Rants and Raves

AT&T offers three separate services through their U-Verse branded advance communications offering.  This post will deal with high speed internet.

Essentially AT&T U-Verse internet is DSL broadband — though at much higher rates that you’re likely used to… the particulars of the speed offering depends on the package you pay for.

• Max Turbo – Up to 24 Mbps downstream Starting at $65/month
• Max Plus – Up to 18.0 Mbps downstream Starting at $55/month
• Max – Up to 12.0 Mbps downstream Starting at $45/month
• Elite – Up to 6.0 Mbps downstream Starting at $43/month
• Pro – Up to 3.0 Mbps downstream Starting at $38/month

Upstream bandwidth increases with downstream, and is generally much more generous than AT&T’s older ADSL plans; though the pricing of the lower bandwidth U-Verse services aren’t as attractive as the older AT&T ADSL plans (particularly with the promotions you can probably still get for the older ADSL combined with voice or even “naked” DSL plans)..

Not shown on their ordering information is a 30 Mbps downstream plan to be offered later this Summer that will ahve a 5 Mbps upstream.

Remember from my earlier post — you must use the AT&T residential gateway.  The gateway is a descent piece of consumer technology, though I’m not sure it’s a very high performance internet router.

My tests of it show that it’s definitely capable of sustaining the advertised bandwidth of your connection (and you really get the bandwidth your order); however, my tests also show that the router isn’t capable of sustaining a large number of simultaneous connections without rather dramatic performance degradation.

Which mean in plan old English — if you’re going to do Peer-To-Peer file sharing, the AT&T residential gateway will not be your friend… you’re probably going to end up having to reset it every day or two to keep it running well (I’ve noted that simply shutting down the connections doesn’t seem to help — but that could be that other P2P nodes are continuing to bombard your IP address).

For most people P2P isn’t a requirement, and certainly most people won’t be doing P2P much — and if they do, they certainly understand how to discontinue P2P services and reset the connection (remember it affects voice and video when you reset) when they need high speed connectivity for something else.

My gut tells me that the equipment is operating as designed — and intended to enforce a “fair use” policy by penalizing individuals who try and do P2P (after all — unlimited really doesn’t mean as much as you want, it means as much as your provider is willing to let you have).

And my gut feeling about the router operating as designed is further re-enforced by the fact that a great deal of though has been put into the design of the software and interface for the router… it will do pretty much anything any use will need for it to do (don’t think along the lines of a Cisco router with IOS, think along the lines of a prosumer / SOHO router).

Overall, my feelings are that the AT&T U-Verse Internet is a good deal, that it performs well, and at the high speed levels (well, not at the highest — I think there you’re getting gouged) it’s a reasonably fair price, and a very solid technology.

U-Verse Internet is really all I wanted from AT&T; and it’s the one service I will keep.

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology, Web by roger
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Comcast consistently ranks in the top ten (almost always the top five) of companies with pathetic customer service in virtually every poll I’ve seen (they probably even do poorly in polls they sponsor LOL).

I received a unsolicited commercial email from a Comcast business customer; and I did exactly what I should do — report it to the abuse contact published in the ARIN database, and send them a plain text copy of the entire email message — including full headers (adding the word SPAM to the subject).

I got back an automated message that said I needed to provide them the headers of the email message and a link to a page that really didn’t have any useful information.

I resent the message; including all the tags that were mentioned on the page (including the one for harassment, since that was the closest thing that fit)… and I got back a message from “Fred CSAtech55″ referencing case ID NA0000014230535; who tells me if I want to follow up as “Harrassment” (that’s his spelling, not mine) that I should “call Comcast Security Assurance (CSA) at 888-565-4329″; but if I want to follow it up as spam I should “then choose the opt out option that the email provides”.

I guess, poor Fred not only can’t spell, but doesn’t understand that the LAST thing you do from an unsolicited email from a company that you’ve never dealt with (and have no reason to trust) is click on one of their links.

Maybe if Comcast hired people who could spell they might get out of the top ten worst companies for customer service.  Even better, if they hired people with a clue, they might actually be able to provide reasonable customer support and be no where near the top ten worst.

Oh, and if you’re thinking that they only provide poor service when you’re not a customer — WRONG, I can tell you story after story about how pathetic their service was in San Francisco; and how much better AT&T’s service was (that should truly be scary, when a company with service as poor as AT&T can have far superior service).

Tags: Communications, Email, Shit List, Technology by roger
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As of 1 March 2010 all of my domains should have both SPF and DKIM support in order to help receiving servers verify that the email is not SPAM.

If you are having problem receiving my email, or my email is ending up in your junk folder, please contact your email provider and query them about this.

