Older blog entries for dwmw2 (starting at number 122)

It seems that Demon Internet seem to have gone downhill in recent years. They used to be quite clueful, but now they seem to have lost the plot entirely.

Just over a year ago, the local telephone exchange was finally upgraded and I was able to get DSL. I chose not to go with Demon; I used Andrews & Arnold instead after they were recommended to me. (I've been very impressed with A&A -- real IPv6 connectivity (with native IPv6 over PPP on the DSL line now), as many Legacy IP addresses as I can eat, proper delegation of reverse DNS and fast, knowledgeable technical support, which is also available on IRC.)

In January (11 months ago), I mailed Demon to tell them that I no longer required the dialup account which I'd been using. However, since I wanted to keep the Demon hostname which was associated with that dialup account, I wanted them to switch my father's DSL (which was still with Demon) to use that account. They replied, saying that "a representative will be in contact in due course".

I reminded them occasionally through the year, but nothing ever came of this. In September, I mailed them again, this time telling them that I had cancelled the direct debit for the dialup account in an attempt to encourage them to act upon my request.

In November, they called in a debt collection agency to attempt to collect payment for the continued service on that same dialup account, which I haven't wanted for almost a year now.

Their debt collection agency, a company called 'First Credit', took to calling my mobile phone with prerecorded messages giving no details but saying that it was important for me to call them, giving an 0870 number -- a number from which they profit when I call them. That's an interesting scam in itself, and not something I expect from a legitimate business. I originally assumed it was just a scam, in fact, and ignored the messages completely. They also sent a text message with a similar request, and since that was from a normal phone number I did reply to it. I told them never to contact my mobile phone again, but gave my email address in case they had a genuine reason to wish to communicate with me. Nevertheless, the abusive phone calls continued -- and I even accidentally answered one while I was in Germany, so I paid international rates for the pleasure of hearing a message asking me to call their for-profit phone line. First Credit's web page says "We aim to negotiate and resolve with professionalism and integrity". Their behaviour doesn't really seem to match that statement.

Tired of this, I chased Demon again. Now they tell me "we have no records in our database that you have contacted us to cancel your dialup service". That's interesting, since I still have their original replies to my email from January. Either their database is very poorly kept, or they were directly lying to me.

They now seem to be under the delusion that there is still a chance of me paying the "outstanding balance" for the dialup service for September and October. I find that somewhat unlikely.

I've now switched my father's DSL to A&A too; I don't think I want anything more to do with Demon.

Sanity prevails in some parts of the world, thankfully. Earthlink have dropped the horribly broken snake oil which is SPF.

For the benefit of all those who wanted to know where I got the T-shirt I was wearing yesterday but weren't amongst the 20-odd who actually asked: http://www.cafepress.com/leuksman.7112875

After closing a bug in bugzilla, I found it re-opened. The original reporter says "How can you tell me my specific DVB bug is fixed, when I haven't told you what the DVB bug was yet?"

Now, I can understand that some people are incompetent enough that they file bug reports without enough information to do anything useful about it -- but to complain when I guess that it's a duplicate of a more coherent bug that I actually fixed last week, and explicitly point out that he hadn't actually told me what his problem was.... that's just _weird_.

Looks like certain parts of the world are coming to their senses. Amazon.com no longer publish a '-all' SPF record; instead they've reverted to '~all' which doesn't ask people to throw away forwarded mail, and which of course renders SPF useless for its most commonly stated purpose.

Hopefully Amazon will roll out one of the various alternative anti-forgery schemes which doesn't have such significant problems, rather than just being discouraged by the whole thing and leaving it as it is. The brokenness of SPF has potential to be actively detrimental to the fight against spam, because people are being tricked into implementing it without fully understanding the consequences of the way that SPF tries to simplify the way that email works. Those people could be put off trying other, saner, schemes.

I've been keeping the dual G4 under my stairs busy. This weekend it built Livna packages to complement the Fedora Extras repo for Fedora/PPC.

[livna-stable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/fedora-ppc/fc3-livna/RPMS.stable
[livna-unstable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (unstable)
baseurl=ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/fedora-ppc/fc3-livna/RPMS.unstable
[livna-testing]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (testing)
baseurl=ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/fedora-ppc/fc3-livna/RPMS.testing

We also got autopartitioning on the Mac working in anaconda, and we're making progress on fixing the X autoconfiguration. I managed a graphical install on the G3 PowerBook for the first time.

It's looking good for a real Fedora Core 4 release on PPC.

