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BT and Old School Spam

tl;dr

Any change to a BT service is fraught with issues - but this was the worst yet - a mis-sold service, 6 times the communications (letters, emails and other spam) and BT failing to respond despite multiple calls, on hold, - I think I have spoken to all of their employees! Sound familiar?

Recently I was contacted by a local BT Business sales person to offer us super fast broadband - who wouldn’t want 10X the speed we are getting right now in rural Somerset. Slightly surprised as our local exchange showed no plans for being fibre enabled I took them up on the offer. The government’s national plan to roll out super fast rural broadband was updated earlier in the year to remove the word ‘rural’ - so we weren’t holding our breath for better connectivity any day soon.

> http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/12/uk-government-quietly-removes-rural-broadband-scheme.html

> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31096850

So he must have the inside track on why big shiny green BT cabinets had started springing up all over the village - and unashamed I was happy to get in on the act before the rest of the village.

My office is on the border of two BT exchanges - one has fibre the other (also serving the village where I live) is the old clunky one with no plans to upgrade. This exchange can at best manage 1-2mb ADSL and has run out of domestic numbers - want a new line - wait for a death in the village. Recently however these mysterious new cabinets appeared almost overnight, tracking from the exchange to a new housing development. A development which on the face of it would not even be able to provide telephones let alone super fast broadband to the new home buyers - best not plan to watch Netflix when any one else in the village is online. Unless of course the big ‘national’ developers have a cosy relationship with BT to provide fibre under the cover of darkness without letting the village now about it until the new house holders are all warmly setup and streaming box sets of Game of Thrones. But that wouldn’t happen would it.

The day came and the Openreach engineer arrived and put in a new line to the office - great so our existing broadband and static IPs wouldn’t change until the new space age service was up and running - too good to be true.

Well yes it was - as he finished and wrote the number on the socket - I noticed it was a number originating from the old exchange and queried this with him.

> ’That’s right’

he said as he packed up his tools.

> ’But - that exchange isn’t fibre enabled - is it?’

I asked hopefully since this would be great news for me at home an opportunity to get fibre in a house full of kids, iPads, Nexus, Huddl and a smart tv etc.

> ’No it’s not’ - he sounded sure.

> ’But you are connecting us to fibre today - that is what the order is for?’

> ’I just have a ticket to install a line’

> ’But to an exchange that isn’t fibre enabled?’

> ’That’s right - that’s what my job ticket says.’

and he helpfully added:

> ’No-one tells us anything about fibre - that’ll be the fibre guys. They put a sticker on the cabinet when they fibre enable it - I didn’t see a sticker’

A sticker. Great - no other indication - as in … say … FIBRE.

> ’But wouldn’t it have been better to upgrade to fibre the line we already have that goes to the fibre enabled exchange?’

> ’Yes that would have made more sense…’

Engineer leaves - job done.

Not for me though - I had to call BT on multiple occasions to get this sorted, explaining to everyone and every automated voice recognising answering device I finally got through to what the issue was. No-one’s really that interested.

After some time I get acknowledgement from BT that installing a new line & charging a connection fee for a service that is worse than the one I already have doesn’t really constitute a ‘deal’ they agree to fibre enable my existing line at no extra charge. Something at least - not the 48MB promised but a couple of time faster than before.

But then the fun starts.

I start getting bills for the mis-sold line and broadband service and letters telling me when the broadband will start working- and not the day after the new line is in but two weeks later - dodged a bullet there - no service for two weeks and then 2MB!!

But that would be one thing - they decided it would be really funny if they duplicated the bills, letters and emails six times.

So I get multiple duplicate emails and letters every day and no amount of calling the customer service team stops this nonsense - in fact I think it adds a new iteration everytime I do! Stop calling us or we’ll spam you more.

Today was the best of all. I still have on a desk in the office the dopey standard broadband router and welcome pack they sent when the order went though - what to do with that - I don’t really want that hanging around the office nor do I fancy taking it to the tip.

BT creativity to the rescue - as if by magic (did they install a bug???) a returns bag came through the post - not just one though 6!!