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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I’ve already posted that I’ve moved my web hosting over to JustHost.com and that  I’m happy with JustHost.com; but I decided it was well worth actually going through what makes JustHost.com a reasonably good choice for hosting.

UNLIMITED would have to start the list.

Web hosting with JustHost.com has unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, unlimited domain hosting, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email storage, unlimited MySQL databases, and unlimited database size.

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE would have to be the second item on the list.

Not a 30-day money back guarantee, but an any time money back guarantee.  If you pre-pay for two or three or four years to get the best price, you can still get a pro-rated refund if they ever fail to meet your expectations; and within the first 30-days you get a full refund (I believe they will charge you for domain registration if they provided or extended your domain’s registration, but that’s reasonable).

COST would be the third item on the list.

And honestly I shouldn’t say cost, but rather value.  After all, you’re not looking for a cheap web host, you’re looking for a reliable web hosting company that won’t break the bank.

FEATURES would be the forth item on the list.

Web hosting plans include one domain (they will pay the registration fee, but they don’t provide private registration — so you may well find that you can get a better deal using another service for domain registration).

They use a fairly standard cPanel for controlling web hosting, domain, and email features.  Though, one thing to note is that just because you see something on their cPanel demo does not necessarily mean that it will be included with the hosting package you order (it may be an extra charge item — though realistically none of the “must have” features are extra charge items).

They have a fairly complete list of applications that can be installed directly from their control panel, and likely any LAMP based web application will run without issue (you may need to change some of the default Apache settings via .htaccess in order to make a LAMP application run optimally).

They support Server Side Include (SSI), PHP5, cron jobs, private/custom CGIs, SPF/DKIM, custom DNS records (you have to request customer service to add records for you on a shared hosting package; but they entered a CNAME for me in just a few minutes) and just about everything else other than Apache Tomcat (Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages framework isn’t include on shared hosting packages).

SUPPORT would also need to be on the list.

Their pre-sales support is great; they’ll answer any question you might have, and generally they’re right on the money (I always test pre-sales by asking them some moderately difficult questions that I already know the answers to along with any real questions I need the answers to).

Their technical support staff is good; I probably should rate them very good.  They generally take care of any issue immediately; occasionally you’ll end up having to provide them a little more detail in a response to the original ticket in order to get a resolution, but even then I’ve yet to have any issue that took them more than a few hours to resolve (though keep in mind, when it involves DNS changes they don’t control how quickly that propagates through the net).

By default they organize your hosting account with a primary domain and all secondary and external domains are “under” that in the directory structure.  To avoid this you can do what I did and register a fictitious domain as your primary domain <your name>.justhost.com works well since you can be sure there’s not likely to be any collision with a real domain / zone (it would be great if they would just give you this as an option).

RATING would also be on the list.

And by that I mean that you don’t have to blindly trust what I’m saying, JustHost.com consistently ranks high on comparisons with other hosting providers.  While you might find some negative comments out there, overall the reviews are positive and when viewed side-by-side with their competitors (many charging far more for less) they get great marks.

One note, the price you see advertised on the web site isn’t the lowest price you can get… if you decide you are interested, when you attempt to navigate away an automated “bot” will offer you a lower price (potentially a very low price).  There may be different restrictions with the promotional price than the normal packages (I could only get the price I paid per year for a maximum of three years, but it was substantially lower than their normal four year plan — in fact, three years ran me a little more than the published rate for 12 months and a little less than the published rate for 24 months).

When you decide to buy hosting from JustHost.com, please use the advertising panel on my site so that I get a referral credit (it won’t increase the price you pay in the least) or use this link:  JustHost.com.

Tags: Blogging, Communications, Deals, Email, Technology by roger
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SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are two methods to help indentify email which is likely not SPAM.  SPF was originally proposed in 2003 by Meng Weng Wong and Wayne Schlitt (SPFv1 RFC4408) as an open standard (SPF is backed by the Sender Policy Framework Council); DKIM originally merged and enhanced DomainKeys from Yahoo and Identified Internet Mail from Cisco (RFC4870 superseded by RFC4871) forming an open standard (DKIM is backed by an industry consortium).

Both SPF and DKIM attempt to provide information to receiving SMTP servers about whether or not a particular email message is authentic.

SPFv1 uses a very simple approach where a domain’s DNS server provides a root level TXT record that supplies information about SMTP mail servers that are permitted to originate domain email.

DKIM uses a more complex digital signature on each message (information about which is stored in a sub-domain in domains DNS containing self-signed keys).

You can read up on the specifics of each through the reference links provided below.

