Here's Why

Lock out!

23-4-05 iiNet have a faulty disk quota script which says I'm using 30 meg of the 30 meg web space they give me for $50/month with my 512K/s ADSL. As a result, I can't enter new blog posts. In reality, a simple "du -ks" on the directory mirror on my computer shows I'm using 14 meg of disk space. This post is an attempt to hack an update message. iiNet have offically gone past their use-by date. Too expensive, and the service is lousy. I've made two calls to their phone line, and two emails. The last phone call recognized the problem, will escalate to their tech staff. Thats nice, but as someone who has worked in computer support myself, I know that the least they could have done was temporarily increase my quota until the problem is fixed. Instead, they've left me trying to hack into a service I've paid for. 18-4-05 My ISP, iiNet upgraded their servers earlier this week at exactly the same time I was experimenting with internet telephony software to talk with Andrew in Victoria. In fact Telstra also decided to have a planned outage, so I was given the illusion of having broken the system. I lost my PPP connection and even ADSL. For the rest of the week, I have been unable to log into MoveableType to post on the blog. I finally had time and health to troubleshoot it, and discovered that all the permissions on my web files had been changed, and that this was stopping the images, the CSS files, the javascript, and much else from working. Then I just had to find an FTP program whose CHMOD commands would actually be accepted by iiNet to fix the permissions. WS_FTP finally did the job. I still wasn't able to log in using the basic mt.cgi from my browser, although the images were visible. I ran MT-Blacklist, my comment spam destroyer, and it works. It has a menu item to "return to blog". I clicked on that, and "hey presto!" I've tunneled back into my own blog. Bizarre.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here

Posted by iwoolf at April 18, 2005 11:22 PM | TrackBack