So what should I return? One will contain the router and welcome pack - but what of the other 5? Maybe I should shred all of the letters, emails and other crap they have sent about this nonsense and send all that back to them?

Ideas welcome.

#british telecom #spam #misselling #broadband #rural broadband

Windows recycling

Yesterday, I was so inspired by a talk on provisioning with Windows that - today I recycled all my windocs #notgoingbackthereagain

The Ansible, Windows, and Powershell presentation (at Ansiblefest London 2015) was great, relevant and very helpful to all those who have to manage Windows infrastructure; one of whom I used to be. I met many who have that challenge and who would have found the tips on how to work in a Powershell environment inspiring if not reassuring.

But it reminded me of why we made the change from bare windows metal to open source 5 years ago. I had flashbacks to freezing, cramped noisy data centres, stacks of licenced DVDs, Kvms, IIS’s gui, the registry, shiver …

I don’t think out loud often enough about how fortunate we are to have open source tools as powerful as Ansible, Drupal and of course Linux to automate, build and collaborate in a way that just wasn’t possible with Windows. They are just there supporting our work every day.

Sure, it was a long time ago that I escaped that ‘win-Island’ but it doesn’t appear that much has changed. I guess I wouldn’t print so much stuff (but that is probably more down to the proliferation of live online documentation - I haven’t actually printed a technical document since climbing out of the Windows) but in the OSS world the online documentation is great; collaboration and openness makes the landscape evolve more quickly and transparently than it ever seemed to in the closed proprietary world.

These great tools such as Ansible do all work on windows - but I remember the pain of getting such things to work on Windows Server (being the prompt to jumping over to OSS) - drush, batch files and git on windows, no useful command line, using scheduler not cron, ugh! and none of it the fault of the tools themselves. I also don’t miss the crippling cost of licences, before you actually add value, the refresh cost of hardware and their OS licence models.

But the thing that strikes me most is how the OS that I relied on for nearly thirty years (from DOS to Windows) is now like a poor relation (we politely, but with surprise, acknowledge it’s still going) of todays open source systems that we rely on today.

It’s not easy to make the change though with many large corporates still thinking that paying for software is a mark of quality assurance. That is changing steadily however with many governments, and Fortune 500s making the transition over the past few years (see for example www.gov.uk's take on OSS). But getting your colleagues (boss, team, business) to support whole scale change to OSS isn't easy and it does require investment (not least in training) - but there's plenty of support and unlikely to be any regrets.

But if I bumped into my previous self at such a conference I would encourage me to ditch the hardware, not renew the msdn subscriptions and move to open source - but if that isn’t an option - get the link to the slides for Ansible, Windows, and Powershell presentation and take a deep breath - it’ll help!

#ansible #opensource

Wordpress white screen of death

A security update to Wordpress was released today - see https://wordpress.org/news/2014/11/wordpress-4-0-1 When patching some v 3 sites users were faced with a white screen in the dashboard - time to help out ... The security update to Wordpress patches 8 security issues such as cross site scripting, cross site request forgery, server side request forgery and denial of service vulnerabilities. I have a number of friends who have Wordpress sites and informed them that they should update and offered to help out. In a couple of cases (especially sites that hadn't been updated for a while with versions such as 3.3.1) the admin area was affected by a white screen error. The side menu was visible but the main content pane was empty. Looking at the page content it was clear that the html rendering had been halted half way. The site owners were at a complete loss as to what to do so I offered to investigate. So it looked like a bigger 'favour' than first thought. The affected sites were on shared hosting and I wasn't looking forward to debugging the issue. Fortunately, I stumbled upon this post on stackexchange and #28 Dmitry's answer looked worth a try. A quick edit within the cpanel's file manager and all was right again and I was able to upgrade to the latest version and the change is replaced. Always worth taking a backup of the site first before upgrading and editing any files - but a quick fix was a gift! Big departure from my day job of using Ansible and git deployment for Drupal sites - but fun to dabble with other CMS in your time off. How to fix empty dashboard issue in WordPress? http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/127427/how-to-fix-empty-dashboard-issue-in-wordpress

