Internet – Page 5

Rogers Outage

January 20, 2014January 12, 2014 Greg

[sc:internet-category ]In my recent post about building an emergency server I mentioned I had lost Internet access for a week. Here’s a little background on the issue and my experience with Rogers.

Only Dec 21st, 2012 a huge ice storm came through southern Ontario and I lost power for 25 hours. This wasn’t a big deal and when power came up the next night everything was fine with the internet connection.

However, overnight as power was being restored, a branch came down and hit the cable line to my house. It didn’t take the line down, but it was stretched several feet lower than it was the day before.

Everything functioned reasonably well, but I was getting intermittent drops. This wasn’t surprising as power was still down for hundreds of thousands of people.

Things continued for a while, I had a significant outage of about 6 hours one day, but other than that it was fine.

Until December 30th, when I arrived home the internet was down and it didn’t come back up. I called Rogers and they couldn’t connect to the modem, or anyone else in the area so they opened a ticket and scheduled an appointment.

Still getting through the backlog, my appointment date was for Jan 6th, a week later…

Having my mail server at home meant I had to get an alternate site up and running which wasn’t much of an issue. I called back in to Rogers to confirm I was still down the next day and they also confirmed the rest of the area was back up.

At this point the support rep from Rogers also wanted me to swap out the modem, in case that was the issue. I dropped by my local Rogers store and got them to swap out the modem, and that’s where the problems really started.

Once I arrived at Rogers to swap the modem, I found out they don’t make the modem I have anymore, that wasn’t very surprising and they brought out a new DOCSIS modem for me. They activated it and while we were talking the subject of my current plan came up. Turns out the new modem didn’t support the plan I had and so there was a different modem I needed.

However the other modem was a router/wireless unit as well and cost more per month, which I didn’t want to pay so I said I’d purchase the unit instead.

This seemed to confuse them and after talking to their manager it turns out they didn’t have a modem for purchase available, only a rental unit.

After going back and forth for a while they suggested I take the rental unit and then call in to customer service, which could ship me a unit to purchase.

Getting home and setting up the modem proved out that it wasn’t the modem, which I knew, but sometimes you just have to play along to get through to the next step 😉

I called in to customer service and it turns out they can’t ship me one, well they can but there’s a $49.95 charge… I really do hate Rogers.

There was nothing to do but wait for the service call… and setup the new modem/router.

The new router was pretty straight forward, kind of bland looking as far as the web interface goes but functional. The one issue I had with it was that I use port 8080 for an OpenVPN server, however the router uses port 8080 for its management interface and you can’t disable/redirect it. In the end I changed OpenVPN to port 943 and everything was up and running.

A week later the Rogers tech showed up, found no signal at the house, went to the pole and promptly started taking the cable down 🙂

3 hours later, all was good and things were back up and running.

Emergency Server!

January 6, 2014September 9, 2014 Greg Leave a comment

[sc:internet-category ]In southern Ontario last week a big ice store came through and took out power and Internet connections for many. I managed to survive with only a 25 hour power outage, which while annoying, was not a huge deal overall. Since the storm, my internet connection has been a little unreliable, but was working in general. A week later it’s gone and hasn’t come back 🙁

This was not a huge surprise to me, a tree limb had come down on the cable coming in to my house and stretched it more than I thought it would survive. However after a few more days I guess it finally gave up the ghost. Unfortunately that means a service call from Rogers and with the backlog from the storm, at 6 days before they can get out to me.

If I was just a normal user, that would be unfortunate, but not the end of the world. As I’m running my mail server on that connection, 6 days is far too long to go without!

Fortunately I do have a few friends that are up and running and I’ve managed to borrow a connection that I can run a server on until I get back up. However there was no way I was taking my entire AD/Exchange environment to their place to run so I need to build something that would do for a while.

I decided it that this was a good time to try out Zarafa in a ‘production’ environment. The first step was to grab a piece of hardware to run it. I still had my Acer Timeline 1810T, which is a fine little box to run as a server.

Ubuntu

First up was installing Ubuntu. I had a copy of 12.04 already burned so I used that, it was the 32bit version which was fine as the Timeline only had 4g of RAM anyway.

In a earlier post I mentioned some of the things you needed to do to make it livable, and I’ve found a few more:

SSH isn’t installed by default, who in their right mind doesn’t install this by default in this day and age?
By default, the login prompt does not include root, only “users” on the system. This is good and bad. Good in the fact that usually you shouldn’t be logging in as root, but bad as if you need to you can’t do it from the GUI.

