month, and around 100-200GB overnight.

I finally got a response from them by telephone telling me this limit was around 1 terabyte. I asked them to confirm this by email:

From: Safwaan Ismail <Ismail.Safwaan@O2.COM>
Date: 20/02/2010 21:33
This email will give them know what’s happening. It will also explain our how we’re applying our Fair Use policy. There’s still no “cap” on the network – but when we have customers downloading over 1,000Gb we need to take action. This activity really is having a detrimental impact to the majority of our customers

and confirmed this later on that it was indeed 1,000 gigabytes and not 1,000 gigabits:

From: Safwaan Ismail <Ismail.Safwaan@O2.COM>
Date: 20/02/2010 21:20
Just to confirm it’s 1,000 Gigabytes!

(I can provide the full text of the emails if required)

Fine I thought; and signed up on their Pro package on 21/02/2010, and was connected on the 01/03/2010.

On the 14/04/2010; I received the following email:

“We hope that you are enjoying your home broadband experience with us. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ve been using significant amounts of our network capacity and it’s affecting the service that our other customers get.”

I called them and was told I was over my limit for using 108GB! I called to complain and ask for an explaination. I was told (over many hours of calls) that Safwaan had made a mistake, and I shouldn’t have listened to him and instead gone by their Fair Usage Policy.

I have all these calls recorded if they would be any use (despite one of them advising me he doesn’t want the call used, not even in court; that’s a risk I’m possibly willing to take).

I was told they would not be able to provide me broadband. I explained that this was a violation of the agreement on the contract, and they disagreed and could only offer £40 on my mobile phone bill.

To change to another company that provides the bandwidth they promised has cost me £283.50 extra for the year. I’ve asked for this money but they would not accept and refuse to discuss it further.

I’ve recently received a bill from them for £1.75, and they’ve told me that this was an error and would be refunded to my credit card, but can provide no explaination of this charge since they have a 3-month free broadband promotion.

Can’t say I’m very impressed. Have contacted The Register and BBC Watchdog so far.

Posted in General, Personal | 1 Comment »

Letter (reply) to my MP, @douglascarswell on the Digital Economy Bill (it’s long and detailed!) http://www.monkeyboi.com/blog/4486 #debill

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I want to change to o2 broadband, but i dont know if how much i download is going to be a problem.

I use my home connection for my work, and for backing up my home folders. This means I download approximately 150-200GB a month. I can be more specific than this.

I emailed O2 to ask them, didn’t get a reply, so I phoned them up and asked.

A really nice guy, called Matt said:

We can’t forsee a problem with how much you download but can’t guarantee it.

He said to email O2, which I have, four days ago. They say they’ll reply within 24 hours but they don’t seem interested in getting back to me.

Today I sent a message to @o2 on Twitter. They say they can’t help with not receiving an email response.

All they could say was:

“you might be affected by fair use”, and

“if your usage is classed as affecting others then we would contact you”

Being as I can actually give them the last three years of my usage, they can’t even give me a clue whether this would be too much or not.

I could go with O2 and chance that I’ll be ok, but then I might end up with a letter after 3 months telling me I’m downloading too much, meaning that I’m stuck in a contract; and obviously wouldn’t be able to do my job.

At this stage, O2 on Twitter aren’t replying to me anymore and I still haven’t had an email back after 4 days (despite them saying they’ll reply within 24 hours).

I’m writing this blog in the hope that other people will then be aware of this and hopefully be able to advise on what O2 might be able to do, or an alternative ISP to use (though I’d prefer to go with O2, since I have a mobile with them).

Either that, or you never know, O2 might actually read this and realise they’ve got a bit of a problem here. If they could sort this out, I’d be a far happier customer – rather than considering changing my Mobile operator next year because of O2 ignoring me.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

This has been a total nightmare! But it’s been fun too!

I’m trying to transfer Android from an Acer D250 to another Acer D250 without Android. I want Android because it boots quick for web browsing (and I’m not leaving it on standby like some fools on Twitter suggest), Gentoo because it’s great for web development and Windows XP for graphics designy stuff. Because GIMP sucks.

