Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

iscableoneshitty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#12

Post by grizzles »

I just went through a 2 month ordeal with my ISP trying to get basic service. It's working now so I think it's resolved for the moment but I don't have much faith in them. Unfortunately I'm expecting further outages.

I thought about making a tool like this as well as crazier ideas like getting my lawyer to sue them for their incompetence - as it happens they are my only option for broadband.

What I'd like and I think alot of other customers would like is a little app to run on my computers that tracks when my internet connection goes down and for exactly how long. I pay a fixed amount monthly. As I'm concerned that pro-rata amount of lost connection time should be refunded to me from the ISP. There is no incentive for them to get better unless they lose money from their shit service.

I think it'd be a good adware product to cover basic expenses, and maybe some money could be made by taking a peice of crowd funded lawsuits vs ISPs. With my ISPs customer base, I don't think it'd be too hard to find contributors...

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#14

Post by jewel »

ajsharma wrote: post #9
falcolas wrote: post #6

It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who come over and say everything's fine.

I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about my service :p

smokeping does this.

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#15

Post by requests_get »

ajsharma wrote: post #9
falcolas wrote: post #6

It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who come over and say everything's fine.

I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about my service :p

Any recent version of collectd has the write_graphite plugin. Mix that with the ping plugin and you're all set. About five minutes of work (assuming you have a graphite stack already). My raspberry pi runs graphite / statsd and my personal servers write all sorts of useful system / network metrics to it via collectd.

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#16

Post by simoncion »

cwsx wrote: post #11

Hey, I'd recommend changing your font-size from 200pt to 16vw(ish). This should make it fully responsive.

Points are fully responsive. They correspond to the on-screen physical size of the text. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29 )

If the text doesn't fit on your screen -as it fails to on mine-, then either your screen is physically too small (as mine is), or your user-agent (or windowing system, or display, or video card drivers) is broken.

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#17

Post by ars »

ajsharma wrote: post #9
falcolas wrote: post #6

It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who come over and say everything's fine.

I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about my service :p

I modified a munin plugin that pings google and charts it: http://imgur.com/jaaLaJP

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#18

Post by falcolas »

ajsharma wrote: post #9
falcolas wrote: post #6

It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who come over and say everything's fine.

I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about my service :p

It's not on a machine I have access to right now, but I'm fairly certain it went something like:

    while [ "true" ]
    do
        printf 'google_ping %f %s' $(ping -c1 www.google.com | awk '/ms/ {print $7};' | awk -F '=' '{print $2};') $(date +%s) | nc graphite_host 2003
        sleep 10
    done

Re: My ISP has a poor service record. I made a tool to test how shitty it is

#19

Post by falcolas »

requests_get wrote: post #15
ajsharma wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont suppose you have a tool that does this? I've been pondering building one, but I'd rather just skip to the part where I can start complaining about my service :p

Any recent version of collectd has the write_graphite plugin. Mix that with the ping plugin and you're all set. About five minutes of work (assuming you have a graphite stack already). My raspberry pi runs graphite / statsd and my personal servers write all sorts of useful system / network metrics to it via collectd.

Collectd is pretty awesome for tracking the state of a machine. I use it all over the place.
Post reply on HN