wally’s blog

Well, things have finally moved on.

Apparently somewhere, myself and Wonga were trying to meet half way, and consistently missing.  But fortunately that’s no longer the case.

You’ll see the blog entry originally outlining my issues has now been removed, hidden from the prying eyes of Google and those who clearly want nothing more than to flame (which I will mention in a moment).

To the guys at Wonga, thank-you for finally sorting this out.  Thank-you for taking on board what I had to say (politely, and in no way aggressively) regarding your customer services, and thank-you for the personal assurance that everything is now resolved.

If you are the unfortunate victim of fraud through Wonga (through, as in “by means of using Wonga maliciously”) – then keep hope.  I’ve witnessed that they do respond, it’s just perhaps not yet quite as easy as it should be.

Hopefully this is now the close of the chapter, and the start of a new one.  A huge stress of my mind, and something to be vigilant about in the future.

Geez. Suzanne’s netbook randomly died on her yesterday (WinXP won’t boot, it BSODs and cycles itself repeatedly) – and the “TechGuys” recovery partition (which replaces the WinXP install CD) just trashes the entire XP install. Thanks. No really. Thanks.

So I grab a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 UNR and try to install it via USB (as there’s no CD drive in the netbook – and I’m lacking a USB CD drive).

It’s been 24 hours now, and I’ve still not got it working. For someone who’s done plenty of initrd hacking, I’m shocked it’s *this* hard. But still, I will prevail. I must prevail. It is just an inanimate object after all.

During a recent conversation with a colleague at work, it began to dawn on me the sheer wasted bandwidth small and large businesses sit on during the “out of working hours”.

I’ve no idea if anything like this has been done before – if it has, then fair play.  If not, then I think it’d make an interesting experiment to try.

The idea is simple – there’s a lack of bandwidth available to home users, thanks to BT’s monopoly and purely reactive attitude toward rolling out fibre, reducing contention, traffic shaping, etc blah.  There’s also an increased demand for long durations of large bandwidth, like iPlayer for example.

Previously, contention and traffic shaping were sufficient (although in my opinion – unfair and hidden), but these high bandwidth, intensely saturating streaming services require constant amounts of bandwidth being available.

Increasingly, it would seem, businesses up and down the country are taking residence near groups of houses, or perhaps the other way around – houses are increasingly being built near industrial estates etc.  And these businesses in industrial estates often fork out a lot of money for expensively low contention bandwidth – like leased lines.

My proposal is simple – businesses start selling their available bandwidth on to houses near by for some nominal fee (because let’s face it, any money made is a win) – during the problem hours of 6.00pm through 7.00am, weekdays.  Weekends of course would be optional – but advised.

As far as I’m aware – leased lines are a set fee per month, and provide a guaranteed amount of bandwidth (say 5Mb).  If that 5Mb were provided purely for iPlayer use across 20 houses, on a first come first served basis (i.e. 2x 2Mb streams allowed at once, and no more), home users with limited available bandwidth could be entitled to a program an evening at full speed.  Perhaps the special “booster router” in their living room could shine a bright white LED when one of the two slots is available?

Alternatively, the system could be provided vice versa – avoiding all problems of “aggregated bandwidth” etc by having BT provide cost breaks for businesses willing to have their phone lines used to push the excess requirements up from the exchanges to their buildings, where it’s placed onto their unused leased lines (a kind of “put power back on the grid” kind of thing).  The big disadvantage here is, the only problem dealt with is contention – not the last mile problem to houses far from the exchange.

But it’s only a thought, and it’s probably a rubbish one at that!

Is it ironic that this Youtube video is refused (in the UK) due to “copyright”?

(It’s the IT Crowd piracy parody)

Disclaimer: I’m certainly no expert in the area of data recovery, and I will not take any responsibility for damage of you, your or anyone else’s hardware/data caused by following these ideas. This entry is nothing more than a diary of what I did for my and other people’s future interest or reference.

Recently I received a Windows XP machine which “wouldn’t start up”. The BIOS would simply output “A error reading disk drive” after the POST. Note this isn’t the same error as “Insert system disk” etc.

I proceeded to check the obvious, trying every boot order and boot option in the BIOS, all without avail. I then booted Knoppix and attempted to mount the data partition (what was C: in Windows), without success.

Important note: I made two stupid mistakes here. Firstly, I tried to initially mount it in Konqueror, and secondly I tried to mount it read/write. If you’re suspicious of a device’s health, mount it readonly and mount it via the terminal. It’ll possibly save your data and save you some wasted time.

I then tried to mount it from a terminal, but I received a variety of errors regarding DMA read failures. I proceeded to disable DMA (K Menu/KNOPPIX/Utilities/Harddisk/CD/DVD DMA Acceleration) and tried again. Still read errors.

