Tag: bandwidth

Bell Internet Bandwidth Gauge Not Accurate

Our home internet service provider here in Toronto, Canada, is Bell Canada. I received an email from Bell at 10:01 telling me we are at 90% of our limit, and have 8.2G left. This email is not uncommon and I expect it on heavy months. Usually 8.2G should last us at least 2 days. At 12:30 I receive another email stating that we are now 350M over our limit.

What the hell!?! During that time I was having lunch and not even on the computer, and there is no one else in the house. This sounds fraudulent.

pinspb.ru, Content Scraper: Research and Ban

This content scraper pinspb.ru is a regular on my site and I’d like to ban it. Very mysterious and hard to pin down. Not much on the DNS record. At least they have a web site. They look like an ISP. They have a lot of IP blocks.

Observations:
46.161.62.74 pinspb.ru 2016-dec-26
46.161.63.90 2016/sept/22
46.161.63.109 pinspb.ru 2016-oct-16

Google Pattern Examples, ban these:
5.8.78.132 5.8.72.0 – 5.8.79.255 5.8.72.0/21
5.101.67.0 5.101.64.0 – 5.101.67.255 5.101.64.0/22
46.161.54.109 46.161.0.0 – 46.161.63.255 46.161.0.0/18
46.161.60.177
46.161.61.68
195.2.240.4 195.2.240.0 – 195.2.241.255 195.2.240.0/23

17 + 128
18 + 63
19 + 31
20 + 15
21 + 7
22 +3
23 +1

Over the Air TV Review: Toronto, Canada

I gave Rogers the heave ho, for both cable and internet, and feel better for it. Scummy, predatory, their service was. Over the air TV has replaced cable. It is not what we are used to, but saves us over $70 each month. Overall I would say that we are much better off without Rogers cable.

Over the air (OTA) TV is not all fantastic, though I did not know all the disadvantages and underestimated the advantages. I will discuss all I learned. With OTA we get 17 channels, which includes a couple of duplicate HD and SD channels, a French channel, though it comes in stunning HD, and a religious channel, also in stunning HD.

Fine Tuning Access to your Web site

The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.

Reducing your Bandwidth for WordPress and Drupal

Busy I have been recently, with not much time for my blog, but it was all for a good cause. My internet service provider (ISP) informed me that I was taking up too much CPU time on their shared service and banned me. I am a good guy and generally follow the rules, so getting banned is out of character. After a frantic email they restored my account so that I could figure out what happened. I truly am a “less is more” type of guy, and that includes IT resources, and my online sites are pretty consistent, so a propensity of new content was not the issue. Eventually I took some steps to rein in the numerous bots that were scraping and doing whatever to my site, wasting my CPU usage on my tab, and eventually getting me banned. If your site is suffering the same fate, you may glean some hints and tips for reducing your CPU usage.