Asgrim

I just found a good article regarding what I spoke about here. It’s called The Seven Deadly Sins of IVR (Interactive Voice Response), and it is just so true. When I rang TV Licensing the other day, my conversation with the machine went something like this:

Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James: Eighteen
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Please say your house number
James (slowly and clearly): EIGHTEEN
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (smacking forehead)
Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James (clearly): One eight
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (shouting): EIGHTEEN YOU STUPID MACHINE HOW HARD IS IT TO UNDERSTAND?!
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response.
James hangs up in anger and disliking the total lack of customer care.

As you can tell, I was pretty fustrated. I did call up and try again, but it totally failed at recognising something as simple as the number 18. It didn’t even understand “one eight”… and there was absolutely no way to transfer to a human operator, which I thought was stupid.

Rant over…

Yep, as I said in the last post, they’re for sale:

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz
• 12U Metal Server Cabinet (black)

Please buy them, or at least tell your friends! The proceeds are going towards Hannah & I’s wedding!!

Well, I have finally decided to stop all this home serving malarkey. I just don’t have time to do it any more, and trying to maintain a comparable up time to other hosts is simply a nightmare. Not only that, it’s expensive on electric, and at the moment I still have no Internet (gah!), so it sort of rules out any hope for now.

Last night I spent some of the evening taking apart the server cabinet ready to sell on eBay. One thing I am particularly cautious about is data on the hard drives. Most people think that they need a whopping great magnet (like the ones that pick up cars in scrap yards), or that they need to drill holes in the drive and damage it irreparably. Well, thankfully, this is not the case.

All you need is DD. And, no I don’t mean my friend from Portsmouth, I mean the ancient UNIX command “dd” (sometimes nicknamed “disk destroy”). dd is a low-level data copier or converter. It works by writing blocks of data from one place to another. The very useful thing about UNIX/Linux is that it has these things called “devices”. One of these devices is called “/dev/zero”. It is a constant stream of 0. Lots of them.

Technically minded people might see where I’m going with this (well, they should already know what I’m talking about really…). Basically, an irrecoverable way of properly formatting a disk is top copy zeros all over the disk.

[root@oblivion /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

The above command is all it takes to completely destroy a disk. If you are really paranoid, you could do it a few times, or intersperse it using /dev/random, like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

According a data recovery company, there is less than zero percent chance of recovering data after using a single dd command. Some guys have even decided to make it a challenge.

If you’ve not heard of them, read about UK2 here. The original article was written by a guy called Andy Crawford, but I’m having exactly the same fustrating troubles as him.

Basically, UK2 are trying to charge me for each domain I want to transfer away, even though I have already thrown tonnes of money at them. This is what Andy Crawford said:

[1] They are not cheap
Ok so they might look cheap at first, but after you register your domain everything else is an add-on. Your website(s) will posssibly cost more in the end.

[2] Pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner
You will have to pay for removal of pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner.

[3] Webspace is extra
Webspace costs extra and it will be assigned to only one domain name. If you have more than one domain that you want to run separately, you need to buy webspace for each and every domain. This now becomes very expensive.

[4] Upgrades and add ons are assigned to each domain
You must also pay for upgrades for each domain separately (CGI-PHP, Statistics etc)

[5] Email is a forwarding service only
If you want a POP3 Mailbox or use IMAP, you will need to create a separate UK2.net mailbox address. Even if you pay extra for unlimited email address forwarding you will not be able to forward to multiple recipients.

[6] It’s pot luck whether your CGI scripts will run
Even something as simple as FormMail will not run on the UK2 servers. If you use their own version of FormMail, any mail generated can only be sent to a UK2.net mail box and cannot be forwarded.

[7] Support
My own experience of the support team is that:They will reply with a block of standard text which does not answer the query, or, they reply with various conflicting and incorrect answers.

[8] Transferring your domain
When you have had enough of UK2 and want to move away, they will charge you to have control of your domain and allow the transfer to proceed. But they will not make it easy, they seem to do everything in their power to stop the transfer proceeding.

[9] Renewals
They will renew your domain and services and charge your credit card even when you have asked them not to, and even after you have transferred you domain away from them.

All of this is totally true. I advise anyone to stay well away from UK2.net, they are just money grabbers.

I’ll post more of my experience when (or if…) I’ve resolved my situation.

Well this time it’s not Pipex’s fault, it’s BT now, and the stupid invention of TPON - Telephony over Passive Optical Network. I’ve been without internet (and thus currently forking out £25 a month to host the most important websites I run on Newnet) for two weeks, and it’s really annoying.

To outline, I’m trying to get Be Unlimited which allows the use of Annex M, allowing higher upload speeds (ideal for running my servers). From the outset, there were problems. When I first ordered, Be said that there was a problem with my line. I rang to/fro between Be and BT trying to understand the problem, eventually getting the blood out of the stone that my line had a TPON tag.

Nevertheless, a few days later I was given an activation date and my activation pack was sent through. Hooray, I thought! Along came 10th July… I got home, no internet. I rang Be, they told me it could be up to 9pm until it gets activated. 9pm came, and went with no sign of internet. Today, I have been told this by Be:

Dear James, I just spoke with BT Openreach and they told me that unfortunately they can not replace the fibre optic line to a copper in that area and they advised me to cancel the order because the fibre optic line is not compatible with broadband orders.

Well that’s just great. I went on the Think Broadband forum (see thread here) to enquire (as well as replying to Be essentially saying, I don’t care, get BT to sort it out pronto). If the case really is that I’m still on TPON and there’s no copper overlays left, then it looks like I’m screwed. That’s just great. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on server equipment recently, which will now be wasted.

However, I’m not letting this lie - I am determined to get Be Unlimited service, and I will do everything I can to make that happen.

