Streaming Abroad

Consistently, the most important thing for incoming officers is immediate access to the internet. They say it's to check in with their family, so their spouse can keep up with her online-grad-school work, or any number of legitimate reasons, but let's face it. We all know it's because they want Facebook and Netflix. That's not an accusation, I was totally the same way.

Facebook works everyhwere, so that's not a problem, but Netflix has regional content blocking. Most of the people I talk to in the Foreign Service use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to bounce all of their internet traffic off a US based host to get around this (we are Americans afterall, it makes sense that we have access to American content, right?). However, I've slowly been converting people from VPNs to a much more appropriate "Smart DNS" service provided by Unblock-Us. VPNs are difficult to configure and use, can only be used by one device at a time (or require expensive network gear), generally cost more, and in most cases, are scarily unsecure. Unblock-Us works by changing who your computer, phone, whatever asks when it attempts to find the actual IP address of the website you've requested. So when you type in a web address, such as www.google.com, it points you to servers in the US, rather than the regional servers for your location. For Netflix, this allows you to watch as if you were in the US, but is much faster than a VPN, since the data only has to travel from Netflix to you, rather than taking a stop at your intermediate VPN host first. In addition, Smart DNS service can be set up with literally any device or network gear, so you can use as many devices to watch Netflix on your home wireless connection as your bandwidth will allow.

Disclaimer: I've used Unblock-Us ever since moving overseas, and recommend it to pretty much everyone. After 11 months of suggesting it to people, I figured I might as well sign up as their affiliate, so everyone that signs up using my link above gives me a free month of service.

Shopping Misconceptions

I recently signed up for a new much cheaper and much faster internet company. However, the new company does not provide a router. I didn't think this was an issue, because I had one from the US. Unfortunately, the technician helpfully plugged my 110v router into our 220v outlet, and immediately unplugged it when it started smoking. I was then faced with a choice... buy one locally, or wait a couple weeks for one purchased online to arrive. I went with the former. Unfortunately, between work and not really knowing where any electronics stores are, I procrastinated for several weeks until it would have been faster to just order it. Oh well, I asked one of my local staff where to go to get a router. He gave me a store name, I followed up by asking if they had parking, since parking is the hardest part of driving in Chennai. He looked at me funny and said, "No, they don't have parking. I will just call them and they will bring your purchase here."

I guess that's what I get for internally assuming that the electronics store would be a big box place, like Best Buy. I've since driven past other stores of the same chain... they are open air counters facing the street with all the merchandise on shelves behind the counter. It's like buying your electronics from a pharmacy. Also, it costs the company so little to send an employee on a two-wheeler to drop off a purchase and accept payment... so why wouldn't they?

Note: We went from paying $48/month for 8mbps down and .5mbps up with a 95gb limit to paying $20/month for 40mbps down and 6mbps up with a 75gb limit. Insanity...

Two Years in India, Weeks 9 and 10: Long Weekend

Weeks 9 and 10 sandwiched a four day weekend, so I might as well write about both at the same time. If that logic doesn't work for you... let's just say I was out of town last weekend and didn't get a chance to write a post.

Ten percent of the way through my first tour and things at work are starting to feel "normal." I'm still regularly asked if I'm "settling in" - it will be interesting to see how long that lasts. My bet is until the next arrival/departure season. I don't have a lot to report except my building excitement to visit Delhi in the near-ish future to meet my counter parts on the "mother ship." (As a consulate, all funding for Chennai goes through the Embassy in New Delhi.) We also had to let our driver go last week, when we learned he was on the RSO's DO NOT HIRE list. It was kind of a bummer, since we liked him, but he was very nice about the whole thing. I'll go into more details in another post; I'm due to write one about the pros and cons of employing household staff.

I did have another small victory at work this week. The State Department uses a system called iPost to continuously monitor the health of the computer networks of overseas posts. To make it more competitive (because, why not?), they tell you what rank you are out of all of the posts in the world and those in your region. When I arrived at post, our world-wide ranking for one of our networks was around 125th, and as of this week we're number 1! Although this doesn't win me any awards, further bilateral diplomatic relations with India, or anything like that... It was still a good feeling and it can't hurt my chances of getting tenured. It almost felt like cheating, since it wasn't that difficult and Chennai isn't a very busy post, so I had the time. I've been talking to the other IMSers from my orientation class and they sound way more busy. I guess that's one of the benefits to going to a consulate!

Side note: The day our HHE was supposed to arrive in Chennai (according to the shipping department) has come and gone and I haven't been contacted. Guess I'll fall back to expecting it when the company that shipped it from DC estimated it would arrive (October 10th).

Internet Around the World

Jeff over at RambleOn was recently talking about how he got some obscene (160mb/s) internet plan essentially for free (I forget exactly, but something around $40/month) in Sweden. I just want to set the record straight that that is not our experience in India. The internet companies here are insane. Specifically the qualitiy of service for similarly priced service plans makes no sense. Without further ado, here are two of the options:

Just for the record, I currently have a plan with the top company. I'm obviously going to attempt to switch carriers, since the other one offers lower prices, significantly faster speeds, AND higher data limits. I just don't understand why anyone (other than people like me who didn't know any better) would go with the top carrier. I'm so confused. The other odd thing, is that all the plans appear to have abysmal upload rates. I really notice this when I'm uploading pictures for the blog (or to my online backup). I haven't seen a plan with upload speeds higher than 1mb/s (in the US we got 5mb/s with the worst plans) and in practice they're closer to .5 mb/s.

Either way, I guess I should be thanking my good forture that ours is still relatively cheap. Here's a sampling of speeds and prices from some of my other new hires.

Moscow: $200/month for 20mb/s
Zimbabwe: $150/month for 10mb/s
Senegal: $100/month for 10mb/s (theoretically, but it's rarely reaches above 1mb/s)

Technobabble

One of the interesting things about being a system administrator, is that everyone just assumes you live and breathe computers. It often inspires unsolicited conversations describing, in excruciating detail, your clients extravagant home setups (and I'm not talking about people looking for home tech support, that's another story altogether). So I often get incredulous looks and words of disbelief when I tell people that my "home setup" is just a single desktop with an external hard drive for backups. A couple years ago we expanded that to include a laptop for my wife. I guess I never really saw the fun in "taking my work home with me."

Our upcoming move overseas has spurred me to revise that policy somewhat, since the likelihood of hard drive failure skyrockets the more you move them (or leave them in extreme heat). In addition, one of the perks to living in the United States is the access to various online streaming video sources (e.g. Netflix, cable channel websites). Many of these sites are blocked to IP addresses originating geographically outside the United States. Some countries also censor specific websites or content. When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, one of my classmates was unable to check his college's e-mail because sites with the name "George Washington" were censored.

A common solution to this problem is to route your web traffic through a US host. After a bit of consideration and some price comparisons, I decided to go with an out-of-the-box solution. Since I won't be readily available to maintain it, I didn't think setting up a custom server was the best idea... and as is often the case, buying a product specifically suited to my needs was cheaper than building my own solution. To that end, I'm going to pick up a QNAP TS-219P+ with 2x 4TB hard drives, configured in RAID 1. I'm going to set it up as an offsite backup, a VPN, and a proxy server. This is not an original idea, many companies use VPNs to securely host work related files for their employees, and some larger companies even use proxy servers to obfuscate their employees internet traffic's origin. My brother, who lives in Florida, has agreed to provide power, space and cooling (the minimal amount that this product requires) in exchange for space to backup his own files. This way I can securely backup my files and access US only or censored sites while overseas.