So much for Mobile broadband

In which Steve mutters about the O2 broadband dongle and its broken DNS handling.

Was trying to check a problem with Canalplan AC today and as its sitting on the server in the living room I thought I should try it “remotely” rather than access off the local network.

So I got the O2 broadband dongle and powered it up and connected, and couldn’t reproduce the error… Oh well, thats how things go, especially when you are talking about IE8.

So whilst I was connected I thought I’d just hop onto this blog site and check a couple of things.

Sorry – No Can Do! Not Possible. Kept telling me the site was not available.

But it sits on the same server as Canalplan AC. It sits on blogs.canalplan.org.uk when Canalplan is on www.canalplan.org.uk.

So if one responds, then the other other should. Right?

Well you are wrong:

Here is the output of a ping command:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:Userssteve>ping www.canalplan.org.uk

Pinging www.canalplan.org.uk [212.159.61.36] with 32 bytes of data:

So that’s good – its getting the IP address. It wont ever respond to pings because the router dumps them.

So lets try for the blogs:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:Userssteve>ping blogs.canalplan.org.uk
Ping request could not find host blogs.canalplan.org.uk. Please check the name and try again.

Nope – its not there.

The DNS servers for O2 don’t recognise it as a valid host name.

Tosspots.

OR rather its their Windows software that is screwy. If I power up under Linux then it works fine!

2 thoughts on “So much for Mobile broadband”

  1. Yeah, every time I compare broadband packages, mobile broadband seems to be getting slated, though it’s mainly focused on speed issues.

    Tell me, do you take much of a reduction in speed compared with a tradition connection? I would imagine there will be a reduction, just wasn’t sure how much.

  2. Significant reductions : At home I manage 3662/302 (or there abouts).

    On the dongle its more like 1473/980

    and on my G1 using it as a tethered modem its : 570/310

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