Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

One year with IPTP

Today is exactly one year as I am working at the position of Technical Director of Fredonia Trading Ltd (Cyprus part of IPTP Networks).

This year was really impressive:

First of all is the team – very nice, highly professional, helpful and just great people. It is a real pleasure to be a part of such team. After one year I really feel to be in the team, where everyone helps me and I do my best to help them. It is a very rare case when that many people can work together without problems and with full understanding. As the nature of the company structure is more flat, everyone feels equal part and stupid situations when people from top push guys at the bottom and the bottom hates top is out of the scope of this company.

Second thing is a huge experience. Never before I worked in the IT company of such scale where the amount of knowledge that flies around you in the air is such huge. Moreover, not only one gets experience, anyone is also free to share their own and it is accepted strait away. This is really nice when people talk and listen each other that much and apply common knowledge gathered from the pieces of everyone’s mind into one solid and huge knowledge base. it looks like the fountain of never-ending information, best practices, technical things, uncommon bugs and so on.

Third is the scale in general. Such big infrastructure creates a lot of branches and different fields that whatever interests you have – you can find something that matches you and contribute there, while mastering new skills and abilities in other fields of the company activity.

Through-out this year I was involved in many different projects, technical discussions and implementations, arguments, meetings, paper works and so on that I am still hard to realize the year is gone. I really feel that I just started and the most fun is still ahead.

So thanks to all the guys who made me this year at IPTP, I really enjoy it and hope we will continue in the same manner to provide our customers with high quality service, enhance and grow our infrastructure while still working in a close team of good friends.

 

PrimeTel (part 2, final)

Just to be fair, I would like share the continuation of the story about PrimeTel for private users that I posted recently. The issue was brought to the attention of PrimeTel and today I have received a call from their office where kind lady tried to sort out the issues and help me with my problems if possible.

First of all, the issue with money included in the package for mobile for local calls only is a policy of PrimeTel and their decision, so as I still find it weird – there is no point for arguing here. The only two suggestions I would make here for them is:

  • Clearly state your policy that the mobile package amount that is included is for local calls only. I found the info on the website while reading about package description that this includes calls to national carriers, but it was not that obvious at the times when I was getting the mobile 15 package. Nobody mentioned this note to me, sales people just said: you have 15 euro included.
  • Create some new package that would be called something like “Mobile 20 all-inclusive” or “Mobile 20 international” that would utilize committed amount for international calls as well (even if you ask for a bigger deposit like 100 euro instead of 50 to be on a safe side – that would be reasonable

With regards to the downgrade fee, the explanation was clear: this fee is required for people not to switch between different packages every months or so, which is possible if done for free. Ok, got it, but as a post-paid packages are contract based, it would be much easier to do a period commitment, that would limit the options to switch the packages. I would suggest allowing people adjusting their package after one months use, as until that period it is hard to really understand how much you need, especially without knowing the first issue described above, and then limit the option of changing the package to once a year /half year free and with additional charge if you need to change package earlier. Anyhow, as I am a long customer of PrimeTel, they downgraded me to mobile 10 without the deposit as an exceptional case, which I really appreciate.

Now, with regards to family package and huge deposits on it: either it was some misunderstanding or human error, but after today’s conversations I was told that the deposit would be 100 euro if I want my wife to have PrimeTel SIM while being attached to centralized (my) account. Otherwise she can register separately and pay only 50 euro deposit (as I did when first applied). This looks decent, having the fact that 100 minutes free included between members of family package. On the other side, I would still suggest to have an option to add second SIM card to the same account with standard deposit of 50 euro without bonus 100 minutes talk free. This would be valid for many cases (including mine) or lets say when I want to have 2 SIM cards in 2 different phones: one for personal use and one for business cases, and control both numbers from same account, why not?

I left the decision of either switching to PrimeTel or staying with CYTA SoEasy for my wife at her own, and currently she decided to leave things as is – SoEasy. I don’t know if she will change her mind or not and how this will go, makes not much difference for me anyway.

Finally I want to thank PrimeTel for contacting me and not leaving the case with no attention, it was pleasure to talk to you and sort out whatever can be.

PrimeTel for private users disappointment

First of all I would like to note that this post is not applicable for PrimeTel corporate/business cases as all works pretty fine in that section and support is really great. More over this post is not about technical quality of PrimeTel (even for home users) as I am using them for more 3 years and have no complains what-so-ever. This is just about administrative side of support for private users.

I am using PrimeTel for home internet for few years and few months ago have also transferred my CYTA SoEasy mobile number to PrimeTel pay monthly to get proper 3G and contract on calls for a decent deposit amount. CYTA was not an option for two reasons: deposits are really huge and if your monthly bill is way to big they will not disconnect you, but will charge you. This  is not good as if my mobile gets stolen and I have no way to notify CYTA on time – some one can make calls on few thousand euros and I will have to settle this bill. There were many stories to confirm this, but I am not going to write anything about it here.

