Peter's Blog

I was slightly dismayed to receive a letter from a debt collection agency threatening me with legal action for the vast sum of £50.80. They were acting on behalf of Virgin Media which is interesting as I am not a customer of theirs and had not been sent any bills in various shades of red. I suspected it was something to do with the NTL broadband and phone I had in my old house. Before I moved I had rung NTL to tell them I was moving and I wouldn't need their services as the new house wasn't cabled up. NTL were in the process of being taken over by Virgin and the woman I spoke too seemed very insistant that I subscribed to Virgin's ADSL Broadband service in the new house. I was reluctant as I hadn't done any research into ADSL broadband services at that time and didn't want to commit. NTL broadband was very good but it's cable, a totally different beast to ADSL. I left the matter there, NTL had been informed and I didn't pursue Virgin Broadband.

To sort the debt out I decided to ring Virgin Media Customer Services and they were most helpful. They admitted they had made a mistake and cancelled the debt.

There was a good reason why I didn't get any threatening bills: they were sent to my old NTL email account that I didn't use after I left NTL..

Someone at work told me I could get a free upgrade of my NTL broadband from 750k to 2M.

I ran through the upgrade on this site and, well, here are the results of a benchmark from ADSLguide.

This kind of thing makes me happy

NTL broadband connection died at about 5pm. Checked DI624 router and could connect to it's admin functions from laptop via WiFi but could not do a good DHCP renew (it renewed but to 192.168.100.1 which is a local subnet address, not a 'proper' internet address). Looking at the cable modem the ready light was flashing which past experience tells me the line is dead. I didn't bother ringing tech support this time, I was patient.

Had another odd network problem. Happily surfing wirelessly on laptop when connection died. No amount of rebooting laptop restored connection so investigated further. Main desktop pc could connect to DI-624 admin pages so that was not a problem. Trued a DHCP-renew and it timed out. Unplugged power on broadband router and plugged back in, still no joy. Rebooted the DI-624, did a DHCP renew and now all is fine (i.e. you are reading this). Odd.

Update: persistant problems all evening. Took the opportunity to flash the DI624 with a new version released last August. This reset everything to default values and I've only just got things talking again. I'm on WPA-PSK authentication.

USB Flash Keys: a must have.

Not sure I ever documented that I got the free 600Kbps to 750Kbps upgrade from NTL.

Not so much NTHell as WIFIHell.

I had a brief flirtation with Skype. I installed it because I was interested in the rather competitive call rates. It also works out cheaper for national calls than my current bog-standard NTL service.

However, I uninstalled it again for two reasons:

• Cannot imagine my wife getting to grips with using a computer, headphone and microphone to make a call.
• While Skype was installed it took my laptop about a minute to come out of hibernate instead of 15 seconds or so. That is not tolerable.

I never actually made a call with it. How can there be no delays in calls?

We use Alpha Telecom phone cards. In Peckham, London there are dodgy street sellers who sell three £5 cards for £10. Skype is not that competitive. The cards have the advantage that once the credit is used up that's it, you cannot talk any more without going to London. Saves plenty on the phone bill.

For the first time in nearly a year my ntl broadband connection is down and I am having to blog via my mobile. I waited on the phone for 25 minutes to be told there is an outage in my area. When the 'ready' light on the cable modem stops flashing I am back in business, no idea when that might be.

Let's see:

strFred = "hello world"

Syntax highlighting from a mobile, cool.

Update: up again, about 6 hours later.

Windows XP SP2 has not fixed the flakiness of my wireless networking. A summary of my setup:

• Dell Inspiron 500m notebook with Dell Truemobile 1300 WLAN Mini PCI card.
• DLink DI624 Wireless router

Most of the time this works fine but occasionally when the laptop comes out of hibernation it fails to connect. I have to go back into hibernate and out again to get things rolling.

When it's working it gives me a 54.0Mbps connection which is ample for my 750kbps NTL Internet connection (and thanks to NTL for the free upgrade from 600k).

Got a version of Visual Traceroute free on a cover disk. It's a souped-up traceroute that shows a world map and gives a host of peripheral information.

It confirms that this blog is hosted in Dallas, Texas and is on a Debian linux box. These days you don't always know where the servers may be.

Ooh Er, it even shows the town I live in if I search for my home server. Do I want the world to know?

My friend zugz uses NTL World for hosting and it seems he is hosted in Canada. He owes me some maple syrup.

Got a version of Visual Traceroute free on a cover disk. It's a souped-up traceroute that shows a world map and gives a host of peripheral information.

It confirms that this blog is hosted in Dallas, Texas and is on a Debian linux box. These days you don't always know where the servers may be.

Ooh Er, it even shows the town I live in if I search for my home server. Do I want the world to know?

My friend zugz uses NTL World for hosting and it seems he is hosted in Canada. He owes me some maple syrup.

My broadband connection suddenly stopped working. This is NTL broadband for the record, using a DLink DI624 Wireless router. All PCs lost connection but could still connect to the router.

The problem turned out to be because the Router had lost the IP address allocated to it from the ISP via DHCP. I pressed the DHCP renew button on the status panel and it all burst into life. Not sure if it's a problem with my new XP setup, deciding to drop the DHCP for me.

I had to manually tell dyndns.org about my new IP address as I don't have my Gentoo box set up to do it. The router should be able to update it automatically but it crashes every time I try to set that up. Hum, maybe they have a new version of the firmware out...

NTL have put up the cost of their 1M broadband service £3 to £37.99 which has finally motivated me to downgrade to 600k which is still £24.99. I spend most of my online time reading about python which doesn't really justify the extra cost. I type at a laptop in front of a 37 inch TV so streaming audio or video isn't very interesting to me either.

Update: 15 May 2004: my maximum download speed has dropped from about 100kb/sec to about 67kb/sec. I think I can live with this. It still feels sweet using broadband, going back to dial-up would be like living without satellite tv and having to suffer with only 5 terrestrial channels.