The Screaming Viking

This weekend I decided to build myself a new firewall.  The obvious question is, “why would you need a firewall at all?”.  I released about a year ago that I was going to need something a little better than a consumer class router to handle my home networking needs.  It’s not that I do anything all that fancy or need more functionality, the little router was not able to handle all the connections I was creating via torrents.  It would last for maybe a couple of days then services would slowly die.  The dhcp server might crash, the wireless might go down, then blamo it would hard lock.  I’d have to reset the power and everything would be fine for a couple of days again..rinse repeat.  I decided to build a smoothwall on free hardware just to see if it’s something I would use.  Fast forward a year and as it turns out the smoothwall is something that was kind of handy to have.  The machine I have it on though it starting to show it’s age in a bad way.  It may or may not boot up completely after a power outage.  One of the NIC’s is starting to get finicky about the connection..the hard drive sounds like it’s on it’s last legs…it’s time for a new one.  On top of all that, it would be nice to have something a little bit faster.  I decided to repurpose my old desktop for the new firewall box.  This machine has a 2.2ghz athlon with 2gig of RAM and an 80ish gig SATA hd.  That should be enough horse power to run a firewall pretty smoothly.  I ordered a couple more NICs so I could configure things the way I wanted…and I was off and running.

There isn’t much to say about the install, smoothwall goes on really easy.  The only “tricky” part about it is knowing what NIC it’s talking about when it asks you what to use for the various interfaces.  I configured it and rebooted..good to go.  The difference between this machine and the old one is nothing short of incredible.  It responds so much faster, it runs quieter…it’s just an all around better box.  I mentioned in the last paragraph that I ordered 3 NICs.  I set one up as the “RED” (external) interface, one as the “GREEN” (internal) interface, and the last as the “ORANGE” (DMZ) interface.  What having the orange interface allows me to do is put a machine on that NIC and keep it segregated from my internal network as well as have it unaffected by the various mods I put on the firewall (content filter, adzapper…etc).  I’m going to connect the wife’s work machine into this NIC.  It isn’t going to increase her speed or anything like that, but it will allow me to say that any problems she is having are not caused by the firewall.  Of course that won’t stop her from asking me about every issue as soon as it comes up…

I dig on being able to create as many connections as possible and this firewall still handling them without a hiccup…and I take for granted all the ad’s the adzapper actually does take care of for me.  The content filter isn’t something I’d really need per se…but it keeps the wife happy that the kid isn’t seeing something we don’t want her too.  The 2nd install of smoothwall went much better than the first time I did it…I can’t imagine what the difference might be….

I sold my NookColor recently…I came to the conclusion that it’s a pretty cool little device, but I just don’t have a space for it in my gadget drawer.  I bought the nook around the 1st of the year.  I was working at the Nor and my “personal” cell phone was a locked down black berry.  This was adequate for what I wanted to use a phone for at the time…and free makes it even better.  At the time, the NC did quite a bit of my crap surfing for me.  I didn’t have to fire up a laptop to check out facebook, it was light..quick to power on and served it’s purpose.  I also used it as a book reader and enjoyed what it had to offer.  At the time, I did quite a bit of reading in bed and the back lit screen worked out well for me.  The lack of battery life wasn’t a concern because I would plug it in each night.  It served it’s purpose well.

Then things changed a bit…I got my job at the school, which meant I wouldn’t have access to a black berry anymore.  Faced with the prospect of buying my own phone, I looked at what android devices were available and went with the Droid X.  This sucker has a pretty good screen size for a cell phone and is useful for quite a few things.  Also at the school I have access to an iPad for evaluation purposes.  It was with the introduction of these two devices that I now found my nook didn’t really have a niche anymore.  The iPad is bigger than the nook and offers a bit better battery life, but I don’t really care to read on it.  It can play videos a little better than the nook, the touch screen is of a little better quality and it has netflix available.  Being able to use netflix on one of these devices is actually pretty handy.  Sitting in bed and want to watch a quick episode of something…netflix to the rescue…etc.  It’s just a handy feature to have.

The phone has come in really handy for lots of things including alleviating boredom.  Since my house is about a 20 min drive from the school, on the days where I have to stay for a board meeting or when I was doing some coaching it would be handy if I had a device where I could do something to kill some time…these would be good opportunities to read.  How about when I go somewhere for lunch…I could read a bit while I’m eating.  This is where I found the nook a little cumbersome.  It’s rather large to bring with everywhere…and it’s another device to haul around.  I always have my phone on me, I’ll try to read on that.  Again, this showed me another problem…there was no way to sync the pages between the phone and the nook.  I’d have to remember where I was at from one device to the next…major suck.  I decided to try to read exclusively on the phone and see how it pans out.

