Switching to from Internode to TPG

Posted on by
Reply

What? Are you crazy?? That’s what you’re thinking isn’t it. First off, why I am writing this post. I want to share my unbiased experience switching from Internode to TPG. Let me assure you that this is not a sponsored post!

As you no doubt would have recently heard, iiNet have bought Internode. I’ve been a loyal customer of the Node for over 6 years, but living out of the city areas means i’m on a Telstra DSLAM on one of Internodes Easy Reach plans. Due to the “Telstra price squeeze” (in which their retail division undercuts their wholesale pricing by a significent margin) i’m paying much more for less data than if I was on an Internode DSLAM. Which prompted me to look for something with better value. Don’t get me wrong, I was perfectly happy with Internode all that time and had no complaints at all, but I wanted better value, and more data allowance!

The only other ISP with a DSLAM in my area was TPG. Now I know TPG have a bad reputation especially in the area of disconnects, slow speeds and most of all customer support. I hit the Whirlpool forums and it seemed that a vast majority of these were customer premise problems, not directly TPG related. I rarely call customer support so that part didn’t phase me too much. After a month of deliberation, I decided to take the plunge and opted for their Unlimited ADSL2+ with Home Phone bundle. Naked DSL would have been a more attractive offer but strangely enough it was $10 more than the bundle.

Signup and connection

I opted to sign up online. Due to the fact that i’m signing up for their Home Phone bundle, I wasn’t able to churn to TPG and was required to pay the initial signup fee of $99 + $20 deposit for Home Phone. After signing up online, I played the waiting game. The quoted ETA was 10 – 15 days, with the phone line connected within 5 days later. 11 days later, my ADSL was connected.

The phone line was connected 5 days later. I don’t use the home phone all that much so I didn’t perform any more exhaustive tests than making sure I could receive calls, and dial out.

Performance

Synch speeds remain the same as what I got with Internode, roughly 16-17 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up. I ran speed tests and packet loss tests overnight and through the day, especially through peak periods and got on average a 0.1% packet loss over 5000 pings. Downloads regularly peak at 1.6 MB/s (note the differing notation between Mb/s and MB/s). Pings to the closest gateway come back at around 19 ms.

Browsing pages seems just as fast as with Internode. Youtube videos also stream just as well. I have an Astraweb account and Usenet downloads peak at 1.6 MB/s at around 10 connections.

Conclusion and final thoughts

One thing I did notice is that TPG really provide a barebones service (hence the pricing). The mailbox they provide you is a POP3 mailbox (I was used to being able to hook up my iPhone and Mac simultaneously through Internode’s IMAP facility). No mail forwarding service is provided either. There is also no online ADSL line profile changer, you’ll have to call tech support and get them to do it for you.

At the end of the day, i’m very satisfied with the service TPG have been providing and would recommend them. This is MY experience with TPG and may or may not reflect what other TPG customers are seeing. Having unlimited data is a godsend, which enables me to rent movies through iTunes now without worrying about how it’s going to impact my monthly quota.

Virtual machine must be running in order to be migrated

Posted on by
Reply

Lately i’ve run into a strange issue where an ESXi server gets into a state where VMs running on it are not able to be migrated to other ESXi servers. This is the error that comes up when you try to vMotion the problematic VMs.

A general system error occured: Virtual machine must be running in order to be migrated.

I’ve contacted VMware support and they tell me there’s no other way to fix this than to shutdown and powerup the VMs. Simply rebooting them does not work as the problem seems to be linked to their registration with ESXi or vCenter Server. You won’t be able to unregister them directly through tech support mode on ESXi either as it simply won’t let you while the VM is running.

After you do this, you had best reboot the ESXi server as well.

If anyone has come up with any alternate solutions, i’d love to hear from you.

Playing downloaded H.264 content on an unjailbroken Apple TV 2

Posted on by
Reply

H.264 content out there in the wild is often produced using the open source x264 encoding library. This article focuses on playing that content back on your Apple TV 2 in an unjailbroken state.

This article presumes you have purchased legal copies of the movies you’ve downloaded on DVD or Blu-Ray and are too lazy to rip them yourself, or are unable to do so due to hardware/time constraints.

The Apple TV 2 is not able to playback .mkv files, so we are going to re-wrap the video and audio tracks into an .m4v container which the ATV can playback.

Tools you’ll need

  • Subler
  • iTunes

Procedure

  1. Load your downloaded file into Subler.
  2. Save the file as a Movie-MPEG4. If the file is larger than 4GB, tick the box “64 bits chunk offset”.
  3. Rename the file to an .m4v extension. The .mp4 container format does not support AC3, .m4v does.
  4. Click on Movies in iTunes and drag your file in. This will copy the movie to your Library.
  5. Enable Home Sharing on both the Apple TV and iTunes.

You should then be able to see and playback content from iTunes on your Apple TV.

When playing back content with AC3 tracks, you MUST set Dolby Digital to On instead of Auto on the Apple TV, otherwise you’ll get an error during playback. You’ll find the option in Settings -> Audio & Video.

The Apple TV 2 is optimised for H.264 playback ONLY. Standard definition Xvid content will playback but will not be hardware accelerated, as a result may be choppy, same with HD Xvid content.