Now some may be saying that root login isn’t such a big deal, but let me tell you. While setting up the system something corrupted my user profile, each time I tried to login it just lopped back to the login page.

That’s a problem when its the only admin account other than root 🙂

Fortunately you can still use the virtual terminals (accessed through Ctl-Alt-F1, etc.) to get to a command shell and login as root. You can always get back to the GUI login through Ctl-Alt-F7.

Of course the first thing you do here is to re-enable root to be able to login through the GUI, this article takes you through the required changes.

Fixing my user account came down to a simple delete and re-create.

The support Zarafa, several other packages are required, including Postfix, MySQL, Apache and others. These are all available through the Ubuntu Software Manager and installed without issue.

Zarafa

The Zarafa Community Hub is the place to go to get the open source version of Zarafa. I pulled down the 32bit version and followed the install instructions. Everything went smoothly until the Postfix integration step, which don’t exist in the install section. There is a very confusing section later on in the manual that talks about Postfix, but this is not very clear at all.

A better set of instructions are in the help area, however even they are missing an important item. You have to make the vmail user an admin in Zarafa (edit the Zarafa config file, it even uses vmail as an example in the comments).

After the install and a reboot I noticed that the server didn’t come back up automatically. Turns out that it tries to start before the MySQL database is up. I’ve always hated *nix startup scripts and instead of finding the “right” solution of getting the boot order right, I just added a quick “sleep 15” to the start of the Zarafa server init script, which solved the problem.

Finally I had to setup the outbound mail configuration. Rogers blocks port 25 outbound (not inbound fortunately) and require you to use their SMTP server with authentication. There’s a good set of instructions on how to setup authenticated mail forwarding with post here.

The last item of note is IMAP access. By default Zarafa disableds IMAP so you have to go and enabled in the config file.

Outstanding Items

This leaves a few items outstanding:

No SSL certs: I didn’t bother to move my SSL certs over for web and mail access as this should only be a short term solution. I’ll use SSH to tunnel in to the server and get to the web interface to read my mail for the time being.
No ActiveSync support: Again, just couldn’t be bothered to install it without an SSL cert.
No Web server: I don’t have much on my home web server, but there are a few things I’ll miss for a few days. If it gets too bad I’ll move my web data over.
No Spam filter: I have a custom spam filter setup on my standard server, I haven’t moved it over but if the spam gets too bad I will later in the week.

But at least mail is back up and running!

JumbleCat WordPress Plugins Update

November 25, 2013November 25, 2013 Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is another post in an ongoing series of articles here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first four were:

It’s been a while so I thought it was time to update what I’ve added and removed.

Plugins Added:

Add Admin CSS

Plugin’s Description: Interface for easily defining additional CSS (inline and/or by URL) to be added to all administration pages.

In the previous list of addons I included Ozh’s Admin Menu settings which let’s you convert the left hand admin menu to a drop down menu style. I use the Add Admin CSS addon to add a bit of custom CSS to make the admin menu look flat, so from:

To:

Admin Post Navigation

Plugin’s Description: Adds links to navigate to the next and previous posts when editing a post in the WordPress admin.

This is handy if you want to move between posts without having to go back to the post list. Just one of those little plugins that are useful in certain circumstances and probably should be part of the core WordPress install.

BAW Post Views Count

Plugin’s Description: Count views for post and pages.

This is just a simple little page view counter, quite easy to use and adds a column to the posts list in the admin menu with the view count. It also can exclude views by logged in administrators.

Just Writing

Plugin’s Description: Adds buttons to the Distraction Free Writing Mode for all kinds of extra functions.

Distraction Free Writing Mode is nice, but really limited, this plugin gives it a bit more functionality.

Shutter Reloaded

Plugin’s Description: Darkens the current page and displays an image on top like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc. However this script is a lot smaller and faster.

A nice little plugin to make screen shots and other images pop up over the current page instead of a new window or replacing the existing one.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin’s Description: See which plugins are slowing down your site. Create a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

This is a great performance tools, but I keep it disabled normally and just check the site every once in a while to make sure nothing is going wrong.

Pie Register

Plugin’s Description: Enhance your Registration form, Custom logo, Password field, Invitation codes, Paypal, Captcha validation, Email verification and more.

I don’t use even a fraction of the functionality of this plugin, but I do use it to put up a user notification during login that dormant accounts will be deleted after 60 days.

Schedule Posts Calendar

Plugin’s Description: Adds a javascript calendar to the schedule posts options.

Something that has always seemed missing from the WordPress admin interface for creating new posts was a way to schedule them with a popup calendar. This plugin lets you do that and also adds a quick link to the posts list so you can reschedule a post without opening it.