If anyone’s got any questions as to WHY I had to do it this way, please do comment. After a week of having trouble; mostly with Windows XP – I got to to work using a DVD Drive, 3 SD cards, 3 HDDs, two IDE-USB converters, Ghostzilla, BartPE and SysRecCD. I also needed nLite for the original XP installation I’d made.

Before starting, I had a working Android/XP installation, a installation of Gentoo (originally made on another machine) and my installation of Windows XP too.

1. Backup Gentoo to a .tar.gz
2. Backup Windows XP with NTFSClone
3. Use Ghostzilla to duplicate the working Android/XP to Netbook – Android and XP both work fine...
4. Use NTFSClone and restore to a secondary drive
5. Make a BartPE CD with the Intel Storage drivers
6. Boot BartPE and delete everything on the NetBook’s C: drive
7. Copy all the files from the restored NTFSclone image (on a secondary drive) to the C: drive in BartPE
8. Reboot and hope! You should now have Android, and your installation of Windows XP
9. Backup using GhostZilla since it’s now got Android and XP on.
10. Reboot into SysRecCD
11. Use gParted to resize Netbook’s drive to make space for Gentoo and swap partition. You’ll have to move the 4GB FAT32 shared partition of Android/XP. Make the two new partitions (ext3 and swap) for Linux as Logical partitions.
12. Then do mke2fs and mkswapfs on the new partitions.
13. Extract the gentoo.tar.gz to the ext3 partition
14. Don’t install Grub. It’ll probably break everything. Boot back into Windows XP.
15. Download the latest Grub4Dos and copy grldr to the root of C:
    
16. Edit the boot.ini to add in (info here)
    

       C:\grldr="Gentoo Linux"

17. Make a menu.lst file and add in your boot stuff (info here); mine is:

      timeout 0

      title Gentoo Linux

      root (hd0,4)

      kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/sda5

Then back it all up!!

WOOOHOOO! I’ve learnt loads after doing this! Huge thanks to @rbsfou and to @kichimi; and especially to @flirtygertie for her Netbook and putting up with me too!

Hope it helps someone! Any questions, please do ask!

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RAID is all set up and working! Finally! Very happy with it.

Sorry, this is going to look a lot of rubbish to most people, but here’s how I got my RAID to work and the diag output!

I’m pretty sure it’d be useful to someone.

If you don’t find the below interesting, I think you’d like this at least:

 (more...)

Posted in General, RAID Array, Work | No Comments »

Well, all the bits finally turned up! I haven’t actually much yet apart from making a few decisions, and taking a few pictures:

• Can’t run my backup on Windows XP x86 – it doesn’t support more than 2TiB, so looking at a second Linux box. For the moment, my backups are going on the 3 separate 1TB drives I already have.
• XFS seems great, but doesn’t care about bad blocks. Similar with JFS, although I haven’t been able to find out details. EXT3 seems the best bet, but if the FS goes over 8TiB, I’m going to have trouble
• Software RAID is better than hardware in some terms – specifically in diagnosis. You can actually check temperature and SMART status per drive.
• oh, and with hardware, you can’t span an array across multiple controllers
• There’s a way to automatically check for Bad Blocks – see here
• MDRaid seems to be the best way for software RAID
  
• Fill all the drives with data, and randomly corrupt sdX and mdX, see if it can cope – and randomly remove one drive, see what happens

Ok, on with the geek pr0n. Enjoy some pictures of what I’ve got so far. Very impressed with the case too actually!

Posted in General, Personal, RAID Array, Work | 3 Comments »

Well, I finally did it. I’ve just bought 6,000GB of Western Digital Hard drives, a massive case and am finally planning to set up my fairly massive RAID!

I’ve spent a lot of time weighing up whether to spend (literally) hundreds of pounds on a Hardware RAID with all the nice nobbly bits, or to use Software RAID, what type of RAID to use, how to get all the hardware in there, whether its possible to extend a RAID easily without losing data, it’s been one hell of a battle.