Finally built a Fedora Core 3 tree for PPC which should install on the Mac G5. It's at ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/fedora-ppc/fc3-ppc/ (also rsync://ftp.uk.linux.org/ftp/pub/linux/fedora-ppc/fc3-ppc/)

Aside from FC3 and the current errata, it has an updated kernel which boots on the G5 and sleeps on the G4 laptops, a patched kudzu which can handle detection of BMAC Ethernet, and of course a version of anaconda which actually generates images/mac64/boot.iso. It also has a kernel-smp package for PPC32. All these changes have been submitted to relevant package maintainers and should hopefully turn up in rawhide soon, if they aren't already there.

This tree doesn't contain any of the other anaconda fixes from rawhide/FC4, so you still need to run yabootconfig for yourself before letting it reboot after installation -- see Colin's install instructions for details.

Wheee. The majority of Fedora Extras packages are now built for Fedora/PPC.

Most of it built without trouble, the significant exception being CVSup. But now we have the Modula-3 compiler running on PPC and building binaries which run with glibc-2.3.4, so that's built too. Very reminiscent of my undergraduate days, trying to bootstrap M3 for the LINUXLIBC6 target.

If we can just fix the remaining installer problems, hopefully Fedora Core 4 can have an official PPC release. FC3 and FC2 both ran well on 32-bit and 64-bit hardware once you managed to get them installed, but it'll be nice to get it properly supported.

Havoc, I'm sure the demonstration to which you refer is very wonderful -- I already installed the Eclipse packages on my Fedora/PPC machine the other day to play with it.

Unfortunately I can't see it. That MIME type doesn't seem to be supported by my Fedora installation. Isn't SVG capable of doing the same things? Or is there a chance of improving swfdec to the point where it's shippable?

I was vaguely confused by this NewsForge article on 'Retail Geeks', as referenced by LWN.

None of it seems particularly specific to Linux. It's widely accepted that front line support is going to be absolutely appalling. In general, they employ complete fuckwits because they're cheap. Not only can they not help you with Linux problems, but they often can't even help with anything competently.

Here's some recent examples of non-Linux-related technical support. First from Yahoo! Groups -- I was kicked off one of their groups because my mail servers apparently rejected a few messages. I assumed it was due to SpamAssassin, but clicked on the helpful link which purported to give the actual error which "my ISP's" mail servers had given. It said:

550 Most messages without it are spam, so your mail has been rejected.

I happen to know that's bollocks. My servers wouldn't say that. In fact the rejection message will have been two lines, and said:

550-RFC2822 says you SHOULD have a Message-ID.
550 Most messages without it are spam, so your mail has been rejected.

So I filled in their support form, reported the above and said that their system should report the whole message instead of just the final line. And I also suggested that if they aren't going to reject RFC2822-ignorant messages lacking a Message-Id: header then they should at least add a Message-Id: of their own before resending the message to their subscribers.

The response seemed to completely miss the point...

We have checked your Yahoo! Groups account "dwmw2@infradead.org" and it appears to be in full working order. Our servers are running normally at this time, so you should not be experiencing any problems.

Your Yahoo! Groups account was labeled "Bouncing" because your Internet Service Provider (ISP) returned messages sent to your account as undeliverable. These are called "bounced messages". Accounts are automatically labeled "Bouncing" after three consecutive days of undeliverable mail.

Creative Labs did almost as well, too. She Who Must Be Obeyed bought a Muvo² MP3 player. I filled in a support form asking if there is a firmware upgrade with Ogg support, and if not, when one will be available. In the case that there were no plans to support Ogg, I asked for the reasons why this was the case. The form required ancillary information, including the operating system which was being used. Obviously I selected 'Linux'.

The response to the question "can the Muvo² play Ogg files?" was "I'm sorry, but we don;t[sic] support muvo in Linux.". I know I said non-Linux-related examples, but IMHO that doesn't count as a Linux-related support question, because the actual question I asked had nothing to do with Linux.

I responded, asking precisely why the operating system was relevant and asking for a more coherent answer to my questions. The answer came back "I'm sorry, but any of our mp3 players support OGG.".

That's a good thing, right? If any of their mp3 players can support ogg, then that means ours does. But still they didn't tell me how. I suspect they meant to say that none of their mp3 players support ogg, but in that case they failed to answer the questions about future support.

Then of course there's the idiot in my employer's IS department who responded to a report that the VPN link from the Cambridge office was losing all packets above 1408 bytes with a comment that it wouldn't matter if I were using the correct SMTP smarthost. But that wasn't frontline support -- scarily, that was actually someone who was expected to have some clue; but I've come to the conclusion that a large part of his behaviour can be attributed to a deliberate attempt to be obstructive.

It does cut both ways sometimes, though. I was in a retail outlet a while ago and bought three items, including a toner cartridge. The monkey managed to scan only two of them, and I didn't get charged for the toner. Normally I'm quite an honest person, and I would have pointed it out -- but in a place like that I consider it perfectly reasonable not to. They employ monkeys who can't help their customers, to whom they have a duty of care. So I consider their loss to be entirely their own responsibility.

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