taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

As I noted last year, BT, the ISP I use here in Ireland, disconnects broadband sessions on a daily basis, assigning a new IP address; this is really aggravating to anyone who uses a VPN, such as most telecommuters. Reportedly, this is done to work around deficiencies in their billing system.

A comment from Jeremy on that post suggested something interesting, though:

Just had a very helpful tech support guy on from BT. [... he] told me to restart the modem sometime that will make it convenient for the 24 hour IP change - i.e. restart it at 6am, and then it’ll change IP every day at 6am.

I’ve tested this, and it works. Much more convenient! Now the renumbering and VPN breakage can take place when I want it to — at the start of the workday, instead of some random point chosen by BT’s billing system. Quite an improvement.

To make this useful, here’s a script, “reboot-zyxel”, which will reboot your Zyxel P-660RU router remotely over the LAN. (It requires perl and curl.)

Tags: adsl, broadband, bt, esat, hacking, internet, modems, p-660ru, routers, scripts, software, zyxel

Argh! This is what happens every day to my DSL connection, at half past 12:

13 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 2: link down
14 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12  INFO  ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
15 Mon Apr 10 12:26:53 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 3: link up
26 Tue Apr 11 12:26:46 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 2: link down
28 Tue Apr 11 12:26:48 2006 PP12  INFO  ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
29 Tue Apr 11 12:26:48 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 3: link up
38 Wed Apr 12 12:26:56 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 2: link down
40 Wed Apr 12 12:26:58 2006 PP12  INFO  ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
41 Wed Apr 12 12:26:58 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 3: link up
50 Thu Apr 13 12:27:00 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 2: link down
52 Thu Apr 13 12:27:03 2006 PP12  INFO  ppp_ready: ch:8056167c, iface:80419f14
53 Thu Apr 13 12:27:03 2006 PP12 -WARN  SNMP TRAP 3: link up

Worse than that, it will generally assign a different IP address to the connection when it reconnects! This buggers up any applications that rely on long-lived TCP connections, such as SSH shell logins, tunnels, remote-desktop sessions, and instant messaging; all get disconnected and have to be manually re-set up.

Initially, I thought this may have been a flaky connection. However, it appears not — check out those timestamps; that’s a scheduled, daily event. Also, there have been no other disconnections apart from those.

A discussion on the IIU mailing list revealed the reason — it seems BT Ireland have a policy of resetting their customers’ connections daily. That could be OK, if they came right back up with the same IP — TCP/IP is designed to cope with that, and generally does — but it does not do that. Instead the IP address is reassigned every single time.

This is turning out to be quite a nuisance. Working over the internet requires quite a few VPN connections, tunnels, and remote logins, and having to re-set those up, daily, is turning out to be a pain in the neck.

I’m casting around for hacks to get around this. Right now, I have an assortment of jiggery-pokery involving ssh, a shell script ‘while’ loop, and screen(1), but it’s messy and not working out too well. Ideally, I’d set up another VPN (via IPSec or CIPE), and set it up to reconnect on link failure, then route all other VPNs and remote logins out via that — but I don’t have spare routable IPs to do this with. Anyone got any good suggestions?

By the way, it’s worth noting that their FAQ fails to mention this, instead giving some incorrect information about my IP being ‘removed’ when my web browsing session ends:

Is it a fixed IP?

No, the product is set up with dynamic IP Addressing. This means that every time you open your browser you will be allocated a different IP address for the duration of that session. When the session ends the IP Address is removed.

That is incorrect — this has nothing to do with web browsing sessions.

To be honest, I’d prefer not to have to switch ISPs to get away from this brokenness — the rest of the service is quite nice, good pings, good throughput, no other disconnections or outages — but this is quite a problem for someone using BT Broadband for telecommuting purposes. :(

Tags: adsl, broadband, bt, bt-ireland, esat, esatbt, telecoms

Perfect timing! Just 5 days before I return to Ireland, Damien Mulley posts ‘Broadband choices in Ireland’, a good overview of the options available for consumer broadband internet connection.

I’ve been out of the loop for quite a while, and spoilt by the options available in suburban Southern California (which are, of course, pretty good). But this is a lot better than what was on the table when I left, 3 years ago.

What strikes me is that the upload/download speeds are quite reasonable and pretty close to what you’d see in the US. Similarly, the prices are finally near to the going rate in the US, once the various limitations and add-ons (required ‘bundles’, state taxes etc.) are taken into consideration.

However, virtually all of these deals use the horrendous concept of download capping! Given that I use this stuff for work, and routinely rsync around 30GB chunks of email corpora between central offices, colo servers, and my desktop, this just won’t fly. It could be argued that I’m therefore not a typical broadband consumer, who these deals have been carefully designed to cater for. But seriously — if a telecommuting software developer isn’t a typical broadband consumer, who the hell is? Hey telcos: a little flexibility goes a long way — don’t fence me in. ;)

All in all, it looks like Smart Telecom are the winners; 3Mb/s download, 512Kb upload — and most importantly, no cap — for EUR 35 per month. (And check out that XHTML/WAI-compliant website!)

I probably would have gone with Irish Broadband, but for the past 6 months the only thing I’ve been hearing about them via word-of-mouth has been bad news, detailing customer service meltdown after meltdown. Even the legendarily incompetent ‘biddies’ of Eircom seem to be getting better reviews nowadays.

Talking of Eircon, our dear old dirty-tricks-wielding celtic-tiger-throttling incumbent telco: the top Sponsored Link on a Google search for irish broadband is:

Irish Broadband

www.eircom.ie — More speed, prices reduced by 25%, free modem & a free connection!

Scum.

Tags: adsl, broadband, damien-mulley, eircon, ireland, irelandoffline, irishblogs, smart-telecom

Just got ADSL installed — it’s sweet. Napster rides again! Well, to tell the truth — gnapster rides again, the proprietary stuff was never going to work for me on Linux anyway, and they’ve been thoroughly shafted by the RIAA now.

Anyway, as a result, I’ve been getting very heavily into the Congo Natty back catalogue. Junglist! ;)

Tags: adsl, catalogue, gnapster, junglist, linux, napster, result, riaa, stuff, truth