Ubuntu Woes

[voodooflux]

It certainly wouldn't hurt to raise a ticket with Three and see if they have any ideas. They've seemed pretty competent when I've spoken to them in the past, once you get past the initial "scripted" responses anyway.

I've also had intermittment network issues with Three, usually manifesting as a good few hours worth of network timeouts despite having what appears to be a stable HSDPA connection. This was with Windows XP though. Surprisingly these issues always seem to resolve themselves within minutes of raising a support ticket

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As a complete aside, I'm on Three Mobile Broadband "Monthly" contract and I appear to be connected through a proxy i.e. my local ip address as reported by ipconfig is different to that reported by something like "whatsmyip.com". However, my nephew is on Three Mobile Broadband PAYG, and he doesn't appear to be behind a proxy i.e. his local address is the same as his public facing address. Just thought that was "interesting".

 

[TimberWolf]

Dunno, but one annoying thing I get in Ubuntu with Firefox is that when I right-click to open a link in a new window, about 1 time in 4 Firefox/Ubuntu will do some other random thing instead. Luckily not something terminal such as wiping the hard drive. I've seen this feature being discussed on the fora but didn't spot a resolution.

 

[Peoplesoft bloke]

It certainly wouldn't hurt to raise a ticket with Three and see if they have any ideas. They've seemed pretty competent when I've spoken to them in the past, once you get past the initial "scripted" responses anyway.

I've also had intermittment network issues with Three, usually manifesting as a good few hours worth of network timeouts despite having what appears to be a stable HSDPA connection. This was with Windows XP though. Surprisingly these issues always seem to resolve themselves within minutes of raising a support ticket

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As a complete aside, I'm on Three Mobile Broadband "Monthly" contract and I appear to be connected through a proxy i.e. my local ip address as reported by ipconfig is different to that reported by something like "whatsmyip.com". However, my nephew is on Three Mobile Broadband PAYG, and he doesn't appear to be behind a proxy i.e. his local address is the same as his public facing address. Just thought that was "interesting".

The problem with raising a ticket is that it plainly (to me) isn't a three problem - since I get pretty much 100% reliability uising the exact same connection method and hardware in Vista - if I complain that I only have a problem in Ubuntu they will no doubt tell me to use Vista (there's probably even a list of supported stuff somewhere that excludes Ubuntu).

I think this is going to turn out to be something daft and esoteric about my Ubuntu installation but I don't have enough background to know where to look really.

 

[voodooflux]

The problem with raising a ticket is that it plainly (to me) isn't a three problem - since I get pretty much 100% reliability uising the exact same connection method and hardware in Vista - if I complain that I only have a problem in Ubuntu they will no doubt tell me to use Vista (there's probably even a list of supported stuff somewhere that excludes Ubuntu).

I agree that it doesn't sound like a Three issue, but they might be able to offer some insight into the problem - hopefully you aren't the only Three Mobile Broadband customer using Ubuntu.

I think this is going to turn out to be something daft and esoteric about my Ubuntu installation

Yep, I think you're right.

Another question (which you might have already answered, apologies if so): does this problem only manifest with HTTP traffic e.g. can you use FTP, resolve hostnames with nslookup, etc.

 

[Peoplesoft bloke]

OK it appears that there's a wrinkle to do with the way some routers handle linux traffic - the problem is to do with the routers not linux, allegedly - but it's all a bit propellor head stuff for me - I was going to try the fix suggested here but the blighter has suddenly started working again

 

[Peoplesoft bloke]

I think the problem might be this but I'm not sure.

 

[DimPrawn]

FFS, delete the crappy Linux OS, it never works and never will and use a real OS, with real applications that does the job in hand. Vista SP1 rules.

HTH

 

[NickFitz]

OK it appears that there's a wrinkle to do with the way some routers handle linux traffic - the problem is to do with the routers not linux, allegedly - but it's all a bit propellor head stuff for me - I was going to try the fix suggested here but the blighter has suddenly started working again

I think the problem might be this but I'm not sure.

That sounds like a promising line of enquiry, given that your problem arose after a recent update, and the fact that it works OK sometimes (suggesting that on those occasions there's no broken boxes upstream of you).

 

[NickFitz]

FFS, delete the crappy Linux OS, it never works and never will and use a real OS, with real applications that does the job in hand. Vista SP1 rules.

HTH

You run along and play with your Fisher Price computer, there's a good prawn

Update: BTW, Vista is susceptible to the same problems as those described for the latest Ubuntu kernel update, according to those nice people at Microsoft

PB, it might be worthwhile checking your Vista setup to see if you can configure it to trigger the same problem (not because you want the same problem, but just to help with diagnosis).

 

[Peoplesoft bloke]

You run along and play with your Fisher Price computer, there's a good prawn

Update: BTW, Vista is susceptible to the same problems as those described for the latest Ubuntu kernel update, according to those nice people at Microsoft

PB, it might be worthwhile checking your Vista setup to see if you can configure it to trigger the same problem (not because you want the same problem, but just to help with diagnosis).

Prawn - I do use Vista when I have to, Ubuntu is just for the majority of the time when I want to actually get stuff done and can't wait the hours it takes Vista to be bothered to boot up and do things. (to be fair to it - it is bloatarama and I only have a low spec lappy)

Nick F - I know what you mean about trying to make Vista do the same, but since I can't be sure to get the bad routers every time, it might take some time until I got it to misbehave. I have configured Ubuntu not to use TCP windows scaling for now - I don't download huge volumes so I can live without it (if I've understood what it's for correctly) and so far (fingers crossed) it seems to be working - I am posting using Ubuntu/Firefox3.

Thanks to everyone for the help and suggestions