Patterns

Dammit! I spend a good chunk of my free time on the phone with the Deutsche Telekom support the last two weeks without actually moving forward a tiny bit. Currently the status is:

• I am not able to order VDSL (even though all my neighbours are -> we are all connected via the same house connection)
• Deutsche Telekom is not able to send my an invoice (the latest one is from April 2nd)
• My T-Home website is not showing all my customer and connection details (I assume my records are missing a link)

I have to say that I am starting to become a bit frustrated about the whole situation. Even though all call-center agents were kind when talking to them, most of them were unable to even understand what is wrong and what to do about to fix things. Dear friends from Deutsche Telekom, just being nice to customers doesn’t help, you actually need to fix the issues your customers confront you with!

I will wait until the next billing cycle. When they haven’t fixed my data until then resulting in my still being unable to order VDSL I will terminate the contract and forget about their new Entertain packages and VDSL product…

Long time no write…

I’ve been on vacation during the past weeks and on my return last Friday I found a letter from Deutsche Telekom announcing they would install the land line on Tuesday, the 27th of May which is - today!

At 12:23h the service technician rang the bell (absolutely on time, he was scheduled to arrive sometime in the afternoon past 12:00h) and was gone after only 5 minutes went by. The installation went lightning fast (he had to connect two wires in a switchbox in our basement) and now I have a land line from Deutsche Telekom. YAY! The months of waiting, fearing, crying and praying finally payed off…

So what do I do with that land line? I already have one with a call flatrate which works fine. Hm, so let’s first connect a phone to it - *ring* *ring*. How can the phone ring when I did not hand out the phone number to anyone so far?

Interesting, Versatel trying to reach a Mr. Aslan. No, sorry, that’s not me. At least now I now who already owned that number before which makes the new phone number not that shiny and new anymore. Actually it feels kinda worn off to me. OK, enough with the distraction, let’s concentrate on the actual reason why I ordered that phone line in the first place which is: Getting VDSL.

As the online availability check shows that VDSL is not available for this phone number I call the service desk of Deutsche Telekom to find out that there are still processes that need to run in the background and I should call again tomorrow. Now I’m worried… At least he tries to calm me down and performs the check again with the phone number of my neighbour living downstairs which shows VDSL50 availability. Well, so I have to wait for tomorrow it seems (I’m now an expert at waiting you know)…

Ode to Cron

Oh dear master of time

Run those little badly written shell scripts well

Else you will send many people to their own hell

And I will never be able to get VDSL

Before I forget:

on Tuesday, the 29th of April the construction crew from Deutsche Telekom actually showed up and started digging a small hole directly in front of our house and added an amplifier + extra wire for our new phone line. As we left for vacation the next day I am kind of unsure of the outcome aka if I am now in a position to order VDSL. We shall see…

Initially I wanted to write about my positive experience with kvm+qemu but after several weeks of testing the following downsides became apparent:

• currently no support for AltGr
• no copy-and-paste support to/from host

As those issues actually prevented me from productively using guest images with kvm a colleague had the right hint at hand: Virtualbox.

I went ahead and installed the packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-16-generic and started testing it by creating various guest images using the simple to use gui. I even converted an existing kvm/qemu image to the virtualbox format using the following commands:

# vboxmanage convertdd image.img image.vdi
# vboxmanage modifyvdi image.vdi compact

Finally copy-and-paste is actually working, something even VMware never accomplished (at least under a Linux host). The CPU Hardware Virtualization support (see this post to check if your CPU has support for it) in combination with the Virtualbox Guest Extensions make the guests subjectively run even faster than on kvm/qemu (I did not clock this, though).

As you might have guessed from my fanboy rave positive posting I currently favor Virtualbox over all other solutions as it seems the right tool for my exact needs. As always your mileage may vary.

btw: AltGr works too…
–

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo T2400 1.83GHz
2GB Ram

I didn’t write a lot lately primarily due to the fact that I was pretty busy with work-related projects.

To give you a little update on the VDSL matter The following things happened in the past weeks:

• I received a call from a call-center agent to ask again whether I would really need an additional phone line instead of migrating my Arcor line over to Telekom
• Last week Thursday the local building team called to inform me that they would do groundworks this Tuesday at 07:30am!

Yep, you read correct. This could mean I would be finally getting the Telekom phone line installed this week. The moment of truth is getting nearer and nearer…

P.S.: For the ones that didn’t read all of the VDSL postings: Before I am able to place an order for VDSL with the Deutsche Telekom I need a phone line from them (which I currently don’t have). So only with a phone line I will be able to make an availability check and place the order. If you ask me how far I am in the whole process I would say probably somewhere around 15%. Not that much considering I started the journey on February 24th.

Stay strong! I will…