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Vodafone sucks

About a month ago, I switched from Telefonica to Vodafone because the former was starting to get expensive, 75 € / month for a 10 mbit/s link, and their uplink was only 300 kbit/s which is really annoying as I also upload stuff to my servers from time to time.

Anyway, so Vodafone sent me the following piece of hardware.

It’s an Huawei EchoLife HG553

At first, vodafone offer you to connect through their 3G network for free until the ADSL link is working. So far so good. Once the ADSL link was up, I switched to that.

But I experienced frequent problems with DNS queries, that is, from time to time I would get the famous “host not found” error, and from all my computers. I first thought that there was a problem with Vodafone’s DNSes so I changed them in my computers, but it didn’t work any better.

Strange! At the end I started to suspect that Vodafone might be filtering DNS requests on their network but I didn’t see why, as hosts like ‘mail.google.com’ or ‘mail.live.com’ failed all the time.

I called their (useless) hotline. They made me change the DNSes on my local machine, without results of course, then changed the DNSes in my router and rebooted it. Hum.. So they’re accessing the router eh? ‘mail.google.com’ resolved once after that.. Then it failed again. They seemed clueless about the problem. They also said something that got my attention: “when I’m pinging mail.google.com from your router, it works fine”.

All right.. How are they accessing the router? And most importantly how can they ping from it as the default web interface doesn’t allow you to do so.

I remembered I was once able to access the router through SSH using admin/admin. So I did that and to my surprise, it didn’t work! So they must have been tampering with my router since I got online?

So, after hacking around, this is how to solve the problem.

First, you need to reset your router to default settings. Turn it off, insert a pen into the ‘reset’ hole, turn it on, wait 10 seconds, turn it off, remove the pen.

Disconnect the ADSL link, you don’t want your modem to reconfigure itself and remove the admin account again. I’ll shortly explain how they do that.

Turn on the modem. Its IP is 192.168.0.1, the admin account’s login is ‘admin’ and its password is ‘admin’.

Go to the web interface using admin/admin then reconfigure what you need to. You’ll see that you have much more options available than with the vodafone/vodafone login. Don’t touch the ADSL stuff, it is preconfigured properly.

Here’s a list of a few stuff you might want to do:

  • Advanced Setup/NAT: Enable UPnP. This is useful for Peer 2 Peer applications or stuff like MSN Messenger, Skype, VOIP or file transfert in chat programs
  • Advanced Setup/DNS/Dynamic DNS. If you want to use services like dyndns.org to have your router available anywhere
  • Important: if you don’t want vodafone to reconfigure your router and remove your admin access as soon as you go online, go to Management/SNMP Agent and Disable it
  • Management/Access Control: Here you can disable vodafone’s ability to access your router from the WAN interface. Just turn off everything except ICMP on the WAN side, and enable everything for you on the LAN side
  • Management/User Management: Change the password of your admin account. support is used by vodafone and the password is ‘support’ as well. Their access only works for telnet and ssh, not the web interface

Now do a SSH to the modem (with the admin account). If you need an SSH client for Windows, I can recommend PenguiNet.

Type the following:

iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING_IN 1

And that’s it! The DNS screw up is gone. Now make sure you configure your computers to use some other DNS than your routers because it is bugged and doesn’t work properly. You can use the vodafone DNSes:

89.6.239.4 212.145.4.98

You can now plug your phone line into the router’s ADSL port. If you disabled the SNMP services, the router won’t be reconfigured and rebooted by vodafone.

There’s still a caveheat, though. You’ll have to type the iptables command everytime you reboot your router. I’m trying to find a way to change it permanently.

I wonder if the vodafone support people realize how silly it is to tell users to change their DNSes when the router will intercept the queries anyway… Oh well.. Big corporations…

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Armin van Buuren at She Discoteca, again

Armin van Buuren

So there I was again on the 5th of December to see Armin mixing at She Discoteca in Vilassar de Mar.

For the review, just read the previous one I did last year. It’s almost exactly the same except it took place on a cold night of December, but the place was just as crowded. Warmup was done by Blake Jarrell and was quite good. Armin showed up at 3:00, just like last year but this time he started with more punch. It was closer to hard trance than trance. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. A funny thing is that the visuals were synchronized to the music as you can see on the video (Sharon den Adel singing in In and Out of Love). Pretty neat VJ feature.

I didn’t check the hip hop room this year. Why people would go in that room when there’s such an event is beyond me 🙂

Here’s the video I took and edited to give an idea of the whole event. The sound is not perfect, blame Nokia.

The party ended at 6:00. And that damn train again on the way back.

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Google Chrome

Google Chrome

A few days ago, Google released its own browser, Google Chrome. As the author of a web browser (Voyager), I think they did it right. Here’s why:

Multithreaded

This is something I always wanted to implement within Voyager but it was too difficult because of GUI issues (the toolkit used was a mess to use from threads). As far as I know, the first browser implementing rendering in its own process was Internet Explorer but when they implemented tabs, they left that out. Apparently they fixed that in IE 8. The advantage to such a design is that the main GUI isn’t locked anymore when rendering CPU hungry website, and you can even switch to other tabs meanwhile. It is tricky to implement such design and I noticed some refresh problems in Chrome when writing in TEXTAREA fields for example. Scrolling speed can also become slow because the refresh is asynchronous then. But overall this is a very good idea.