So as I changed my mobile to PrimeTel, I got a mobile 15 package, which tells me that I have 15 euro calls included. Sounds great, I am happy, but…

Last month I had friends visiting Cyprus from Russia and they used Russian mobile number in island, so I had few calls to them and then, somehow, my mobile stopped calling any international numbers without giving me a reason. Digging into the problem with few friends from PrimeTel I was told that my limit for international calls is exceeded! WHAT? What you mean by “international calls”? I have a commitment for 15 euro per month (thought I). But the explanation was pretty cool: the 15 euro from the package are ONLY for LOCAL CALLS. WTF?! When I was using SoEasy I tend to buy a 10 euro card and I didn’t bother about destination of my calls. Each destination has it’s price per minute and it was fine with me. Why should 15 euro cover only local calls while I have to pay extra for international? This is somehow stupid.

Ok, my friends from PrimeTel told me that I should probably downgrade my mobile package to smaller amount (for local calls) as I am not utilizing what, so that my commitment would be 2 or 10 euro per months local calls and the rest I can cover extra with the difference from what I am paying at the moment. Fine, whatever, went to PrimeTel to downgrade and here we go: “if you want to downgrade your package you need to pay 15 euro once-off downgrade fee” – WTF?! Paying more to have less??? I can understand paying extra to upgrade, but to downgrade? Guys…..

Yet another case that happen before all this bullshit: as I was happy with PrimeTel mobile and pretty good 3G, I thought to bring my wife in and transfer her SoEasy to PrimeTel as well. So we came in. Obvious question from my side was: can I have both mobile numbers under same account so I can pay bills and see calls while logged in as a single user? Yes I can. This is called “Family Package”. Apart of controlling all numbers under this package from single place, the only additional benefit is that we gonna have 100 minutes of free calls in between us. This I was not really interested as 2 euro package would be enough for my wife to talk to me and her parents, but anyway. So all sounds good, but then I was told: “you need to pay 300 euro deposit” – and again WTF? The standard deposit for a mobile service in PrimeTel is 50 euro (and that’s what I paid for mine), so I assumed having to numbers would be 2×50. Why I need to pay bigger deposits while requesting basically same service?

One more case to go (but this I can understand to some extend): as my mother is currently not in Cyprus, she asked to terminate her internet connection. I grab here equipment, copy of her passport and my passport and go to PrimeTel. No luck here. They have requested an authorization letter from her to do the job. Ok, I can understand this to some extend, but on the other hand: I have her equipment with me, and our passport data (with the same surname and we are pretty alike if you on the photo) – I assume things should be a bit easier.

Anyhow, up to now I stayed with mobile 15 package, my wife told that she would stay with CYTA SoEasy, because “fuck all that bullshit and complications, SoEasy is easy – you buy a card for 10 euro and use it properly. When finished – you buy another one”. I think that PrimeTel really needs to review the way the treat private customers and the way they bundle the services.

Once again, this is not about technical quality as I am satisfied how things technically work and it is not about support for business customers, as I have quite few cases where I deal with PrimeTel as business account and all is just great there: fast response, good quality, no complains.

Anyone still trust Skype?

Now, this is something really weird! I never feel trustfully with regards to the subj, but this is getting way too far:

Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H‘s associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

http://www.soft-impact.com/infrastructure/index.php/news/111-think-skype-is-safe-think-again

MySQL create update and modify

Short post to keep in memories for a very common task in MySQL with regards of two things:

  • keeping track of record timestamp with regards to created/modified
  • updating a record if it exists or creating one if absent

The above two issues are pretty common and many frameworks use them and have a way around them. Today I decided to make a small script that would use DB to keep a single table with a list of IP addresses as well as created and modified timestamps for them (kinda admin task), so I got into MySQL to sort out the table and had few thoughts on how to do it better. Googling for few minutes brought me to the article here that shows an interesting way of setting current timestamps on created and modified, while mysql documentation shows a INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY  section that I never saw before.

So having a table with a structure like:

CREATE TABLE ip_list(
    ip VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    souce_fw VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    created TIMESTAMP DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
    modified TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW() ON UPDATE NOW()
);

 
I could use a simple statement to insert update the IP (adjusting the source field if needed) as follows:

INSERT INTO ip_list (ip,source,created,modified) 
    VALUES ('8.8.8.8','myfw1.com',NULL,NULL)  
    ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE source='myfw1.com';

 
Which would either insert a record in the DB with created/modified set to NOW() or update the row with given IP setting new source and adjusting modified to current time.

As usual: simple but cool!