Archive for January, 2009

Not quite how one expects to find out…

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

This afternoon I discovered that I’ve officially been accepted to the MSc programme in Maths at UCT. But how did I discover this? I received an automated email from ICTS (UCT’s IT administration) that said “Dear Post-Honors Student, A new email address has been created for you in the Name.Surname format…” So I figured, “OK, they’ve given me a new email address, I guess that means I’ve been accepted.” And indeed, when I checked Peoplesoft (the student admin system) there was a green tick in the Admissions section that hadn’t been there before.

Now, it doesn’t really bother me to find out this way, since in my case the official acceptance is just a technicality. But in general it seems like the best way to inform prospective students that they’ve been accepted is not through an automated notice about an email alias creation. Of course a proper signed letter is in the post as I write, but, y’know, it might be nice to send an email saying “Congratulations, you’re in” before sending one saying “Here’s your email account”.

Oh yes, and they could try to spell “Honours” properly, too.

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Whois-related irritation

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Responsibility for the African IP ranges was transferred to AfriNIC what, four years ago, right? So why is it that some services that use the whois data still ignore the AfricNIC whois data? The result of this is that they believe that all African IP addresses are in Mauritius. If you’re on a South African IP, you can see this with, for example, the WhatsMyIP.org service by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org/more/ and looking at the “Whois Lookup” information.

Also, Netcraft should really know better. Check out the Netcraft information for the UCT website. It’s not like this information hasn’t been around for a while; all the open-source whois tools started using the AfriNIC server long ago. (I myself submitted the bug and patch for FreeBSD.) So really, they need to get with the program.

Update: I may have maligned Netcraft unfairly. Although they get the UCT information wrong, most SA sites do show up correctly. SAIX, for example. I’ve sent them a bug report.

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HSDPA modem and custom routing

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

So, for my Christmas present to myself I got a Huawei E220 HSDPA modem – it’s one of the Vodafone-branded ones, but I reflashed it with the generic firmware. Anyway, it’s an awesome thing to have for a geek like me – I can be connected to the Internet at broadband speeds almost anywhere in the city. It’s particularly useful when i’m on campus, so I can avoid the dog-slow UCT internet connection.

Problem is, I’d like to stay connected to the UCT network as well so that I don’t use up my precious* data bundle for UCT services, and this requires a bit of custom routing magic. So I have a script:

#!/bin/sh
GATEWAY=137.158.32.97
route add -net 137.158.0.0/16 gw $GATEWAY
route add -net 192.48.253.0/24 gw $GATEWAY
route del default
route add default ppp0

137.158.0.0/16 and 192.48.253.0/24 are the UCT netblocks, and 137.158.32.97 is the router on the subnet that I’m mostly using at the moment. ppp0 is, of course, the name of the interface associated with the HSDPA connection.

The problems with this script currently are that I have to edit it to change the gateway for each subnet that I’m on, that I have to run it manually each time I connect, and that it doesn’t restore the original routing when I disconnect. The first and third problems should be reasonably easy to solve, but the second will probably require that I dig into the mysterious world of NetworkManager. (Cue dramatic music.)

*It’s ourssss, my preciousss… they wants to take it from us, the nasssty Vodacom…

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