#wordpress #security

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care

John C. Maxwell

Be yourself - everyone else is taken

Oscar Wilde

Extending the life of old tech

I received a new wireless router from my broadband provider today. It was a mixed blessing as although it promised to be a better wirelss unit (yet to be proven) it made my previous Netgear DG834PN redundant. But then I had the inspired idea of converting the Netgear to a wireless range extender - to extend the range of the wireless to other parts if the house. We live in an old farm house (built 1686) that has very thick walls making some parts of the house wireless-less. I have used powerline converters to provide LAN to most of the house but lack wireless in the kitchen (no iPad or iPhone when cooking or at breakfast) I thought it would be an outside chance that it would be possible and was keen not to have to add the Netgear (which is probably a better unit than the Huawei HG533 provided) to the stock of old kit in the attic. Basically it is really easy!

All you need:

A = The router connected to the ADSL

B = The router to be used as a range extender

At least two powerline units to turn your house wiring into a LAN and a couple of RJ45 cables (both routers will have come with one)

Note that I could have bought a wireless range extender powerline unit - but that costs money and I have a spare wireless router that I don’t want to land fill.

Login to A and set the DHCP Start and end address to 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.98 (this can be what ever you want but make sure the range doesn’t overlap with the IP address you give (B) in the next step and makes sure they are on the same subnet - If that is gobbledegook then go with the defaults.)

Connect to (B) via a cable and turn off DHCP - this will stop (B) dishing out IP address and give that job to (A)

In the LAN settings on (B) - set the IP address to 192.168.1.99 At this point the connection to the router will be lost - and you will need to reconnect to 192.168.1.99

Set up the WAN SSID and WPA-PSK security options on B (if you are cautious make sure the ‘broadcast SSID’ is set to on and maybe turn off security until you are happy you can connect OK)

Now connect (B) to the powerline network.

(A) will manage the (ADSL) and main wireless WAN and (B) will provide an extended WAN.

Settings for A (main ADSL router)

Settings for B (router as a wireless extender)

Give them both separate SSIDs so you now have 2 WANS on one LAN, wireless access throughout the house and you don’t have a redundant router cluttering up your attic (or in the local landfill) - Neat.

By the way most broadband provider supplied routers are plug and play and you may not know how to connect to the configuration screen as you won’t have to in most cases. On your network connection settings look for the gateway address (192.168.1.1 in my case). You can login from there - find out the actual manufacturer of the router (Huawei in my case) and you will find the login details on line! Note that you should change these from the default as that isn’t secure at all!

#homelan #saynotoObsolescence

Using Github Gist as a blog?

Came across these the other day - they are services that convert your Gists into a blog page - nifty for quick posts - which is what I generally use Tumblr for.

http://gist.io - POint this at a gist of your own and it creates a blog page out of it - nifty -

One I made earlier - http://gist.io/5983325

http://www.roughdraft.io/

see http://iaugur.roughdraft.io/

Both interesting tools!

#gist #github #bloging tools

No Internet connection - "Failed to query TCP/IP settings of the connection"

Just had to replace the CMOS battery on a Dell Dimension 370. Legacy Windows XP machine that I have loads of old software on - I use a Mac now a days for all my development.

Anyhow - Having got a battery (cheap enough CR2032) - You pay more for the postage (courier due to being lithium) so I bought some other stuff at the same time to ease the pain of 5.99 p&p on a .69p battery!! Including a nifty computer repair tool kit - how auspicious!

Replacing the battery - There is a metal clip that if you manage to push it in the battery just pops out - so make sure the chassis is on its side to get gravity to assist you. No amount of brute force prying will achieve the same effect.

Once rebooted I found my network card no longer worked - it was there but showed no sign of TCP/IP and ipconfig just responded with:

Windows IP configuration

- no IPs, no subnet mask, no DNS suffix or gateway - no addresses - nothing!. Searching various Dell and other tech forums left me with the daunting prospect of reinstalling drivers, disabling and enabling TCP/IP, rolling back to a restore point, renaming TCPip sys files. registry entries …. enough now!! All I did was change the battery - Hmmm Can I finally make the break and ditch my trusty (really..!) windows Dell …

Then *ping* can’t remember how I spotted it or if I read something to jog my brain - but powered down and entered BIOS setting and sure enough - when resetting the date after the battery change I got the year wrong 2012 - not 2013!! (I still think it is 1996 by the way! and wrestle with filling out the date on cheques - who uses cheques???)

