Warning: this post is intensely technical, bordering on arcane. It’s about improving your user-experience as a command-line user on remote Unix-like systems. As such, it’s probably not intended for you, but my hope is that someone else will find it useful. The usual geeky stuff (food, travel, language, etc.) will follow again soon.
The Accidental Expats were in a mad rush to part with some of their European acquisitions. I got a sweet deal on an N-spec. router out of their chaos. That’s an upgrade for me — I’m still using the G-spec. router that came with the contract with our ISP. But TAEs’ N-spec. device branded and optimized for T-Com (a.k.a. Telekom, again, I think) and I use another DSL provider (at least until my current contract is up in a few months…let’s see who makes the best offer then).
But after two days of messing around with it, I think I’m going to switch back to the original one. For whatever reason, and I don’t know enough about EMC and Napoleonic-War era construction and mixed OS environment to make a guess about why, my Linux machine beyond those thick walls in the back room connects better with the older router. Skype is usable with the old one. Running a small webserver as a test environment through a NAT firewall and DynDNS hostname works with that one. I just can’t seem to get those things to work reliably with the N-spec. router, even though the functionality is ostensibly there on the new router (and just to make sure, I updated its firmware to the latest version, though not without a little headscratching — it took me a while to realize that the router was rejecting the firmware file upload because I was using Google Chrome instead of MSIE <v7 or Firexfox ≤v3).
I thought N-spec. routers were supposed to have both speed AND range advantages over G-spec. Any thoughts as to how I could reap those benefits? I only have one device still stuck with a G-spec. WLAN adapter; once that gets replaced at some point in the far future, our household will be pure N-spec. compatible.
Otherwise, I may as well stick with the slower but apparently more reliably G-spec. router.
Which mobile provider do you use here in Germany? What do you like/dislike about them? Think about coverage. Billing. Pre-paid vs. contract. Perks. Roaming (EU and beyond). Especially welcome are your comparisons between operators/plans.
I’ll start:
I’ve used Debitel pre-paid for phone service. O2 for pre-paid data services in Germany. Vodafone and Telekom for business and personal telephony and data plans.
Seems like they all are the pits on the DB stretch between Regensburg and Nuremberg. Vodafone and Telekom are just okay for coverage in our apartment. O2 doesn’t work at all there — good thing we don’t need them to and didn’t move there with O2 contracts in place. But I like their pre-paid surfstick plan (with which I use a mifi instead of their stick and am publishing this now).