Fast

Well, I’m impressed by the speed. The browser chews tons of HTML without problems. This is not just a minor speed gain but it’s really noticeable on usage. And most important, the browser launches in less than a second, without preloading files or anything. I was quite getting fed up of MSIE and Firefox taking more than 5 seconds to launch. Their JavaScript engine uses JIT techniques, which is the first time it is in a browser I think. Although I don’t think JavaScript execution speed is really a burden in most common webpages (yet) this is a nice addition.

Nifty features

The tabs drag & drop, search in the address bar (without search words being recognized as URLs or other nonsense), uncluttered GUI, automatic fullscreen mode, URL completion that actually works, all plugins working without hassle.

Stability

Not a single crash as of yet. Perfectly usable as a main browser.

So there, Chrome is now my default browser. I was getting fed up with Firefox’ bloat and MSIE had too many annoyances. Nice job Google. Chrome is how I always wanted to make Voyager like. Now good luck fixing all the quirks 🙂

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New Mix: Aurora Mix #2

Aurora

Once again a new mix played at Aurora for the beginning of 2008. Download location is here and the tracklist is as follows:

  • DT8 Project – Hold Me Till The End (Truly Deeply Dub)
  • Pablo Roma Marcelo Vasami – Pushing Me Away (Riko Mix)
  • Nick K – Space Dough
  • Scope – My Generation
  • Cyro – Score A Million (Original)
  • Martin H Oliver Klein – Club Game (Simon Shaker Remix)
  • Hauswerks vs Gaz James – No Disco
  • Dave McCullen – B*tch (Club Extended)
  • DJ Jose – Stepping To The Beat (Dave McDonald Remix)
  • Tim Deluxe – It Just Wont Do (Club Mix)
  • Dave Spoon – Sunrise
  • Gabriel Dresden – Dust In The Wind (Album Version)
  • Marco Petralia ft. Jimmie Wilson – Come Back (Erick Decks & Marco Petralia Dub)
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New Mix: Aurora Mix #1

This is the mix I played yesterday at the Aurora. You can download it here.

Tracklist:

  • 16 Bit Lolitas – Passing Lights
  • Plus49 – Rock On (Pole Folder Unfaithful Remix)
  • Gabriel & Dresden – Dust In The Wind (Album Version)
  • Ashtrax – Freeload (Freelove)
  • D. Ramirez – La Discotek
  • Jackson Q – Our Melody
  • Jorgensen – Untitled (Deadmau5 Remix)
  • John Dahlback – Don’t Speak (Album Version)
  • Audiofly Paul Harris – Miscalate
  • D Ramirez & Mark Knight – Colombian Soul (Gabriel & Dresden Tuscan Soul Mix)
  • Robot Needs Oil – Defected (Olivier Giacomotto remix)
  • Booka Shade – Tickle
  • Ida Engberg – Disco Volante (Sebastien Leger Remix)
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Indexing on Linux not ready yet

Beagle Tracker

On the Linux Desktop there are at least 2 ongoing efforts to try to bring indexing support to the platform. That is, a way to quickly search for files spread around the user’s home directory. One is Beagle and the other is tracker.

But both projects have a major flaw: they can’t properly track file changes. To do that, they use Linux’ inotify feature which allows to watch directories and files. Although you can watch the content of a directory, notifications do not recurse, which means that you have to watch every single directory of your home.

So what happens? Upon startup watches have to be put on every directory and that requires quite a significant filesystem activity. Beagle seems to defer this when the system is in an idle state so it is less noticeable.

The proper solution would be that the Linux kernel provides an inotify that does recurse. This shouldn’t be a performance problem as indexing softwares would only need one watch then.

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Gnome creating problems

Gnome

Funny how instead of trying to solve problems, Gnome apps are actually creating new ones, all by themselves, without any outside factor. They must be really bored or something.

All modern desktops have an area called a systray which is a small area where apps that keep running in the background but still provide an interface that is accessed from time to time can be found, usually by displaying their icon here. Such apps are usually music players, instant messaging software, news aggregator, mail clients, etc.. This is useful because the app doesn’t get in the way by being too intrusive. For example you don’t need an instant messenger to take unecessary space when no one is messaging you. Same for a music player, you don’t need it to display anything once you did your music selection and it’s playing.

For these apps, when you press the close button, they go to the systray.. or so you’d think. Because some people think that the close button should be used to close apps, and that for minimizing to systray you should use some obscure keyboard shortcut (ctrl + w, the ‘w’ stands for ‘wankers’) or press the icon in the systray again. Of course, the former behaviour is still available in other apps.

So what happens is that when pressing the close button, some apps will go to the systray and other will just exit. A good example is Rhythmbox which exits when you press the close button. How many users are really running Rhythmbox to play a few seconds then actually quit the app? Probably very very few. How many users said “oh shit” when pressing the same close button? Probably many.

But as usual I bet they’ll spend years and years on that “problem”..

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New Mix: Top Models

DJing

I finally moved my DJing setup to my current place. There are now 4 speakers “surround sound” and lights to make my neighbourood happy.

You can download a Trance/Progressive mix I did last week here. If you use Windows I recommend Winamp to play it (AAC+ format). Let me know what you think about it. Yes, I know I fucked up a bit at the end, this is the wonders of realtime mixing 🙂