Along with help from my friends Rich and Thom, who have a slightly better system than what I’ve got an are using hardware, I’ve learnt a hell of a lot. There was also a very useful Slashdot post, Grishankh (216268) gave some excellent advice and I’d really like to thank him for it.

So what have I learnt about hardware and software RAID?

• RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!
• Hardware RAID is incredible expensive. If you need two PCI-E cards the same, you’ll want identical cards too.
• Most hardware RAID cards are actually fake, and use software RAID. Expect to pay through the nose.
• SMART monitoring on a hardware RAID is fraught with problems. Only some cards can tell you the SMART info.
• Some hardware RAID cards use proprietary methods to store data, if you card dies and you can’t get another one, you’re possibly screwed.
• Drives must must MUST be the same size, and preferably the same format to work best.
• RAID 0 is just for spanning disks, RAID 1 is great but a tad excessive. RAID 5 seems a good, happy medium. If one drive dies, you’ll be fine, but you’ll probably lose data if more than one goes. But you really should have a backup anyway.
• If you want to extend a drive, you’ll probably have to use a software RAID app like LVM on top anyway, so any benefits of using hardware is kinda lost.

That’s why I’m using software RAID. It’s only a file server, it’s not for anything mission-critical, I’d just like to have a big drive, and a massive back up of it, so I’m planning to set up two software RAIDs in the end, one on Linux, one on Windows. At the moment, I’m just going to be backing up anything important.

In terms of configuration; I’m no expert at this, but it looks like I’m to use:

• IDE drive as bootup, and another as my (temporary) personal backup
• 6x 1TB Western Digital drives connected under RAID 5 using
  • mdraid
  • LVM
• to be honest, unless anyone else has any better ideas, I’ll probably stick with the Gentoo Guide as to setting up RAID.

So what about the hardware? Ok, well obviously I’ve gone for:

• 6x 1000GB Western Digital GREEN POWER Hard Drives
• Thermaltake Element S Black Mid Tower Case
  • it took me SO long to find a decent case!
  • I went for this one since it has 7x 3.5″ bays, 3x 5.25″ and a ton of room for fans for cooling
• I’ve already got a damn fine OCZ PSU for it which I’m hoping will cope great
• a couple of removable tray caddies – two SATA and two IDE just in case I’ll need them
• and a crapton of SATA cables
• plus some fans

Cost a lot less than hardware RAID and should get me set up quite nicely! If anyone has any advice though, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks to all those who helped me =D

Posted in General, Personal, RAID Array, Work | 1 Comment »

Things are actually going pretty well for me at the moment. Work is very busy, which is great, and I’m just about having enough time to squeeze in being sociable and seeing my friends. Sure it’s a bit more hectic that I’d like it to be, and things like hayfever, some quiet bouts of depression and people being a nightmare, it’s been ok.

Obviously missing a lot of my old friends. Seems to have been months since I’ve seen some of them. Others’ I’ve seen quite regularly, but things like Facebook help to stay in contact, so it’s not so bad.

Some arguments with, well, mostly one friend. Similar things have happened before though, with them and other people. Mostly about things that I’ve done wrong, but they’ve not been able to tell me I’ve done anything wrong, so things have got worse. Instead of just being honest and saying what they do and don’t like , it’s turned out as anger towards me, and I’ve taken that as them wanting more attention. What I didn’t realise was actually that’s what’s been getting to them, and ended up in a fairly major argument. That caused me to get pretty upset because I didn’t realise I was doing anything wrong at all, and they were too scared to be honest and just say how they’re feeling. Of course, now I’m getting all the blame for it when I didn’t know what I was doing was hurting them instead of helping.

I don’t understand why people just can’t be honest and explain what’s up, rather than hiding behind hints and expecting friends to just realise what’s up. I guess I’m as bad as anyone like this, but it’s got to a really hurtful argument that I could really do without right now. Especially since it’s all been a shock since I didn’t expect it, I thought things have been great lately.

To summarise, if somethings’ wrong – talk about it. Don’t hide behind hints and attention-seeking. It just causes anger and resentment.

