comcast – the foremind

January 8, 2017October 4, 2015 by Andrew Fore

Editorial Note: Apparently Comcast really would prefer that people not use the term data cap when referring to the limitations being placed on their customers data usage and would much rather prefer that we use the term data usage plan or data threshold, however, I don’t really care. 🙂

Dear Comcast,

I would like to go on record as saying that you suck.  I recognize that you are a for profit company and that you would like to make a profit on the services that you provide.  I even think that having your company make a profit is a good thing because that enables you to pay your employees so that they can put food on their tables and afford to pay the fees for their children to participate in Little League baseball and other such childhood activities.

Your data usage cap system is bogus.  According to the data available on your own website you have eight (8) different trial markets where you have rolled out data caps since 2012:

  • August 1, 2012: Nashville, Tennessee – 300GB cap
  • October 1, 2012: Tucson, Arizona – 3 tiers (300GB, 350GB, 600GB)
  • August 22, 2013: Fresno, California – Economy Plus option added
  • September 1, 2013: Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Jackson, Mississippi – 300GB
  • October 1, 2013: Mobile, Alabama; Knoxville, Tennessee.
  • November 1, 2013: Huntsville, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; Tupelo, Mississippi; Charleston, South Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee – 300GB cap
  • December 1, 2013: Atlanta, Georgia; Maine – 300GB cap
  • October 1, 2015: Fort Lauderdale, the Keys and Miami, Florida – 300GB cap plus $30 option for increasing to  unlimited

In fact, your page on this even refers to these as “trial start dates” which to a reasonably minded person would imply that they have an end date as well, however to the best of my knowledge (as well as the comments made by a customer support representative) there is no plan to end these trials OR any plan to actually collapse them into a single cohesive plan that applies to your entire service.

Read moreDear Comcast: You Suck

Categories Uncategorized Tags comcast, General, Personal, Uncategorized, usage cap 2 Comments

Andrew Fore – Page 3 – the foremind

plex_firewalld-6988582I recently rebuilt my Plex Media Server box as a CentOS 7 VM running on Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2012 setup.

When I installed the rpm and started the service I found that I was unable to load the interface on my desktop. I knew that it was running because I installed netstat and I was able to see the port was open for traffic and I was also able to load the interface locally in lynx on the server.

Read moreCreating a firewalld service for Plex Media Server

As the new year broke upon us just over two weeks ago, I found myself wondering what resolutions I should make to improve myself during the next twelve months.  In the past I have made resolutions about inconsequential things like reading more books or taking more photos.  I even tried to participate in a photo a day and managed to make it through two months before giving up.

Read moreStarting anew in 2015 – a resolution

Switch your domain registrar to Hover – the foremind

6722541653_98d7b2b922_m-6679546There is an adage that you should vote with your wallet when you are unhappy with a particular business or their practices.  Do we do this as much as we should?  Probably not.

Taking this to heart,  I have decided that I will try to apply this to the usage of my electronics and gadget stuff.  So the first thing I chose to do was to switch my domain registration from using NameCheap to using Hover.  There were several usage reasons, like support for the TOTP/HOTP system for two-factor authentication instead of relying on SMS messages.

But there are some other reasons, like the support for causes that I feel are worthwhile.  Here are just a few that Hover is a patron of:

  • She++
  • Ladies Learning Code
  • Revision Path

So if you own a domain or two, or you work somewhere that does, think about switching your registration to Hover and help support not only your account’s security but also some great organizations.

Gratuitous Recommendation Link: https://hover.com/Ems0HmPv

Full disclosure: I work at Web.com and they are the parent company of Register.com and Networksolutions.com, two really large domain registration companies, but I still prefer Hover.

Proxmox Package Repositories for non-subscription installs – the foremind

proxmox-logo-150x150-5328710If you ran across my previous post about disabling the Proxmox no subscription pop-up, you might also be wondering why you get an alert on the console regarding the scheduled update job.  The reason that this shows up is that the apt-get update job returns an error code for one of the Proxmox Enterprise repos.

The fix is relatively simple, just reconfigure your sources.list.d contents to not have the pve-enterprise repo, but instead to have the pve-no-subscription repos enabled instead.  The wiki has a nice article on the various package repos used for Proxmox.

Please note that the entry for the pve-no-subscription repo merges the sources.list and the sources.list.d file into one.