Archive for January, 2008
Carphone Warehouse to o2 iphone number migration port
Ok, they’ve changed the tariffs now to something resembling useful. So we’ve decided to make the plunge and purchase an iPhone. Herein lies the rub; we’re told that number migrations from Carphone Warehouse (o2 contract) take 24 hours. Ok that’s fine. We’re given a PAC code, we go home, plug it all in and activate.
We ring up later the next day to find out how the migration is going as we’ve had no emails, no nothing. Carphone Warehouse inform us to ring o2 directly as they’ve taken on the contract now. We ring o2 who kindly inform us that it will take 9 days to transfer the number. 9 days!, “Yes Sir, 9 working days it’s in our schedule”. According to OFCOM regulations it takes a minimum of 5 working days to port a number as it’s not o2 to o2, it’s Carphone Warehouse o2 to o2. Oh sorry, we’re just lowly plebs who think o2 actually means, o2.
o2 then go on to say the PAC code beginning MARxxxx is a generic PAC code from Carphone Warehouse, and if we want a quicker migration of 7 days (5 working days) we should ring Carphone Warehouse and get a PAC code beginning VT. Dutifully we do this and are politely informed that whomever spoke to us at o2 may be misinformed (i.e. don’t know what the hell they are talking about). The ‘PAC’ code given to us is not actually a PAC code at all, but rather a ‘transfer code’ that generates a PAC code that we never see. It’s totally internal on o2’s systems. This chap at the Carphone Warehouse was actually quite helpful and knew what he was talking about.
Ok, so I may be overreacting but Apple/o2 are trying desperately to get business users onto this iPhone platform. This amount of frankly, messing around is not going to win them many friends in the business world. They give you a temporary number for the iPhone but how pointless is that? *Joe Smith* that I ring every other day for business matters is not going to know who my number is. Oh, I’ll tell him I have a new number but in 9 days it’ll be back to my number he knows. Multiply that by 100 people o2, yes? I didn’t think so either.
To O2: sort your system out it’s a mess. Also, inform your call operators as to what they are talking about as we spoke to 3 different people and got 3 different replies.
To Carphone Warehouse: your staff seem to think you’re part of o2, as do we, the punters actually giving you cash. To then be told we may aswell be on Vodafone when transferring to o2 direct in terms of how long it takes, simply grates.
Time to put the iPhone back in the box and continue using my crash happy n95 for the 9 days it’s going to take to transfer me!
Posted in Technology Stuff | 4 Comments »
When Business & Pleasure Collide
When we first started 3DPixel Ltd. we naturally had to ingratiate ourselves with everyone we could think of in order to generate business. This is how every business has to scrape at first to stay afloat. Anything and everything.
Forums are created, IRC channels are made, phone calls are made, less-than-perfect business is taken on. Naturally, being of that nature, your relationship with people gets personal as well as professional, if only from existing friends taking on business you offer. 99% of the time this works out fine, but what happens if say, the personal relationship turns sour? Could be anything. A falling out, a clash of ideals, simply growing apart. The worry for myself then is that person will hold a grudge against the business because of a personal matter as they are so ingrained with eachother from that early stage. A lot of damage can be done when it’s nothing to do with the professional aspect of the business. I am not generalising here, I have genuinely felt this will happen and have had to dance around to prevent it doing so.
Many will say don’t mix business and pleasure. I wholeheartedly agree, now. When however, when you are (or were, I should say, 5 years soon!) a young business in desperate need of new business; You try it.
I myself spent most of 2007 distancing myself from people I once was talking to all day every day. One event made me realise this ‘pally situation’ could not continue. I was talking to my friends, some of who had accounts with us, in IRC and the network we operate went down for 23 seconds (as part of some maintenance from our upstream providers). I was hounded, I mean literally hounded with cries of derision and annoyance that would not normally be aired if they had to log into our website, and log a support request. In a sentence, we were too available in my mind.
I only post this now as I feel finally that situation has been attained. It’s sad for me as I’ve lost a lot of friends in the process just by simply drifting out of contact. Our business is now more… I want to say stand-offish but I don’t mean that, I mean more professional. We don’t know our customers as friends, we help them as well as we ever did but there is never the risk of anything but professional differences getting in the way of business (bad enough of course). Less complications and less risk of emotional contamination.
Posted in Randomness | No Comments »
Block Bad Bots Globally In Apache
There are plenty of guides around to block bots using mod_rewrite however on a shared system with many domains, if you want to block a spoofed bot which is changing IPs you can block it globally from the user-agent in the apache httpd.conf.
In this example, MajesticBot+ had their bot spoofed for the past several months but the user-agent is different than the current version they themselves use (basically it’s an older version being spoofed).
mod_rewrite .htaccess code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MJ12bot/v1\.0\.8.*$
RewriteRule .* - [F]
httpd.conf code:
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^MJ12bot(.*)1\.0\.8″ stay_out
<Location />
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from env=stay_out
Allow from all
</Location>
Note it only blocks 1.0.8 version of this bot which has been spoofed:
89.130.142.68 - - [15/Jan/2008:10:55:21 +0000] “GET /somepage HTTP/1.1″ 200 48167 “-” “MJ12bot/v1.0.8 (http://majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)”
All others will be allowed to crawl your site.
Exact httpd.conf code obtained from this blog entry
Tags: block bad bots, httpd.conf, mod_rewrite
Posted in Web Hosting | No Comments »
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