More specifically, if you don’t appreciate that someone is trying to be there for you, accept that they’re trying, and appreciate it – but explain that’s not something you need right now. Don’t hide behind your emotions, anger, violence and sarcasm, because anyone sensitive is going to think that you’d appreciate more support; which is going to make it worse.

Other than that things are actually pretty good. Had some nice chats to my other friends, and actually feeling a lot more comfortable about moving forward with my life, which has felt like it’s kinda been on hold for a long time because of stuff on my mind, work and commitments.

One company I must mention – Microdirect suck. Lots of people seem to complain about their poor customer service, and there’s plenty of other stories about how terrible MD are, especially with awful returns. My experience? Bought a motherboard that turned out to be DOA (Dead on Arrival). Obviously I’d tested all the other components, and they were all fine in my testing board. This is for a customer, so I wasn’t too happy, but I guess sometimes Motherboard fail, right? (first time for me with this manufacturer!) I arranged a return, took days to get an RMA number, but I sent it back with their postage. Admittedy RMA postage was free for the first 30 days. Being as it was broken on receipt, I don’t see why I should EVER pay for return unless it turns out to be fine, but that’s just my opinion.

Anyway. I received the new one about 10 days later, remember I’ve got a customer waiting patiently. Got it all set up. Same problem. DOA; won’t boot, nothing on screen. Exactly the same. I checked the serial number, it’s the same as the old board! They’ve sent me the SAME motherboard back as what I’d sent to them. I phoned, they told me I was lying and that they’d probably put the motherboard in the old box, despite the board already having signs of being screwed in, having a loose northbridge heatsink and the backplate not being in a plastic bag. They couldn’t deal with it on the phone, so I had to fill in an RMA online. I said I’d like them to arrange collection and a refund, and to call me to arrange.

I didn’t even agree to their Terms and Conditions (disable javascript and it still sends). Of course, they just sent me an RMA notice a few days later again. Useless. I’ve heard many many times that they’ve a habit of saying things aren’t received, but I don’t see why I should pay for return proof of postage. Haven’t heard a word back from them and they won’t reply to my emails, so I’m arranging a chargeback with my credit card company. Bottom line – don’t deal with crappy companies such as Microdirect.

Must get in contact with some old friends, and get on with some side projects I’ve had in mind for years. It’ll happen this year. I’m sure. Aside from the arguments and stuff being my fault without me realising or being told about it, things are actually pretty good for once! Can’t actually complain, but could do with a hug if anyone has one spare?

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

Been a good week and a good weekend, got quite a lot of things done; been working on a PHP-based DNS manager that synchronises with other servers, and some gallery code and it’s all gone quite well. Though, I am slightly fed up with Javascript!

Other than that, had a pretty good weekend, met up with Kirkingham and did some videoing in Clacton Pier. Never realised how great my Fujifilm Finepix F10 is at recording video – happily does 30fps even when on the Techno Frog ride! I do have the video. I may post it if I can edit it properly (and get permission).

Feeling pretty rubbish today though. No idea why, had a nice sleep and a lie in, got a few bits done today, and spoken to a few friends, but actually feeling really low, quite sick and really quite down. Hopefully it won’t last, but I don’t know what to do in this kinda situation. Meh.

Take it easy everyone

Posted in General | No Comments »

I’ve been using Alex King’s fantastic Twitter-Tools plugin. Unfortutely it’s broken in WordPress 2.7.1 (and probably 2.5 and above). The category list doesn’t appear properly, so Tweets are put into the Uncategorised category.

I have found his SVN, which does seem to have an updated version, but before I found it, I ended up fixing it myself. My fix is based on Version 1.6, 2009-02-18, with only the category problem fixed. It seems to work fine for me, but the SVN is probably best for most people.

If you’d prefer my version, you can get a syntax-highlighted version here, or the plain text version here.  However, you’re probably better off going to alexking.org and trying his SVN version!

Thanks to Alex for a great plugin!

Posted in General, Twitter | 1 Comment »