[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] It's a known Cisco bug — CSCsd13298, for which a patch exists. And yet they still seem incapable of dealing with it.
They've tried sending engineers to my house, as if they think that could help. I turned him away with an explanation of what the problem really was, and then they put false information into the ticket: "SFI Line tested ok following attendance by BT external engineer". The engineer didn't get anywhere near it; he was turned away at the door.
They've tried charging for a "Special Faults Investigation" engineer visit, despite clearly being instructed that such a visit was not requested. This is an offence under the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act, 1971.
This update from their side is particularly impressive:
No BTW fault - an engineer attended on 15/10/2008 23:40:00 and reported reterminated e side to b/pair 17070 all ok fast test done = line test ok. Notes and test results indicate no fault exists.If there was an engineer in our house at twenty to midnight on Wednesday, he was very quiet. And he managed to complete his work without disturbing the DSL line, which has remained synchronised from Wednesday morning until now without interruption.
They've even tried just closing the ticket without fixing it, in what seems to be just a fraudulent attempt to evade the SLA.
It's astonishing to watch the exchanges back and forth between BT and the ISP on the fault ticket, with complete lies being put forth from BT in clearing the ticket, and then being rejected by the ISP.
Why on earth can they not just fix their poxy Cisco kit? (Or preferably retire it in favour of machines from someone less incompetent, like Juniper; but that's more of a long-term plan).
Fucking Useless, Criminal, Telco.
BT own most of the copper to our homes in the UK, and provide DSL services to an ISP of our choice. BT is paid to pass PPP frames between the DSL subscriber and the ISP, over L2TP or some similar mechanism.
The content of the PPP frames is something that BT shouldn't be involved with. But due to a bug in some of their Cisco kit (and don't get me started on Cisco this week, either), certain packets are getting 'eaten' in transit.
BT, in their 'wisdom', have declared that they are not intending to fix the bug. For technical reasons, IPv4 packets happen to get away without tickling this bug in the transport, while (some) IPv6 packets do fall foul of it. So although this is clearly a bug in the service which BT are contracted to provide, their response is:
"BT currently supports IPv4 on it's[sic] Broadband products and does not support IPv6".
They seem to have missed the point that this is a generic problem in their transport. And it's a problem for which a patch exists, too!
Fucking Useless Telco.
A&A's response, as ever, is wonderful:
"Of course we are wondering what else BT do not "support" now.(The Register, /.)
We exchange data with them at a low level (L2TP and PPP). When a higher level (IPv6) broken their answer is that they never said they support IPv6
But they do not state they "support" email either, or web pages, or MSN...
BT have never said they "support" web sites with a lime green background colour...
We have asked BT what they do "support" over PPP, including the above list..."
Strange, therefore, that I got a call yesterday from their missing payments department chasing up my last bill, which they hadn't bothered to take for some reason. They left a message with a number to call them back on, and a reference number. Yet when I called, the person there seemed unable to do anything useful like checking why they hadn't bothered to take the payment. She just said she'd have to get someone more clueful to call me. I wonder why I wasn't asked to call that person in the first place?
Immediately after the call I checked my bank statement, and it seems that the Direct Debit was actually taken — yesterday. So I helpfull called back and told them that, since they didn't seem clueful enough to work out for themselves what they were doing.
Today I got another phone call, and another British Telecom representative lied to me by telling me that the bill was still unpaid.
Fucking Useless Telco.
So let's make a start with the fun bits... OCaml now builds on PPC64 Linux. Maybe I'll take a look at Modula-3 if I get a few moments to myself and need a little light relief.
I've looked at a few build failures on PPC/PPC64 this week, and (aside from the 'we need some nutter to port OCaml' bit) so far they've all turned out to be generic problems which just happened to bite here first. As usual, Fedora on other architectures benefits a lot from the mere fact that we also build it for PowerPC.
24 Feb 2008 (updated 24 Feb 2008 at 11:08 UTC) »
For a start, there are almost no useful shops. Now, I can deal with airports without shops; there are a lot of those. But Incheon is just packed with perfume and shiny things and tat of all kinds. Although there's a huge concourse of shops, it's really disappointing to find that there's nothing but rubbish there, aside from two tiny bookstalls. And absolutely nobody selling DVDs, thus failing to provide the two basic ways of whiling away the time spent locked in tin cans. It was extremely disappointing.
