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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Aggregating in hotels
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Via Dave Winer comes a link to this fascinating hotel issue with net connections:
Seems Hilton Hotel chains are using a ISP service by a company called Greentree. They watch the outbound traffic of all guest connected computers. I have had intermittent problems with my connection just locking up. Turns out their monitor watches for too many concurrent connections and when a guest computer appears to be doing something it isn't supposed to it locks the offending MAC address out.
I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with a Greentree technician today and he determined aggreator which I have set to limit 5 total connections at a time was triggering the filter. We then tried the iPodder program and it did the same thing. Needless to say I am not at all happy as making News Aggreator runs is going to prove to be more difficult.
Now, I've never run across this particular issue in a hotel. I could deal with it by forcing BottomFeeder to do sequential (rather than forked) http queries, but it's never come up. What I have had happen was an unfortunate use of permanent redirect. I was staying at a hotel that had daily rates for net access, and you had to verify the use each day. I made the mistake of leaving Bf online overnight. When I got up, Bf had dutifully folllowed the permanent redirect of all my feeds and updated the urls. Argh! I've since learned to have Bf offline overnight at hotels that do the daily charge thing. Had they used a temp redirect, I would have been ok. Live and learn...
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