From http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/implementation/archives/bell-canada-suffers-major-hosting-outage-10432 :

On Sunday evening (July 9th) it would appear that one of Canada’s largest shared hosting operators – Bell Canada – had a major outage to their shared web hosting infrastructure.  Their shared web hosting environment consists of 4 very large servers.  Two of those servers are known as bellhosting and the other two are known as bellwebhosting.  It would appear that somehow a routing block was created in the core router resolution of the bellhosting pair which caused 100s of websites to disappear including any associated e-mail and ftp services.

The duration of the outage was close to 24 hours before all sites were returned to service.

Finally, I found out what’s the catch with that 2 months free Sympatico Internet aceess: there is only 1 month free, although their representative said clearly there are 2 months free. And there is a 30 days cancelation notice. So, there is nothing free because surely you’ll have to pay something (unless you cancel in the same day you receive the package).

To find out these I had to pay my price. Never trust Sympatico again - they have just lost a client. For ever.

Don’t miss today’s news from The Star: T.O. to become wireless hotspot

Toronto Hydro Corp. will announce Tuesday that it plans to turn Canada’s largest city into one giant wireless hotspot, directly challenging the country’s major mobile phone carriers for a chunk of the $8 billion a year wireless market.

With the deployment, which sources say could be available in the downtown core as early as this fall, Toronto joins a growing list of North American cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco, that have announced plans to bring low-cost, broadband wireless access to their citizens and businesses.

[…]

According to Torrentfreak Rogers is throttling Bittorrent traffic. He suggests a solution: encrypting :

“Currently both Azureus and µTorrent included this new form of encryption (specs) in their latest Beta’s. The fact that these two clients are actively working together to implement this new feature is promising and will make this form of encryption the new standard since the users of these two clients cover the majority of all Bittorrent users.

There are two “encryption modes” available.

The 2 different payload encryption methods plaintext transmission and RC4 provide a different degree of protocol obfuscation, security and speed. Where the plaintext mode only provides basic anti-shaping obscurity, no security and low CPU usage the RC4 encryption obfuscates the entire stream and not only the header and adds some cryptographic security at the price of spent CPU cycles.”

Good to know.

Today, I’ve got my new free testing modem from Bell. I still don’t get the catch for this business: they shipped me a new modem to use their service for free for 2 months. At least, this is what they say.

There was a sale agent in my building trying to sell or offer (??) Bell Internet connections. I told him I already have an ISP and I won’t change it. Not that is the best possible, but I have other reasons. I don’t need other net connection, I won’t keep it, I won’t be their customer. And still he insisted to get this free modem and try it for 2 months. It was easier just to accept this free gift than to argue.

My question regards this business model. What can it bring to the company, in this case Bell? Really don’t know, because as I said, I won’t keept this modem, even if works fine. They spent money with the modem and cables, money for shipping it and surely other costs, including free net connection, which is not quite free for them. What they get? Nothing. For sure.

Maybe there is somebody to explain to me this business model and what’s the catch.

Of course I knew about WordPress as a free & largely used solution for weblog software, but it’s first time I’m really using. I used mostly Blogger and other solutions. Finally I come to this solution, plus customize it to match our design on this website.

One first conclusion is that I don’t like it very much. Problem is this HTML editor (tinyMCE) which is slow and awkward. I tried 5 timed to delete a paragraph from last post and didn’t want to show it as I wanted. Plus, HTML core editor is a separate window, I don’t like. I’d prefer to have it here, in one place (toggle to HTML WYSIWYG and HTML code, and vice-versa).

However, we won’t change it for a while. This new weblog system is set up to allow user registration and user posting. So, feel free to register and blog here, about what you think is ok on this Toronto portal. If is not appropriate will be simply removed .

Yesterday, I found out that my ISP (cable guys: Rogers) blocked access on port 25 (SMTP) to any other mail servers than its own. Everything else works fine including POP3 (110) port to receive emails or web surfing.

I contacted their customer support twice and it was the same story: the only way to do it is to use their SMTP server. I tried to explain them that is important for me to have emails sent by my email servers with no luck. Then, I searched on the Internet to find out how widespread is this policy, and I found many others complaining about it, especially from big ISP companies.

Why this rule was applied only now? Don’t know. Why there are no exceptions? Don’t know. They simply blocked an Internet port and that’s it.

Of course there are workarounds. One is to use GMail which offers POP3/SMTP access, on non-standard ports:

GMail offers POP/SMTP access to its email. Here are the settings:

POP server: pop.gmail.com.
Port: 995.
Require SSL: Yes.
User name: your Gmail email address.
Make sure your user name includes both your Gmail account name and “@gmail.com”. If your Gmail account name is “qwertz.qwertz”, for example, type “qwertz.qwertz@gmail.com” as the user name.
Password: your Gmail password.

SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com.
Port: 465.
Require SSL/STARTTLS: Yes.
Require SMTP authentication: Yes.
User name: your Gmail email address.
Password: your Gmail password.
( http://www.iopus.com/guides/bestpopsmtp.htm ) 

Other solution is simply to use other port than 25. Many hosting companies already implemented in cPanel an alternative solution openning usually port 26. If you have CPanel/WHM + EXIM see Service Manager -> exim on another port. If this policy will continue we’ll see email sending on all ports available.What’s the use of blocking port 25? All spammers could easily send emails on another port and this stupid rule only block decent, non-technical people. Looks more than an administrative solution to group (and maybe scan & analyse) all emails sent, from a single place. If this is only one small step to control user access to the Internet what would be next? Mandatory HTTP proxies (port 80) to control web surfing?