Back in touch

[liv]

My life is generally wonderful, and I have broadband at home! I feel a bit like a starving beggar at a feast, I can tell you. Last night I stayed up way too late chatting to redbird and hatam_soferet and jack.

I was also a good girl and the first thing I did on getting online was to install lots of Windows security updates, and an antivirus program (is there anything enough better than the free version of AVG to be worth paying for?) and the latest version of Firefox. And the second thing I did was to re-backup my LJ and back up my DW for the first time. (The backups I previously had were on a computer which died and my admittedly inefficient system for keeping that backed up failed on me.) Anything else I need to do to be a good internet citizen? In particular, is it likely to be a problem that my router has a somewhat guessable password?

Orange sold me a mobile phone contract which allowed me to just about keep in touch during the transitional months when I didn't have my own place to put a landline or proper internet connection. They lied to me, repeatedly, about their pricing, which is a big black mark against them. But it turns out their real price, after all the hidden costs (most of it was deliberately obscure advertising, but some of it was the sales rep outright lying) is about mid-range (as opposed to the stunningly cheap they led me to believe) compared to the competition, and their service is decent, both technically and customer support-wise.

I was planning to cancel the data part of the contract when I got real internet, but actually it's so incredibly good for my routine to be able to read my LJ and DW reading lists on the bus to work that I am going to keep it after all. My blackberry is the innovation I've been waiting for, in that it's more convenient than carrying a book around all the time but equally entertaining. It means I haven't done nearly as much fiction reading as I usually would, but it's worth it because it removes the temptation to procrastinate by reading the internet before leaving for work in the morning, and the temptation to procrastinate by reading the internet when I get home in the evening instead of getting down to chores and making supper.

BT absolutely sucked. They wouldn't even confirm whether my house has a BT line unless I signed up to a two year contract and committed myself to paying a £150 connection charge if it turned out that I don't have a line in place. So I decided not to give them any money.

T-mobile had a reasonable deal on a mobile broadband PAYG dongle, which I bought to cover the limbo period between moving in and getting broadband set up. The dongle Just Worked on my Windows computer, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work on my Linuxy Eee. (I don't blame T-mobile for this, as they don't claim to support Linux, and it's partly my incompetence with Linux wrangling that's at fault.) However, when I needed to top up my credit, it turned out that I had somehow been sold a sim card intended for a mobile phone and not for a dongle at all. It took several hours on the phone to their helpline to sort this out, but I was impressed that the reps were willing to go off script and deal with a slightly weird problem, even the ones who clearly didn't have English as a first language. And when it did finally get sorted, they gave me a new signup bonus of 30 days for £2 instead of the expected £15.

The main complaint I have against them is that they have an incredibly baroque system for adding credit to the dongle. You have to "register" a card with them and mess about with sending card details by SMS, which doesn't feel secure. And you have to perform two completely separate transactions using distinct, both complicated, methods, to put credit on your account and to use the credit to buy time. Anyway hopefully I won't need the dongle much from now on.

TalkTalk have generally impressed me so far. I picked them because they were not the cheapest provider out there, but among the cheaper who are actually offering a full service. And they are absolutely upfront about what they're offering for what money. Their customer service has been consistently good; I always speak to friendly, professional, fluent English speakers who actually respond to what I say rather than just reciting their scripts. They lose points with me because they initially promised too good to be true things about four working days between signing up and getting a service connected, but once they had actually committed to a realistic timescale they did stick to it.

I got the phone connected soon after Christmas. An engineer who surprised me a little bit by being female, and a lot by coming from BT and not from TalkTalk themselves, turned up, was helpful and competent, and was totally unfased to find that my house had only an ancient GPO phone point from back in the early 70s. Then I had a working landline, which was somewhat useful (it has encouraged my Granny to call me occasionally to see how I'm doing, which is very sweet of her), and I only had to wait a couple more impatient weeks for the actual broadband bit. TalkTalk sent me a package with a router, and clear instructions for how to set things up (and a CD in case I needed further handholding, but they didn't force me to use it). And it all just worked straight out of the box, so I am finally finally finally online properly (and I can browse the internet from bed if I feel the need.)

Other things that are making me happy: blue_mai's basket of spring is full of yellow, blue and white flowers on the windowsill beside me. Several people dear to me have coupled up recently, so I feel much happier knowing they are happy instead of having to field lots of my favourite people complaining about how nobody loves them. And I am having a great time with teaching some really fun, responsive students.

Comments

[lethargic_man]

And the second thing I did was to re-backup my LJ and back up my DW for the first time.

Oh yes; that's something I've been meaning to do since, well, before I burned my yearly DVD backup on New Year's Day. What tool are you using for backing up?

is it likely to be a problem that my router has a somewhat guessable password?

Simplest solution: change the password?

[liv]

I have been using ljArchive; it is very good, but it is Windows only. I can't remember if you have access to a Windows machine or environment these days. If not there are lots of alternatives out there, mostly in the form of scripts in just about any language you care to name.

ljArchive is about the only one with any sort of user-friendly interface, but it's not under active development at the moment, so that comment about coming soon for Linux isn't actually going to happen. I imagine you're probably not going to be scared by running a script from the command line, so the main thing you have to check for is to pick a backup option that includes comments. Generally anything from about the last 4 or 5 years should be fine; it's only the very old stuff where LJ's API made it extremely difficult to back up anything more than a month worth of posts.

[lethargic_man]

Thank you. I know there's a number of different tools out there, of varying usefulness. I used a not very good one last time (and of course there's a security risk downloading software from the Internet), so I wanted to get one with a recommendation rather than just using the first one I saw.

[pseudomonas]

I use jbackup.pl, which I got a while back.

[lethargic_man]

Thanks (though I've now just backed up using ljArchive).

[liv]

If it's a problem that the router password is simple, then the solution is to change the password. But that's a certain amount of hassle, particularly when it comes to remembering what on earth I changed it to when I need to log in to the router in future. So I'm only going to bother doing that if a low-strength router password is actually going to cause any security problems.

[pseudomonas]

If you can set it up so your router is only log-innable-to via a bit of wire rather than wifi, then you can probably have a bad password, since only someone with physical access (or who has already compromised your computer) can get at it. Main thing is that it shouldn't be accessible from the internet end at all.

[liv]

That sounds like a good idea, though I don't really know how to do it. I should poke around online and see if I can find some instructions. It doesn't really help that my wifi has a good password, cos someone could break into that by other methods than guessing the password, and then they might be able to get to my router.

[verazea]

There are exploits out there which use the machine they infect to change the router settings and mess with your network settings that way so a secure password is a good idea anyway. I use the solution of taping the password to the router and store a gpged copy on my machine, but a plain text file will do just as well

(is there anything enough better than the free version of AVG to be worth paying for?)

[(Anonymous)]

VGB uses AVG (installed by Clippy). I use F-Secure, which I find very good, if slightly slow in scanning large attachments.

When I first renewed my subscription to F-Secure Clippy said that he was aware of occasional system incompatibilities but I should continue if I liked it.

General advice - not NORTON

SOUTHERNWOOD

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

ooh! i'm happy (and slightly surprised) that the spring is colourful already. i haven't felt very much spring at all yet.

[syllopsium]

Personally I prefer Avast to AVG - it's free too, supports a boot time scan and generally works well.

There are a number of exploits now circulating in the wild that take advantage of flaws in your browser to poke default passwords into locally accessible routers. Therefore, you should definitely be changing your router password from default to something more secure. Modifying the default IP address of the router will also defeat some unsophisticated exploits.

My router's web interface isn't even accessible by me (it just passes the connection on to a firewall, and the web interface isn't accessible by anything)