Three Rock Masts

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Barry O'Donovan

Living below Three Rock mountain in Stepaside, I often look up the many communication masts. Today I trekked up on the bike and took a few (dark and bad) photos.

 

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Porting Experience with Vodafone

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Barry O'Donovan

This post could equally be called Why do Service Providers Make Their Problems my Problem?

I recently migrated my company’s mobile phone account over to Vodafone via The Carphone Warehouse. We had two numbers to port but when I got my first bill, there were three subscriptions on it – one for an unknown mobile number.

I rang Vodafone on 1907 and the agent’s first response was to ask me to return to Carphone Warehouse. This irked me. Yes, the sales agent in Carphone Warehouse most likely made the error. But I’m not their customer. They are not billing me. Vodafone are. This seems pretty cut and dry – there’s a subscription I’m not using, don’t have and don’t want and one that I did not receive any phone discount for on my bill. Just remove it and refund me. Take it up with Carphone Warehouse on your time, not mine.

So, after explaining to the agent that I am Vodafone’s customer and expected them to sort it, she said she would and put me on hold. Eventually she got back to me to let me know that she had left a message for the agent in Carphone Warehouse who would call me within an hour. I had a sunken feeling. This should just have been dealt with. The how and why and means of it being dealt with are not my problem and I don’t want to know about it.

As expected, one working day later and no word from anyone. I ran Vodafone up again. This time the agent checked the notes and let me know it was with the agent in Carphone Warehouse and they were waiting on them to get back to them.

I made some simple points:

  • I was promised a call within an hour which I did not get;
  • I made the point that I did not not want to call Vodafone every day for an update – I just expected that it would be done;
  • I was told that I could assume it would be done. To this I replied if I did that, I’d be looking at the same charge on my bill next month.
  • The reply was that I could then call in to have it really taken care of. I explained I’d then be €100 out of pocket and not €50.
  • I was advised to call in a week.
  • I explained this was not my mistake – can it not be diary-ed in there for someone to follow it up in a number of days and for me to be called when it was done. No, this is an inbound call centre only. WTF?!?

So, it’s still not solved and still my problem. Why?

Oh yeah, rather than asking if I’d like to take a quick seven question survey on your phone service, why not just answer the bloody phone by a human within three rings? Then you wouldn’t need to do surveys!

UPDATE (~4 hours later): I tweeted this to @VodafoneIreland after writing it up. They got back to me (here and here):

I’ve DM’d the details and gotten further replies which is great.

I just hope the real issue has not been lost in the quick resolution through the public forum of Twitter: Vodafone’s problems / procedures / relationship with agents / etc is not the customer’s problem. Don’t make it the customer’s problem and don’t expose it to the customer. Just fix it.

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Duke Nukem Never Comes Early

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Barry O'Donovan

I’m not a gamer and I never played Duke Nukem. But I was always taken by this article: “Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem” which is required reading for anyone developing software products.

On May 6, 2009, everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game’s developer,3D Realms, told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel.

It looks like someone else is going to release Duke Nukem now but they’ve delayed the release date in hilarious fashion (hilarious assuming you’ve read the above article):

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Curtains for SGU and the Stargate franchise

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Barry O'Donovan

It’s a sad way to start a Monday when I browse the handful of feeds on my RSS aggregator  and read from an entry entitled until we meet again on Joseph Mallozzi’s  Weblog (Stargate Executive Producer and writer) that the end has arrived:

That was the title of the email I received from Brad Wright late yesterday, an email confirming the worst.  Despite his best efforts and a situation so fluid it vacillated from “almost yes” to “probably not” and back to “almost yes” on any given week, final word had come down.  There would be no SGU movie. Stargate, that had spanned fourteen years, 354 episodes, two DVD movies – that had helped build a network and establish itself as a studio’s most successful television franchise was coming to an end.  It was a terrific ride and, while it would have been great to give the fans that final chapter, that last crossover movie in which Brad had envisioned incorporating elements from all three shows (SG-1, SGA, and SGU), the truth is television is a fickle business.  When it comes down to decision time, it’s less”What have you accomplished?” and more “What have you done for me lately?”.

It was indeed a terrific ride which never failed to excite the sci-fi loving geeky kid hidden inside of me.

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Benchmarking the Mikrotik Routerboards RB750 and RB750G

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Barry O'Donovan

Continuing on from today’s earlier post, Benchmarking the Mikrotik Routerboard RB1100, I now present some results for the RB750 and RB750G using the same methodology and platform.

The RB750 and the RB750G are two identical looking routers intended for the SOHO environment:

The specifications for the RB750 (with differences for the RB750G in italics and parenthesis) are:

  • five FastEthernet 100Mbps (Gigabit 1Gbps) ports;
  • 32MB DDR SDRAM ;
  • 64MB on board NAND storage;
  • Atheros AR7240 400MHz (AR7161 680MHz) CPU;
  • powered by PoE or power jack;
  • up to 3W (6W) power consumption;
  • ports 2-5 share dedicated switch chip allowing full 100Mbps (1Gbps) throughput;
  • all ports can be individually configured.
  • €31.73 (€54.61) from Wireless Connect.

Both routers come with an L4 license of Mikritik’s RouterOS which is built on the Linux kernel so anyone familiar with Linux networking will get up to speed on these boxes in no time.

As a disclaimer in case it is not clear, all routing tests are done using just two ports – one for the traffic generator and one for the receiver – with the device under testing routing the packets between two networks. As such, on the RB750, the maximum throughput we could achieve would be 100Mbps.

I ran tests for plain routing and also, in evaluating it for certain uses, over a VPN tunnel.

All results are presented below. Given the wealth of features, I think these are super boxes at a super price. So far I’ve put them on the end of an Imagine DSL line providing IPv4 and v6 over PPPoE and the end of a 30Mb UPC line taking its UPC IP via DHCP. They provide firewall, NAT, port forwarding, OpenVPN tunnels, QoS, DHCP, DNS caching and VLANs for phone / VoIP and managment networks.

 

 

 

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