So there you have it: Get the date in the BIOS wrong and you’ll stop your network working - TCP/IP refuses to time travel!!

As much a note for me as hopefully help for someone else - before they really enter a cycle of pain and rip everything apart - If in doubt - doubt yourself!

#Dell #BIOS battery #cmos battery #tech tips

Debugging .htaccess rewrites

The Apache mod_rewrite module is a great utility and is essential for any Apache based web site. One aspect of writing rules though is when you get one wrong (and it is very 'picky') you get a nasty 500 error. This is usually enough to put most people off; but shouldn't be.

There are a number of golden rules:

Move all .htaccess rules (not just the rewrites) up to the server configuration (httpd.conf / VHosts). That way they perform better and better still you get to use apachectl to check them first before you reload.

apachectl configtest

and then reload them gracefully once you are happy

apachectl -k graceful

that reloads the config by restarting Apeches processes once they have completed current requests - as opposed to brutally restarting Apache

If you have to use .htaccess - test it on a local site first so as not to interrupt a live server.

In any case if you do get a 500 error what can you do about it?

Well the first stop is the apache log files. These may be the main Apache log or a site specific one depending on your set up.

Let's look at an example.

Say you have a rule that directs old urls to a new url:

RewriteRule ^oldpage\.html$ newpage.html [R=301, NC, L]

All looks good - but when you run your site you get a 500 error.

Open up the logs and you find the following error:

[Tue Jul 02 16:55:03 2013] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] /your/localpath/websites/thesite/htdocs/.htaccess: RewriteRule: bad flag delimiters

The specific error is:

Bad Flag Delimiters

This tells us that the 'options' [R=301, NC, L] mustn't have spaces between the flags. Remove those and all is good.

(BTW - R=301 - performs a 301 redirect, NC = Ignore Case and L means stop processing rules)

Ref: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

#apache #rewrite #htaccess

When {robots | humans} don't {function | understand}

Check out this comment we got on a blog post (below).

Either the robot is malfunctioning or the {black hat SEO guy | cheap labour} didn’t {get | understand | receive} the instructions.

Here we have all the pattern variants of manually entered spam and we could use this to catch all spam (not that they are hard to spot …) Interesting though as in a way it’s like a code breaker’s lucky break - you have all the variants. Counter es-spam-ionage breaks the code by way of a mistake. Shame that life isn’t that simple but amusing to think it could help in the defense against pam commenting.

In fact we have had a few of these and since they vary I’ll post some more in case anyone finds them useful in spam counter measures.

An example spam comment error:

{ {I have|I've} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. {It's|It is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web owners} and bloggers made good content as you did, the {internet|net|web} will be {much more|a lot more} useful than ever before.| I {couldn't|could not} {resist|refrain from} commenting. {Very well|Perfectly|Well|Exceptionally well} written!| {I will|I'll} {right away|immediately} {take hold of|grab|clutch|grasp|seize|snatch} your {rss|rss feed} as I {can not|can't} {in finding|find|to find} your {email|e-mail} subscription {link|hyperlink} or {newsletter|e-newsletter} service. Do {you have|you've} any?

Drupal and the spring migration

Short version: I've gotta say I love the #Drupal migrate module - take 6 dead Wordpress blogs, export them, enable wordpress_migrate and click one button and you have one #drupal site with 6 integrated blogs! Breath life into old content. Extended version: Hmmm - the body text contained loads of images linked to external images - fortunately still accessible online.. So I then migrated this one staging site to another 'live' Drupal site and using the migrate module's powerful prepare row function scanned the body and teaser texts, found all of the images, downloaded them and rewrote the img tags to point to local image cache references (and tidied up the filenames while I was at it) - very satisfying ! I'll write this up soon with due credit to all of the excellent Drupal community reference material that enables you to achieve such magic!

iPad support patchy for trending apps

Is it just me? I am quite often surprised at how trending apps / services such as Pinterest and even Tumblr have iPhone apps but no iPad version.