And if it doesn’t work, then I will be a failure - a web developer… without internet?

Interesting concept… thanks a bloody lot BT.

Just a quick one - with regards to my post about PHP4 dying, I’ve just seen on PHPDeveloper.org a blog post on the Developer Tutorials Blog about migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 for developers- check it out.

Pipex Internet are absolute cowboys and con artists. They should be shut down.

This is a continuation of Pipex - Absolute Nightmare.

After advice I got from the Think Broadband forum (read the thread here), I reclaimed the £100.79 that Pipex Internet had wrongly charged me for a supposed contract breach fee. I did this through my bank because Pipex were so uncooperative. I filed an indemnity claim to reverse the Direct Debit payment as the charge itself was a breach of the Direct Debit Guarantee (I rang to cancel my account on 2nd June, the payment came out 4/5th June, can’t remember when exactly). They did not inform me of the amount, therefore is a breach of the Direct Debit Guarantee. I was happy with the outcome, and that was that, end of problems… or so I thought…

Read the rest of this entry »

PHP4 for me since starting at Netbasic has been a mere lifeless form of PHP that I used to get into web development. But reading this article reminded me that PHP4 will soon die.

Well, as I said recently, on a day for the PHP community dubbed as “8-8-8″ (referring to 8th August 2008), PHP4 will officially be halted. This means there will be no more development done for PHP4. Any new bugs will remain forever. Any developers still using PHP4 won’t get the support they used to. There won’t even be any security updates to seal up loopholes and hacks.

But on the upside, PHP5 will be the choice. We’re already on PHP 5.2.6 (stable), and the next version is well on the way. Now the article I linked to poses several questions:

• What if in 2 months time, evil hackers will find a bug in PHP4 that is exploitable?
• What if they write a spider that crawls the internet in search for applications that run PHP4?
• What if they target all those sites with malicious code?
• What if indeed there will be no fix for this exploit?
• What are you going to do?

There’s a simple answer to all these questions :- people really need to upgrade to PHP5. It’s really that simple. For developers, I think there’s actually very little to do (the odd thing is listed in the PHP5 Migration Guide). My move from PHP4 to PHP5 was simple and very very pain free (perhaps I was lucky?). Personally, I think it’s the web hosts that need to get their bums in gear. Following my article about Newnet, they’ve actually started using PHP5 for new hosts, and are offering free migrations from PHP4 to the newer PHP5 UNIX servers, so good on them, I fully back Newnet 100% in this descision.

At the end of the day though, a day will come when web hosts really do NEED to upgrade, perhaps because of some horrific bug that will destroy the universe. If I were those web hosts, I’d do it sooner rather than later. But as is the way with some companies - they use the ethos “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I used to think that, but I’ve learnt recently that with some things, even if it ain’t broke, you can make it more secure, work faster and work better.

Thankfully, here at Netbasic, we use PHP5 already, so I’m happy as chips.

I guess the more people read about Windows Live messenger scams like the one I’m about to tell you about, the better. People need more awareness about things like this. And it looks like I’m not the only one writing about this particular scam from a (probably fake) company called TST Management Inc.

Basically, someone receives a link from a contact on their Windows Live list. The duped person visits this site (in my case, my Mum and Dad were victims of this phish, and (well, not them) sent me a link to http://r.titcumb.imagefrosty.info/ followed by http://ultraoffers.info/), and enters their Windows Live logon details in the hope of seing some pictures that their friend has sent them. Unfortunately, you probably won’t read the small print:

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination
of the following:
1.  Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2.  Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

Basically, what they will do is log onto your Windows Live account (sometimes even when you’re logged on!), send a link (sometimes personalised) to everyone on your contact list. And so the cycle restarts. They also have a nice big list of e-mail addresses that they can now send spam e-mail to, or sell on for lots of money.

There is a simple message that I must say to everyone, even though no-one EVER listens to it, even though they are told umpteen times by everyone who is computer savvy:

DO NOT ENTER YOUR PASSWORD OR PERSONAL DETAILS ON ANY SITE EXCEPT THE ORIGINATING SITE.

i.e. if you signed up for a Windows Live passport, only ever enter your password on sites that end with “live.com”. If you sign up for a Google account, only enter your password on sites ending with “google.com”.

That means don’t enter it on sites like “google.securepeople.com” or “google.email-program.com” or anything.

If in doubt, for heavens sake, ask someone who knows about computers. At the end of the day, it’s the unskilled (or sometimes unobservant) computer users that are fuelling the spam industry. Do your bit to reduce spam. Use some common sense.

Edit 1 - Looking for Encryption Certificates:

Also, websites which ask for your password should always start, in the address bar, with https, the s standing for secure. A valid site wouldn’t ask you for your password unless it was secure.

As Hannah mentioned, you should also look for “https”. These type of sites also have security certificates. You can check these by:

• Internet Explorer 7/8: To the right of the address bar you should see a gold padlock. Click it to see something like “Verisign has identified this site as www.yourwebsite.com. This connection to the server is encrypted”
• Firefox 3: To the left of the address bar, click the site’s Favicon, and you should see the certificate information there.

An example of Google’s login screen can be seen in each browser here:

Internet Explorer 8

Firefox 3

I had a quick read of this article about potential VoIP setups at home. They’re mostly what I’d expect from VoIP really, but there is a potential flaw… who in the UK knows of a “popular” VoIP provider? I mean like BT is to phone lines, and Sky is to satellite TV (sorry Freesat, as much as love having you!)… who is Company X for VoIP services? Call me cynical, but I probably won’t bother with VoIP until it’s a bit more established at home. Nice idea, but I’m happy with my BT service for now - even if it is more expensive.