Shortcoder

Plugin’s Description: Shortcoder is a plugin which allows to create a custom shortcode and store HTML, Javascript and other snippets in it.

A while ago I decided to jazz up my posts with an image indicating the category they were in, but I didn’t want to hardcode the media so I use this plugin to insert the image in to the post. That way if I change a category image all I have to do is update the shortcode and all related posts will automatically be updated as well. There might be a better way to do this, but it seems to work well so I’m happy with it.

WordPress Statistics

Plugin’s Description: Website statistics tracking.

I’ve been using BAW Post Views Count for quite a while and it does provide a good view of what posts are being read, but that’s all it does. WordPress Statistics takes it a step farther and give a detailed view of all the hits on your site.

Plugins Removed:

Admin Customization

Plugin’s Description: Allows you to customize basic aspects of your WordPress backend This plugin simply adds several options that probably should be in the base WordPress control panel but aren’t.

I removed this plugin quite awhile ago and I can’t honestly remember if WordPress simply added the features I was look for or it fell out of support and stopped working. Either way it’s gone from JumbleCat now.

GTranslate

Plugin’s Description: Get translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website!

This was a nice plugin, but Google broke it and I haven’t found a replacement yet.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Plugin’s Description: The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

I used this for a while but it had quite a few bugs and didn’t really provide a very good user interface. For my uses Schedule Posts Calendar replaced this.

IE11 in Windows 8.1

October 28, 2013October 24, 2013 Greg Leave a comment

[sc:windows-category ]IE 11 came with Windows 8.1 and being a major update (it’s not IE 10.1 after all) has a lot of changes. But they’re not for the better.

I’m not talking about the user interface here, it’s mostly unchanged from IE10, but at the low level Microsoft has made a major move towards standards compliance which hasn’t quite worked out as well as it might have.

In particular, as IE no longer sends a browser string that gets identified as IE, MANY web applications are now broken. Including some of Microsoft’s own like Outlook Web Access.

Many other like WordPress and many of Google’s apps are severely hampered as well.

Of course as the sites update this should go away and I suspect Microsoft didn’t have much choice at this point but to take this painful step, but perhaps they should have been yelling at the top of their lungs that the change was coming and to update your code appropriately.

At the moment, most of the major web apps I use are so broken that I have to use another browser to get to them.

I had to use FireFox to login to my work e-mail’s OWA the other day and I guess I will continue to have to until either Microsoft issues a patch for IE or Exchange to resolve the issue.

Bell’s Data Grab

October 22, 2013October 22, 2013 Greg

[sc:internet-category ]Over on Michael Geist’s blog there’s an article on a change Bell Canada is going to be making in its data collection policy in November.

I use Bell for my TV and Cell Phone, but I certainly don’t want them collecting:

Web pages visited from your mobile device or your Internet access at home.
This may include search terms that have been used.
Location
App and device feature usage
TV viewing
Calling patterns
Information about your use of Bell products and services (such as device type, postal code, payment patterns, and language preference)
Demographic information such as gender or age range

Which is pretty much everything they can get their hands on.

They say they’re going to use this to:

To create business and marketing reports.
For other companies to create business and marketing reports.
To make ads you see more relevant.
To make ads you see more relevant.

I don’t recall asking my cell phone provider to do any of these things 😉

But more importantly, they offer an opt out for only the last item in the list of things they want to do.

To be fair, the text is a little bit foggy on the whole thing, statements like the following from the support site:

If you do not want us to use your information for any of the purposes described above, you can opt out.

Seem to say the data won’t be used for any of the aggregate usage as well as the targeted advertising. However it still doesn’t say if they will collect it or just not use it. There is a difference, as we’ve seen with the mass surveillance scandal in the US, the government may ask for data Bell collects without a warrant (or a secret warrant) and expect to get it, where as if Bell doesn’t collect the information there is no way they can hand it over to the government.

I called Bell’s customer support line and while they tried to be helpful, the first attempt didn’t really get me anywhere as the support rep didn’t have any idea of what I was talking about. My second attempt had a bit more success and the supervisor assured me that opting out meant they would not use my data in any way other than for billing purposes. However he couldn’t say if they still collected the data or not. He did provide the address of the Customer Relations department, and I mean address, not e-mail or web site, and suggested I write them to get clarification on the question.

The letter will be in the mail shortly 🙂

If Bell doesn’t clarity what the opt out option really means, I’ll have to make a hard choice of either accepting the change or leaving Bell for my cell phone and TV. My service provider should be providing me the services I pay for, not try to co-opt my personal information for their own monetary gain.