Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

… again.

It is very difficult for me to say but… the most appreciated by me application in the Windows world was defeated. It was tough. I tried to save it but it failed… for the 2nd time in (my) history.

Last night has been a busy night trying to send 2 e-mails of ~3MB each with Microsoft Outlook 2003. I know, they’re pretty big, but in my father’s business people often exchange big files (documentation) using e-mail. Unfortunately, some servers block big e-mails or some busy people have e-mail boxes with few free space. That’s when.. (no) surprise.. the e-mails bounce back, filling YOUR e-mail box with the same e-mails you’ve sent (lots of MB included).

As I’ve said here, my ISP behaves a bit weird. I have uploaded very fast the e-mails, but they weren’t gone from Outbox. Downloading bounced e-mails took really long time. Unfortunately, Outlook sent over and over those e-mails and they bounced back, filling my father’s Inbox with ~14MB. Guess what… everything was blocked. My father couldn’t read future e-mails because those e-mails were waiting in the queue to be downloaded. Moreover, if Outlook did manage to download an e-mail, it would not delete it from the server unless all the transfer has been completed. A broken connection would have meant re-downloading everything (which did happen a few times). Great “joy”…

My father has a pretty small e-mail box, considering the tons of e-mails he gets - only 50MB maximum mailbox size. The hosting provider in Romania (actually a resaller from US) is not very competitive - I’ll make sure this changes in the future. I have to use POP3 for his e-mail in order to free his mailbox. The problem of the 14MB of bounced e-mails could only be solved by IMAP.

Enter the Outlook IMAP experience. My previous expericences with IMAP in Outlook were also not very bright. I’ve had problems before. I’ve selected the e-mails, pressed delete, but Outlook tried downloading them and everything got stuck… again. I’ve closed the laptop and got to sleep. I had enough for one night.

Today, a bright day in history, I tried again IMAP in Outlook, with no success. Last time I had the “big e-mail, everything is stuck”-problem (was one >10MB e-mail, I know: people have huge bandwidth outside Romania) I’ve used KMail to get the e-mail, remove it from the mailbox and make Outlook work again. The same thing happened now: I’ve started KMail, created an IMAP account, opened my father’s mailbox, deleted the bounced e-mails and… everything was back to normal - Outlook successfully downloaded the rest of the e-mails.

Now, I’m very sad that the only application I really liked on Windows - Outlook - behaved so bad. Outlook has probably the worst Queue Manager (& IMAP support) I’ve seen in the world of e-mail clients (I live in a very limited world of e-mail clients: Outlook, KMail, Thunderbird). Unless Microsoft does something about the Queue Manager and the IMAP Support, I’ll have to retreat the title of e-mail client from Outlook, leaving it with Best Application on Windows excluding e-mail clients .

Hope for the best in the future, or I might change my father to use Kontact when KDE is ported to Windows (with the help of Qt4 which is said to be GPLed for Windows also).

When I first configured my P3 450MHz LAN server I wanted to add support for active FTP connections from behind NAT. Linux is smart enough to do this with connection tracking (old article describing Linux connection tracking).

It didn’t seem to work… until I came across a web page mentioning the unknown to me kernel module named “ip_nat_ftp”. I manually loaded it up, it loaded its dependencies and everything started to work.

[root@server:~]# lsmod | grep ftp
ip_nat_ftp 4720 0
iptable_nat 22692 2 ip_nat_ftp
ip_conntrack_ftp 71600 1 ip_nat_ftp
ip_conntrack 30348 4 ipt_state,ip_nat_ftp,iptable_nat,ip_conntrack_ftp

Pretty impressive. Simple and elegant solution, exactly how I like it.

My ISP increased the bandwidth limit this month.
For my $15/month I get now 512kbps instead of 256kbps. The rest of the subscription remained the same.

BUT, the upgrade was done under the following unwritten conditions:
External:
- before: upload/download 256kbps
- after: upload: 512kbps, download 128kbps before ~17:20 local time, 256kbps in the evening and during the night

Internal (Romania):
- before: upload/download: 256kbps
- after: upload/download: 512kbps

People might say “Well, great, 512kbps!!!“, but what really annoys me is the 128kbps download speed during the day for the external sites. I use primarily sites outside the country. My server is outside the country. My ArchLinux mirrors are outside the country. Everything is so slow. It’s a bit weird, considering that this is an upgrade. IMO, an upgrade should provide the previous conditions but improved.

Now, one more thing to notice: I have 512kbps upload speed everywhere/everytime, for only $15/month. How many people outside Romania can say they have this uploading bandwidth for for only $15/month. I have a semi-fixed IP (they assign it by DHCP, but it’s kept the same - they said it’s for the situations when they increase the network, change the topology etc.). I could make one almost-great webserver here, with this bandwidth.

I hope they rethink their upgrading scheme. I don’t really like it right now.

I’m also studying some alternative ISPs. I might be making a small peering point in my home, if it works that bad. Some networking experiments wouldn’t hurt.

I don’t know where to put this entry… under Leisure or under Programming. I’ll put it in both.
Why am I asking this? Well, I just finished the last week of the semester… an exhausting week. Got home partially on foot, as I do every time when I come back from school. I always walk half of my way home, because I have the boulevard on one side and the university campus on the other side. It’s a nice blend between the green nature (in the campus) and the city. When everything gets gray because of blocks of flats, I get on a bus and go home.

Later the day I started the computer and, of course, Psi. I believe the Yahoo! transport I use was down, or I couldn’t have remembered that Psi has a bit of an annoying bug. During the nights of studying, the Yahoo transport went out and came back, but Psi set Online as my status for the transport, not my account status. My Computer Science mind, recently overloaded by somehow useless stuff, felt the need to express itself in a constructive manner. I’ve therefore started digging through the sources and came up with a patch for this problem. I’ve also FlySprayed the bug (as I normally do).

I don’t know how to consider this action… but it really felt good. After all the work for school, after all the sleepless nights, this tiny one hour patch made me feel really good. Finding the classes/functions in the code took most of the time - it was like a quest.

I did something that pleased me after a long week of work. Feels really good.

Enjoy the patch (attached in the FlySpray task). Making it allowed me to gain some more info on Psi’s inner-workings. More ideas got born. I feel really creative sometimes. Fortunately, I do write my ideas

This was the last day of the semester. Tough semester, the toughest until now.

Readers of my blog probably noticed that I haven’t posted anything in the last 2 weeks or so. During the last 2 weeks students finsh seminars, take evaluation tests etc.

The week ending today was the most full week of my entire school life. I’ve never slept so little. I had to finish a project, present it, make 2x ~15pages homework, prepare exams & take them all in one week. Very short nights. Some of my colleagues even skipped some nights.

Only today I’ve had 2 final exams: Logical Design, Switching Theory and English. I could have done better - time wasn’t on my side. I have 4 more exams to think of, out of which 3 are really difficult.

Now, I guess I can think of some real sleep before starting to prepare for the remaining exams.

P.S. I’ve also did some computer related activities, which I plan to back-blog (blog with older dates, inspired by “backport”)