Microsoft SPF Record Wizard · OpenSPF Wizard

DKIM (Wikipedia)

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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POP:
host: mail.<yourdomain>
host: <yourhost>.justhost.com
port: 110
port: 995, SSL

IMAP:
host: mail.<yourdomain>
host:<yourhost> .justhost.com
port: 143
port: 993, SSL

SMTP:
host: mail.<yourdomain> (requires authentication)
host: <yourhost>.justhost.com
port: 25
port: 2626
port: 465, SSL

WEB MAIL:
url: https://<yourdomain>:2096
url: https://<yourhost>.justhost.com:2096

• SSL: you will need to accept the self signed certificate; some mail readers do not allow you to retain self signed certificates, so you will need to do that each and every time a connection (or initial connection) is made.
• SMTP: requires authentication; also you ISP may block port 25 (which is why port 2626 is also supported).
• <yourhost> would be something like cl111 so for example cl111.justhost.com
• <yourdomain> would be something like mydomain.com so for example mail.mydomain.com

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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As I posted a couple weeks ago I’d gone ahead and moved some of my domains over to JustHost.com.

Mainly I was looking for an affordable hosting package that supports server side includes in addition to what I already had at 1and1.com for around same price.  I also wanted unlimited bandwidth (but frankly I could have gotten that at 1and1.com with a cross-grade for just a small amount more per month with no hassle).

The way I started looking for a new host was to find some the “10 best” “50 best” or what ever they happened to be articles on the internet for hosting companies.  I read through them, looked at their current offerings, features, and prices.  The ones I felt were interesting I looked for reviews on the internet and read them.

Reviews from people you don’t know are not necessarily valuable.  Read the review, see what they’re saying, see how they’re saying, and see if their needs and abilities closely ally with yours.  And look for a pattern in reviews — if many people say the same thing, it’s far more likely to be true and not simply an isolated incident.

Once I narrowed down the field to a handful I reviewed any demos they offered of their control panel, features, etc.  If they didn’t have any demo I placed them on the bottom of the list.

Then I tried their online “chat” feature to talk to a pre-sales person.  If they didn’t offer an online chat I placed them on the bottom of the list (the very bottom — online chat is more important in the long run than a demo).

For the chat, I asked a few questions that there were in fact answers to on their site (just to see how quickly the person on the other end could provide me with a response, and if their response agreed).  Then I ask any questions that I had that were not addressed by the site.  Finally I ask one question that would require the person to actually think and apply the information on their site to the context of the question.

After that I decided on going with JustHost.com — they seemed like they provided the best package, best support, and most reasonable price.  When I went to order the package they offered me a better price when I was going to navigate away from the order page to check on a couple things.

I’ve moved all my domains over to JustHost.com; I’ve put an affiliate advertisement for JustHost.com on my web page and my BLOG (if you’re going to order service from them, I encourage you to click on the advertisement on here so as to help defray the costs for maintaining my BLOG — and hopefully growing it; it won’t cost you anything).

Things I don’t like…

• They have the concept of a “primary” domain; which makes all domains but that reside under the primary in the directory structure.
• They do not allow direct access to DNS on shared packages.
• Shell access is extra (quite a bit extra) per year.  It would have been a “nice to have”, but I didn’t need it, and didn’t pay for it.
• PHP5 doesn’t work by default in subdomains.
• Databases are on the same machine as web servers.  I know this is very common, but I prefer databases to be on database servers and web servers to be separate.  This item is on the end of the list for a reason.

But…

• They will allow you to use a “fake” domain (I did a subdomain of their domain) as your primary, which makes all domains equal, but if you want to access the root you have to use the host name where your hosting account files are located rather than your domain name (you could have them enter a CNAME for you if you like, but if you forget the host name just do a trace route to one of your domain’s web addresses and you’ll see it).
• While you don’t have direct access to DNS, they will enter DNS records for you — CNAME I know (they did that for me); and I expect they’ll do TXT, A, etc.
• To enable PHP5 in a subdomain you just need to add a couple lines to your .htaccess file (the service representative didn’t know them right off the top of his head; but after confirming it should work, I had no problem).

Things I do like…

• The price is very reasonable for a unlimited shared hosting package.
• Customer support is great; the people who’ve chatted with me or replied to my tickets have been extremely courteous and have resolved the issue.
• Server side include support.  It really is nice to be able to have dynamic content that is provided by the server rather than have to have intricate AJAX requests (and faster).
• Performance.  Thus far I can’t complain about the performance.
• IMAP, POP, SMTP email both clear text and SSL versions.  SMTP is offered on alternate ports as well for individuals who’s ISP block access to port 25.

I often say..

Rarely do you get what you pay for.

With JustHost.com you may in fact get what you pay for (and maybe more).

