[Nottingham] Slashdot and ridiculous NTL Cache

[Dave Silvester]

Hi Alan,

On Thursday 09 Dec 2004 13:01, Alan Pope wrote:
> You could've learned about NTL and their proxy with some very simple
> googling. As a web developer I would expect you to evaluate IT
> purchases rather than blindly going in and expecting certain service
> levels.

Hey, I'm only a web developer - I'm certainly not immune from bad judgement, 
especially at a stressful time like moving house!  :-S

The house we were moving into was already wired up for NTL, and as I needed to 
get up and running again as quick as possible after the move, with the 
minimum amount of hassle, I just went with that.

It was a bit of a whirlwind house move really - some crazy stuff happened this 
year in general, and our situation changed drastically in May because my dad 
died suddenly and unexpectedly.  Needless to say... evaluating the best 
possible broadband connection wasn't top of my list at the time, so now I'm 
paying for it.

I did Google NTL a bit before subscribing, and knew that a few people weren't 
entirely happy with it, but I foolishly went with "how bad can it really 
be?"... no way like the hard way.  Still, I couldn't have easily known in 
advance that NTL's cache would hamper my use of Slashdot.

So indeed, now I do know, have found some semi-acceptable workarounds and will 
possibly take action on it after my 12 months of NTL have expired, if I 
continue to be dissatisfied with them.

> I really don't think it's NTLs fault here. It's slashdot that have
> banned the range of IP addresses used by the NTL proxies. They could
> just as easily have banned the range of IP addresses used by NTL
> customers. You'd be even more stuffed then!
>
> Only continued pressure on cmdr taco et al will resolve this.

But I'm not particularly able to exert that pressure - Slashdot seem to 
require the NTL proxy administrator to contact them.  I guess it won't hurt 
to try contacting Cmdr Taco directly, although I'm still rather miffed with 
NTL's bad customer service - they don't even send out automated 
acknowledgement that you contacted their support department, so there's no 
ticket number for future reference.  (Let's not even get into phoning 
them...)

> Don't forget you can always use the NTL proxies in other parts of the
> country. I for example am on NTL down south and am not blocked. Why
> not use the proxy I use?
>
> Of course you've seen
>
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/trancache.html

Yep, seen that one.  Interestingly, only some of the proxies seem to work on 
ports other than 80 - for example, I can't seem to specify a different 
Nottingham proxy because the ones I tried didn't work on ports other than 80.

> glfd-cache-1.server.ntli.net  is the one I am on I think.

I'm having some success with "manc-cache-1.server.ntli.net" although it's 
slower than using a Nottingham one and is still banned from the RSS feed.  
Thanks for your suggestion of a fully working one though - I've just tried it 
and it's much better, as well as pretty snappy.

Should we really have to jump through so many hoops, just to get around NTL's 
setup?  I don't think we should, but you know... I can get a bit wound up 
about things sometimes.  I should probably chill out more!  :-)

Cheers,

~Dave

-- 

Dave Silvester
Music Technology Junkie | Rentable Website Monkey
http://www.mu-sly.co.uk | http://www.rentamonkey.com