At this point I plugged in an external 500GB hard drive (USB) and started an ntfsclone with the command

ntfsclone -o /mnt/sda1/hda1.img -s --rescue /dev/hda1

Whether due to the computer’s USB speed speed or (more likely) the HD’s state, it took about 9 hours to copy 10GB of data off. It unearthed several hundred unreadable sectors in the process.

It’s important to note at this point (if you’re not familiar with the NTFS tools) that the “-s” switch for ntfsclone causes it only copy parts of the filesystem which are actually in use. That means it does not do the same as:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/hda1.img conv=noerror,sync bs=8k

I’ll probably go down the same route as before, using my Autopsy script to get off what good sectors I can. But the above commands and flags might just make some else’s life a little easier.

It’s been on my mind for some time now … possibly due to my work (where I am interacting with “technical” people who even themselves struggle) – there must surely be a “near perfect” home router design, something which anyone who has used the Internet on their home computer can install and configure.

I currently believe that the “perfect” design must be a simple design, and have a simple interface.  It must rely on doing everything it can, itself.  It must not ask any questions that don’t need answering.  It must only include features that the home user would want – no VPN, no VLANs, no PPoE, and so on.

So in my mind the device looks something like a WRT54GL.  It has 1 “Internet” port, and 4 “other” ports.  It has wireless antenna.  And it has a power LED.

When you plug the device in, it offers DHCP on every interface – that’s WiFi, LAN and WAN.  The user opens “the Internet” and trys to browse, perhaps the documentation suggests going to “router.lan”.  Dependent on which interface they’ve connected through, a webpage will be displayed welcoming them to their “network”.  If they’ve plugged themselves into the WAN port – the page will ask them to connect using a different pot, because this is for the “Internet”.  For those using WiFI – a congratulations your Wireless network is working!

Once they’ve “OK’ed” the WiFi welcome or changed to a LAN port, a Wizard will walk them through setting a wireless network name and setting a passphrase.  Then it’ll try and connect to the Internet, using DHCP on the WAN port (the DHCP server is now disabled on that interface).

The router hosts it’s own DNS server – directing “router.lan” to itself.  Until the Wizard is finished, all DNS requests will point to itself, enforcing the user to finish before getting online.  The Wizard will ask for a “computer name”, allowing the user to setup DNS records for each device on their network.  Every computer’s MAC is saved for DHCP – ensuring each device gets the same IP every time.

The network would be in the 10.0.0.x range, possibly using a /16 mask to allow more than 253 devices to ever be connected (remember we assign an IP permenantly to each device).  This plus lifetime IP assignments should make it easier for non-techies to operate their network … “ten dot zero dot zero dot five” I believe is  a lot easier than 192.168.0.5.  And everything keeps the same IP, so little Jimmy’s netbook is always going to be 10.0.0.8.  With the “computer names” (DNS entries – possibly automagical via NetBIOS for the most part) make connecting between devices even easier still, i.e. wii.lan and netbook.lan etc.  We also minimize the likelyhood of conflicting with our modem device.

Finally there are “additional” options – not included in the wizard – allowing “Advert blocking” and “Website logging” etc.

The router should attempt DHCPing the WAN port – and only in the situation that DHCP fails should it provide the option to enter some details manually.  Home users don’t (and shouldn’t) have to care about their LAN DHCP pool or DMZs.  The router should offer some advice, allowing you to select what “kind” of device various clients are – for example “10.0.0.14 (XBOX 360) connected 12m 34s” – allowing the router to offer suggested port forwards (or just doing it with basic consent?), and potentially performing a portmap scan for “servers” to help the user understand what things they might want to allow (like RDP or HTTP).

Finally some access restrictions might be good, giving the option to stop access late at night, and of course some enforced QoS.

So the router is going to make a lot of assumptions – but all in the name of simplicty.

Kamikazi developers anyone?

On that note: I be feeling lucky!

If you’re an Essex University student (i.e. you have a valid Essex login) and you’re tired of having to enter campus for access to the Apple Higher Education store, you’ll probably be pleased to know you can do it from home.

If you’re running Linux/Unix (including OSX), you’ve already got everything you need.  Windows users will need to grab Putty and an X server.

Users of real operating systems will just have to open a terminal and enter:

ssh username@unix4.essex.ac.uk -X
Password: [enter password]
$ firefox

Windows users will still be downloading and installing the needed tools at this point, when they’re eventually ready, they’ll have to run Putty, enter “unix4.essex.ac.uk as the host, enter their username and enable X forwarding. Hopefully, if your X server is running, typing “firefox” at the prompt (after your password) will bring a firefox window to your desktop.

Now this firefox window will be slow, because it’s running on the University’s server. So be patient and use it only for what you need. As it’s running at the University, it’ll have no problem accessing the Apple Higher Education store.

Seems Google is indexing yet more information from the net, now you can search for movie times. Woo!