Tags: Blogging, Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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I’ve mentioned before that I was considering moving my web sites to another hosting company, not that there’s anything really wrong with my previous hosting company, but more so because I wanted some features that were just too expensive for me to justify.

My new hosting company — JustHost.com — offers fairly attractive prices, has a fairly good reputation, and has the features I most wanted on an unlimited hosting package.

It’s still too soon for me to give them a recommendation; but I have placed an advertising link on the side panel of my site and blog to them (and yes I will get a referral fee if you use it).

A couple things…

I’m not hosting any domains with them; their registration price isn’t bad, but private registration is extra (and I really don’t like my personal and confidential information published on the web to be harvested by those who will not benefit me).

The cPanel interface they use is fairly common at hosting companies (I guess vDeck is the other big competitor) — but it’s totally different from what I’m used to.

Keep in mind, you should evaluate a web hosting company against your personal needs and requirements.  Remember, most hosting companies packages like this are not suitable for companies that have a great deal of web traffic and would suffer should their web site not be able to deliver information to customers.

Tags: Blogging, Communications, Email, Technology by roger
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Make sure you’re sitting down, I wouldn’t want you to fall over — but there are bugs in Live Mail.

I actually did the Beta for Live Mail quite some time ago, and reported several bugs during the course of that — from my experience you’re wasting your time reporting bugs to Microsoft, each and every bug I found made it into the first release, and almost all of them are still there.

Here are two bugs that really need to be fixed.  Both are annoyances (they won’t result in the loss of data for sure); but both of them speak to the attention to quality and detail that simply isn’t part of the Microsoft culture.

The first bug which really needs to be fixed has to do with viewing a folder in an account.  Many times when you perform and operation (like deleting a folder for instance) Live Mail will repaint the folder view; however, it repositions the view port at the first item (but leaves focus where it should be)… the problem is if you have more folders that fit vertically on the screen, you’re looking at an entirely different time zone than the one that has focus.  A simple fix — save the view port position before the operation; restore the view port position after it if and before the repaint.  I guess the programmer that did this code was sleeping during Windows Programming 101.

The second bug which also really needs to be fixed has to do with dragging an email into the file system.  Windows Live Mail will create a file system safe name for the container file from the subject; however, if the subject ends in “…” (and probably many other character sequences) the file doesn’t get a “.eml” file extension, but rather a “._eml” file extension.  I guess the programmer that did this code figured it was right to make the file name file system safe after appending the extension when he should have made the base name file system safe and then appended the extension of “.eml”.

Like I said, these are simple issues — with very simple fixes… but they are fixes that shouldn’t be been necessary since this code should have never gotten out of Beta with these problems (they were reported).  In fact, I could argue that these problems should have never made it into a code build — they should have failed unit tests.

But these problems made it into release code; and these problems have existed for quite some time in release code — all I can say is that the commitment to quality I see in Microsoft software is similar to that that I see in Open Source code… so hopefully Microsoft will begin giving away more and more of it’s software at no charge so that the cost basis and the quality are on par.

Tags: Computers, Email, Software, Technology, Windows by roger
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Part of the Microsoft Live Essential software suite available either from Live.com (see link below) or through the Microsoft Update is Live Mail; a simple, fairly versatile email client.

Live Mail allows access to POP3, IMAP4, and Hot Mail / MSN Mail / Live Mail web mail.

Live Mail is a replacement for Outlook Express and Windows Mail (from Vista).

It’s nicely polished, and for the most part works without any major issues (like any software, it has bugs and annoyances).

One thing you may not like is the fact that Live Mail hides the menu bar (you can enable it; but even that seems to be made purposely difficult in the latest version).

The biggest annoyance I have with Live Mail is that it will not import an IAF (that’s an export file) created with Outlook Express or Windows Mail (thank you very much Microsoft for paying such close attention to customer needs).

If you have a Hot Mail / MSN Mail / Live Mail web mail account you will probably want to choose this product as an email client on your computer; if you don’t you may want to look at Thunderbird (part of the Mozilla project, as is Firefox).

The feature I like most about Live Mail (and it’s predecessors) is the ability to drag an email out of Live Mail onto my local file system and put it back (Thunderbird doesn’t have any convenient way to put a message back).  This isn’t a feature that should be a deal breaker for most anyone (if you need to do it, you know how to do it with Thunderbird — it just won’t be quite as easy).

Overall, Live Mail is a descent program, and it’s priced right — FREE.

Windows Live Essentials

NOTE:  GMail content can be access by either POP3 or IMAP4; simply follow the instructions on GMail to enable it and add it to Live Mail or any email client that supports POP3 or IMAP4 over a SSL connection (and allows you to specify the port numbers).

Tags: Communications, Computers, Email, Software, Technology, Windows by roger
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