An apology

After having used windows from its first incarnation and DOS beyond I recently threw all in with iOS with a new mac book Air ( mmmmm). So apart from missing some things (winScp, the constant hour glass, blue screens, DVD writer/reader) I haven't really looked back! One regrettable side effect that I'm not proud of is that I have almost forgotten that anyone else uses Windows and IE and instead of seeing everything through IE glasses ( square boxes, no media queries,) I now see the world through iOS ( and not restrictively Firefox as I routinely proliferate tabs on chrome and safari too). Although we do browser compatibility testing on the page views I don't use IE to browse as a user. So it is shameful that after having delivered a site with responsive design and full Facebook integration I neglected to notice that the Https support for Windows IE 7 on XP was poor. This is due to the fact that I created a Virtual host alias for the site on 443 using the same ip as the default https supporting site. For SSL to work perfectly in apache using virtual hosting it requires that the client browser supports SNI (whereby the client browser sends the host name in the initial request). This is so Apache knows which certificate to serve. As it turns out IE on XP doesn't support this and therefore connections made to the site within a Facebook app when the user is browsing Facebook with https get a certificate warning. The upshot is that I had to move the site to its own IP to support non SNI browsers. All other combinations of OS ( yes even Vista) are unaffected. I discovered this when checking some responsive CSS degradation on IE/XP - I have set Facebook to browse securely to confirm https support routinely when developing Facebook apps but clearly only checking in Firefox/Chrome/Safari on iOS. So all that just for XP + IE + Https on a domain that isn't covered by the default wildcard SSL certificate. Pop over to analytics and that turns out to be one unique visitor. .... And if that wasn't me - then sorry!

#apache #SSL #IE #Drupal

Who's the Mayor of the Whitehouse - Now It's a Foursquare venue? http://t.co/eOoSBTa

BBC using QR codes & BBC.in link shortening to link web info to TV http://t.co/drc0Sfx / http://t.co/OW75tMQ (can't vouch for recipe!)

BBC using QR codes and custom BBC.in link shortening to link web info to TV

#bbc #qrcodes

Drupal commerce detective

Finally solved a curious issue that has been nagging me on a test Drupal commerce site. I have a utility script that lists products that are not linked to Product Displays (handy). Perplexingly the ‘report’ kept showing some orphaned products even though I had linked them all and the report had shown none previously.

It is a test site undergoing some heavy development so at first I put it down to that - rolling the database back and forth etc But today I noticed it and was pretty sure that nothing had changed that could cause such data changes. Could it be some bug in entity API, commerce ? Unlikely!

So crack out the deer stalker and pipe and first stop check the last updated datetime for the related product displays and see that, sure enough they were updated that morning.

So if I didn’t update it who or what did? The most likely suspect is cron calling a hook - I could debug that by listing all hooks and chasing the rabbit through them - or think what would cron call that would affect product displays - job scheduler is a likely suspect and ‘ping’ light bulb! I imported the product displays using the excellent feeds module and although I ran it manually from an uploaded file, by default it sets up to run the import every 30mins! And there you have it!

** update **

I thought you couldn't import product displays linked to multiple products - since found out from Randy Fay of Commerce Guys that you can! Using Feeds Tamper! I'll post a link to another great screencast from Randy here [here you go http://www.drupalcommerce.org/node/467]. (By the way the latest version of Feeds now also allows you to import to list(text) fields!)

See also http://technology.blue-bag.com/importing-products-displays-and-related-products-drupal-commerce

So I imported several thousand products and about 30 product displays using feeds then linked the displays to the products - helpfully I had imported a common field on both that allowed the displays to be linked to the products. All fine until every 30 mins the node importer ran and updated the product displays in small batches (hence not immediately obvious that products were being unlinked) I had disabled it on the commerce product importer but overlooked it on the displays import.

So the top tip? When using feeds to import data from an uploaded file make sure you disable the schedule element! and disable the feeds module on production if you don’t need it!

#drupal #commerce #feeds

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