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pldtdsl at 384kbps. not!

noel — Tue, 02 May 2006 15:24:44 +0000

i was downloading a iso image file of pcbsd 1.0 (a 683 meg file) when i noticed that downloads are a bit slow.

so i checked my traffic stats and here’s what i see:

i’m not even hitting 256kbps!

so i go over at pldtdsl.com and here’s what i see:

i don’t think the difference of 128kpbs wouldn’t even cover traffic overhead.

conclusion: pldt lies.

update (2006.05.03) :
i checked with pldt’s bandwidth tester located in their site and here’s what i got:

something really sucks.

witching hour

noel — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 12:12:57 +0000

it was almost midnight. to some its the witching hour. certain things slow down. and then stops completely.

noooo!!!!

dsl decides to disconnect right when i’m in the middle of importing a blogger blog into a wordpress blog. that is not good.

i was able to get connected six hours later and restored the blogger template just to get that site up. the wordpress import got to 75% before the disconnection. grrrr. the weird thing is that the wordpress import script got all of the posts and comments except for the three latest posts. i also found out that several posts got duplicated and the images are not exactly aligned the way they were at blogger. no biggie really. i can simply delete the duplicates and just re-edit the html in the posts that has images.

good thing this is just a dry run so i know what to expect.

another no so good news is that my isp is having log in and routing problems. its takes a looooong to log in to the network and when i do get to login its hard to get to where i want to go beacause there’s a core router down somewhere along the line in north america. ugh.

no, i am not going to try another blogger import under these conditions. i’ll be lucky if this post even goes up.

this sucks.

got dos’d

noel — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:06:34 +0000

my firewall got dos’d (denial of service attack) yesterday. according to my firewall logs it was a dos teardrop attack. cute. i did a little digging and found out that it only affects machines running windows 95, windows nt and windows 3.1. fortunately the firewall (smoothwall) is linux-based. ha!

curiosity got the better of me and i let the event run for about 8 hours just to see what happens to my smoothie. to make sure that there are no trojans or virus running behind the firewall, i physically unplugged all network cable connections to the switch except for the smoothie’s. the traffic was still there which means nothing weird is coming from the internal network.

my patience finally ran out and i simply disconnected the modem, turned it off and then back on for good measure and reconnected to the net to get a new ip address. that’s one advantage of having a dynamic ip address i guess.

this is a first.

dsl problems

noel — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:17:26 +0000

yesterday afternoon my isp went bonkers. i couldn’t login. the connection just gets cut and i couldn’t login anymore. i didn’t change any of my settings or moved anything so the problem is coming from them. for the record i don’t connect my workstation directly to the internet. the connection goes to the dsl modem to the linux firewall (smoothwall) then to the network switch where i connect my desktop. smoothwall performs the connection duties. here’s an excerpt of the ppp logs:

18:54:00 pppd Connection terminated. 18:54:00 pppd Modem hangup 18:54:00 pppoe Timeout waiting for PADO packets 18:53:25 pppd Connect: ppp0 < --> /dev/ttyp0 18:53:25 pppd Using interface ppp0 18:53:25 pppd pppd 2.4.2 started by nobody, uid 99

and that went on for the whole night. i was able to connect only this morning.

yo! pldtdsl! someone’s been screwing around your login system again. next time, please inform your customers that you’re doing something to the system so we don’t go all worked up and curse you to high heavens when we can’t connect. that should be standard operating procedure in the first place.

computer not connected

noel — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:08:50 +0000

in a couple of instances i found one or two workstations has no access to the internet or local area network. in those instances i found out that the local area network connection in those workstations has been disabled. to enable the lan connection again just follow the following:

open control panel and look for “network connections”

double-click on network connections and another window will appear. look for the section labeled “lan or high speed internet”. under that you will find an icon labeled “local area connection”

as you can see from the image above the connection has been disabled. it also shows the name of the manufacturer of the network card. right-click on the icon will give you the following

click on “enable”

if there is nothing wrong with the hardware you will see it acquiring a network address

and after a minute or two it should show that is connected

you should be able to access the network and the internet soon after. if the connection shows that its still disabled then try to restart your computer and repeat the steps outlined above.