If I'd wanted to buy 500 handbags from 17 separate but (to the untrained eye) identical shops, I'd have been perfectly happy though.
There was no Internet access either. Again disappointingly so -- it looked like there was, but on trying to pay for an hour's access and getting a few screens through the process you get a popup dialog saying "Try again, please after setting the Plugin!". Closer investigation shows that it seems to be trying some Windows-only plugin just to register for access!
Not a good airport. Hong Kong, from which I type this, is much nicer. Also lots of tat shops, but at least there are some real shops amongst them. And working (and free) wireless access. And a Virgin lounge, which helps... :)
The Direct Debit Guarantee promises him a full and immediate refund in this situation. If he phones his bank, the money should be back in his account by the time he puts the phone down.
I have heard that Barclays Bank are very bad at honouring their obligations under the Direct Debit Guarantee, and one person tells me that's one of the reasons he now banks elsewhere.
But that's a reason for Jeremy to change banks, not to admit that he was wrong about publishing bank details -- which are, after all, on every cheque he's ever written, too.
8 Dec 2007 (updated 8 Dec 2007 at 15:21 UTC) »
Why is it that the easy way of obtaining and building a Fedora kernel isn't documented anywhere? It looks something like this:
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/pkgs co kernel/F-8 $ cd kernel $ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/pkgs co common $ cd F-8 $ cat > GNUmakefile <<EOF ppc: DIST_DEFINES += --without smp ppc64: DIST_DEFINES += --without kdump i686: DIST_DEFINES += --without pae --without xen include Makefile EOF $ make $(uname -m)
There are HOWTOs out there, but they seem to recommend that you download the SRPM and extract it, instead of working directly from the original. And presumably if you ever want to update it you need to download a whole new SRPM and do it all over again, instead of just 'cvs update; make $ARCH'. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to work directly with SRPMS like that, for any package. Even when I'm just building local hacks I wouldn't do it that way; I'd always take a copy of the Makefile from CVS and keep everything together in its own directory rather than scattered around ~/rpmbuild mixed together with potentially conflicting files from other packages.
The bit with the GNUmakefile is optional, but useful -- you can disable the builds you aren't interested in to save time, and more to the point if the last package built is the one you're interested in, you have the fully compiled source tree left behind (in kernel-$VERSION/linux-$VERSION.$ARCH) when it's done. This makes it easier for you to hack on it and debug it. After installing the built RPM on the target machine, you can individually rebuild and replace files -- both modules and the kernel image.
For the development ('rawhide') version, you'd use 'kernel/devel' in the first cvs checkout instead of 'kernel/F-8'. You can obviously have both at the same time, or even just checkout 'kernel', which should get you the common/ directory too. And a bunch of other 'branches' of the kernel.
It contains a new kernel with support for the built-in Ethernet -- which used to be present in Fedora 7 but somehow got dropped before Fedora 8, although it should now be in the next official Fedora 8 kernel update.
It also contains a few installer-related changes which are in the process of going into the Rawhide development tree. And a fix for the moronic bug which broke PS3 installations at the last minute.
You can burn it all to DVD, or just burn the images/boot.iso and boot from that. Or if you don't have a USB CD/DVD drive for your Efika, you can do it all over the network with TFTP. If someone reminds me precisely how to do that, I might update this post -- or better still just put it straight in the Release Notes Wiki. Another option is just to copy the two files you need to a USB storage device and use them from there.
To install, proceed as follows:
s" hd:0 /efika.forth" $bootYou exit the nvram script editor by hitting Ctrl-C, and then use the nvstore command to save it.
ok setenv boot-device hd:0
ok setenv boot-file /yaboot/yaboot
(That's assuming you used the default partitioning, with a separate /boot partition as the first partition. If you used a single ext3 partition and no LVM, which would be a sensible thing to do, then it might be 'hd:0 /boot/efika.forth' in step 4, and you might want to set boot-file to /boot/yaboot/yaboot instead. Use brain, or consult adult.)
Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking
When I said by rights you should be
Bludgeoned in your bed
And now I know how Joan of Arc felt
Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
I was actually being serious -- it's quite possible that SDHC cards might fail to work in some places where SD works. But I think he thought I was just being pedantic -- his response was to say that I should be taken out back and shot.
Should I make a formal complaint about this threat of violence? Do you think the HR department would take it seriously? Or is it just a harmless figure of speech which I've even used about myself on occasion?
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