The end of the Internet

It had to happen some-time, but why tonight ?

We are still without TV and I had read everything from our bookcase that appealed to me and so I found myself catching up on email and surfing the usual places; news channels (BBC, CNN, NY Times), Slashdot.org, www.theonion.com and a few others - To save you the trouble I can summarise these for you - Russian diplomats expelled from UK (I think they will think twice before subjecting anyone else to radiation poisoning), a nuclear reactor leaked in Japan, the US department of Lost and found has found a Slip-Slop and MIT has developed fearless mice (gee these are going to be useful - perhaps they will be brave enough to roam around the kitchen after dark)

Anyway after reading ALL this I realised I had seen the entire INTERNET, I frantically re-visited all my bookmarks (been there), also my http://del.icio.us bookmarks but sadly I had seen them all.

If only I had rationed my use of this resource. We can't go on like this every day consuming more and more of the INTERNET. Part of the problem is caused by ADSL lines instead of DSL broadband - people are reading far more than they are writing.

It is a sad, sad day. Please use the precious resource sparingly.

BT Home hub HTTPI broken

For serveral weeks now we have noticed problems with blogger and large posts.

The symptoms were as follows:

• On large posts there would be failure to sucessfully save or publish and instead giving an empty web page.
• Trim the post a bit and things would work.
• Post from another ISP and no problem.

Tonight I had a look at the HTTP headers involved in a blogger post and it looks like the entire post is placed in a cookie for the AJAX auto save functionality. Blogger uses several cookies. Together these are long and sent as a single HTTP header which led me to believe some some buffer length is being exceeded.

Sure enough I checked to the logs of my BT Home Hub and the HTTPI module is reporting

[HTTPI] (error) HTTP header does not fit buffer ?!

HTTPI is a small, light weight perl HTTP server. I turned on url filtering on the BT Hub a few weeks ago and it appears to require this module to intercept each web request. Disabling this service and problem is solved.

If you have a BT Home Hub you can get detailed logs as follows

telnet to 192.168.1.254
user: admin
password: admin (unless you have changed it)

Cntrl-Q

URLfiltering is under menu -> dsd (also using the command line)

As a bonus I added my USB memory stick to the USB slot of the hub and am now listening to "Modest Mouse". The Linux 2.6.8 kernel on the device includes support for USB mass storage and USB printers :-)