Reading on the phone has worked out surprisingly well.  I can turn the screen brightness down quite a bit, the app I use is Aldiko.  It is very easy to get this software to pick up books in whatever directory you put them in to.  My screen is 4 inches…which works out well for me.  I’m not turning pages all the time and the touch screen on my phone is a bit better than the touch screen on the nook.  The phone fits a bit better in my hand, is lighter…etc.  I can see the text just as easily…it’s a win win to have less devices.

So…I sold the NC.  The guy I sold it to was eager to have one.  If I didn’t have access to an iPad I probably would have held on to it, as it was though…it became a redundant device.

FYI, the FTP server is going to be down until we’re finished with the move.  If you can’t hit it…too bad.  You’ll have to be patient.

My…lord…these people are horrible.

I posted on here about moving to a different host.  I hadn’t gotten around to posting how I finished up with surpass yet…and maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t because as it turned out, I wasn’t actually finished with them.  At this point, I’m not sure if they will continue to harass me or what.

I found a new host for a reasonable price and moved everything over.  The move went smooth, the only hitch was I needed a peardb module installed.  It took me a second to understand how to actually install it, but looking through their cpanel interface I found that I was making it far more complicated than it needed to be.  The module was installed fine and things were rolling smoothly.  After I was satisfied that things had been migrated and email was being delivered correctly, I contacted surpass to discontinue my service.  I was not looking for money or anything other than them taking me out of their system and not having to see an email from them ever again.  Much to my surprise, their accounting department refunded me my prorated per month charges until the end of my commitment.  I had signed up for 3 years at 140 or so, I had till Jan 2k12 left with them…so they refunded me the balance, 36 bucks, via paypal.  Wait…now that I’m thinking about that…how could they have known my paypal information?  I’d paid them with a credit card up to the last month, the last month I didn’t want to put CC info in so I did a one time paypal transaction.  It’s associated with my gmail account…which is not the account associated with the surpass account (remember that problem?) yet they pushed the money into the pay pal associated with my gmail account.  This could have been a random buddy’s paypal…jfc.  I just thought of that while typing this out.  Granted, it worked out so it’s not such a huge deal, but it really illustrates just how half assed these people were about business and customer service.  Why wouldn’t you confirm the paypal account to refund the money to?

So now I have a few bucks back, I’m rocking out a decent service with another company and I’m golden.  About a week passes and I get this email from surpass:

Good day,

We are reopening this ticket for you today as we had been awaiting a reply from your
end regarding the previous issue(s) at hand. We simply want to know if you are still
having issues, and if so, if you could please provide us with an update to the
problems we will be more than happy to trouble shoot the problems for you.

If the problems documented in this ticket have been corrected, and you are
satisfied, then there is no need to reply to this ticket. We hope that you have a
great day.

Huh? What the hell are they talking about?  What freekin ticket do I have open with them?

I respond:

The incompetence of your company is nothing short of mind boggling.

I discontinued my service with you earlier this month.  My account was
cancelled and you issued me a refund for the unused time.  For the love of
Christ, is there no way to get away from you people?  Even when I have had
my service terminated you still harass me with emails.

Your company far and away provides the worst customer service experience I
have ever seen from the I.T. industry.  Please stop sending me emails.

thanks

Pretty straight forward, and I have no interest in being “decent” to these people. I’m sooooo tired of hearing from them.
They respond:

Hello,

Your account is canceled and the invoice has been settled so you should no longer
receive any e-mails from us.

Have a great day!

Regards,

Golly, now you check this out?  In all fairness I do not fault the tech that emailed me about the problem.  I’m sure they have some metric where they have to verify open incidents, make sure things are resolved…etc…etc.  I also don’t really expect that he should check account status before sending an email…what I do blame is whatever software package they have chosen to use that does not provide this information for them?  There should be some box that has big red letters “account cancelled”, maybe the tool should take all my helpdesk tickets out of the system or deactivate them when the account is cancelled…something.  Maybe those red letters are in place and the help desk monkey didn’t see them…but after working with this company I think it’s far more likely they have no way to verify that information.

My last email to them:

I "shouldn't" have received the first email today.

I hope one day every individual in your company has the pleasure of
dealing with an organization and miserable as your company is to deal with
on the whole.

Soooo tired of these people.  It appears I’m done dealing with them…for now.