09/05/2008 @14:13:02 ^14:42:29

Just to keep the page updated

So last week I dropped off the internet for three days. ntl (yes I know they changed their name but I hate it) did something to their network on the Tuesday and I lost the connection. I waited to see if it would fix itself but it didn't, so as usual I very reluctantly tried calling the ridiculously expensive tech support line. This was last Friday. I guess three days is better than the last time when it me two months to make the call (although of course the last time I wasn't completely offline)

So I spent about 15 minutes on the phone with a woman with an impenetrable Indian accent who asked me to reboot the modem, unplug this or that, yadda yadda. At least on this occasion I didn't have to sit there for several minutes having recorded messages played at me. She eventually agreed that it wasn't my fault the thing was down and would send out an engineer. Apparently that means I get the cost of the call refunded, or at least the cost of the call if I had called them from one of their phonelines, which I didn't.

Anyway so to cut a long story short the guy turned up and poked at this and that and added another attenuator, why I don't know, but he eventually fixed it by doing something at the cabinet up the road that the other end of my cable is apparently connected to. Fortunate that worked because prior to it he was talking about getting the cable re-pulled which would have been weeks. I don't really understand what he actually did, his accent was pretty impenetrable too especially with my shyness around strangers acting up, but it's fixed now so that's the end of it I hope.

Well, almost. Thing is, they've been upgrading everyone on my broadband package to a higher speed. Here's the really stupid part - I didn't notice the speed had gone up until I happened to look at the modem's configuration webpage several days later. See I have this traffic shaping script that's vaguely based on wondershaper, and one of the things it does is drops packets if they come in too fast. So it was of course dropping everything that was coming in faster than the old speed! I should probably get rid of it but I don't know. They put ingress policing, as it is apparently called, into wondershaper for a reason. What you really need is some way to test things, currently all I can do is make a change to the script and cross my fingers and hope it worked and keep an eye on it over a few days which is less than ideal. Or I could just stop caring. Fed up of typing this now.