phillsacre.me.uk

As I posted up on my Twitter account recently, we’ve been having a few internet problems. Basically I noticed that our Eclipse broadband account was a bit out of date. They’ve restructured their pricing but we were still on the old price, so we were actually paying over the odds for our broadband! Anyway, I regraded the account so we’re on the cheaper plan. Unfortunately that seems to have knocked out our ADSL for the time being.

I’m currently sitting here writing this on Phil’s laptop using the 3G connection from my new phone. It’s pretty nifty, I have to say. The connection is good enough (for the most part) to listen to Spotify and do a bit of web browsing as well.

To think that I’m getting a faster connection than I was ten years ago via dialup is actually pretty cool. The me of ten years ago would be pretty jealous of the me today, I think! I know that 3G has been around for a fair amount of time now, but I’ve never actually used it before (well, not like this). Ok, so I’ve caught up with what the state of the art was five years ago, you can’t have it all :p

I’ve been having internet connection troubles again recently. I think I might have mentioned this on a previous post. Anyway, as a lot of people seem to be coming to this blog searching for “Eclipse ADSL MTU Size” (and if you’re one of them, hello! – I hope you find this helpful), I thought I’d post it up here.

The symptoms seem mainly to be problems uploading – sending large emails, uploading stuff via FTP… I’ve even had problems with Facebook and logging into Gmail! It’s all very similar to the last time.

Anyway, I’ve checked the Eclipse knowledge base again, and they recommend an MTU size of 1458 – but say if that doesn’t help, you could try 1430. So, lo and behold, I changed my MTU size to 1430 and everything seems back to normal. Bizarre, non?

Ah well, I’ll bear that in mind for next time.

Just for the sake of posterity, here are a couple of articles which might help:

Changing the MTU size in Linux on Debian based systems (including Ubuntu)

Changing the MTU Size in Windows (Note: I haven’t tested this but it looks like it should work).

I’ve been thinking about writing a quick post about internet security recently, and this article by Stephen Fry finally made me write it. We are living in dangerous times, so to speak – keeping your computer free of viruses or any such malware is becoming more difficult. We also have an army of scammers and ‘phishers’ who want to steal our credit card details by sending fraudulent emails (Mac and Linux users — take note: you don’t have to be running Windows to get caught out by phishing!).

So, I thought I would offer up a few tips on staying safe on the internet. Feel free to contribute in the comments to anything I have missed – I might make this into a proper article. Some of these tips are Windows-only — for that I apologise, but the majority of people who need these tips will be Windows users.

• Do not, and by this I mean DO NOT open attachments from anyone you do not know. It’s just not worth the risk.
• If you’re running Windows, disable the option to ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ – you can do this by going to a folder, clicking on ‘Tools’ -> ‘Folder Options’, then clicking on the ‘View’ tab, and in the list of checkboxes unchecking the box next to ‘Hide extensions for known file types’. This will prevent you from accidentally opening up virus.jpg.exe, thinking it’s a photo! (admittedly, it probably wouldn’t have ‘virus’ in the name, but still…)
• If in any doubt, err on the side of caution.
• If you receive an email with an offer that is “too good to be true” — it probably is. DO NOT send your bank details to anyone, even if they promise money.
• Always access your bank’s website by typing it in / using a favourite in your browser. Never click on links in emails, even if they appear to be from your bank. There are many fraudulent websites which look exactly like your bank’s website, don’t be fooled.
• Always run a firewall. Windows XP has a firewall – if you don’t know whether you have turned it on, see this page.

That’s all for now, but I may well update this as time goes on!