Something’s Fishy in Verizon-land

So, the other day, Verizon announced it was going to start disconnecting customers at the end of August who have grandfathered, business-class, ‘unlimited data’ plans. Arstechnica has an article.

This is big news to people who actually have those grandfathered unlimited plans… like us.

Admittedly, we typically hit somewhere between 100 & 150G/month. Last month, we hit 208G.

Now, what’s really, really strange about this is that my Jetpack has suddenly – I mean, within the last 24 hours – stopped incrementing its data counter. As in: as of last night, I’d used 15.431 GB of data in this cycle.

As of right now, even after nearly a full day’s work with two audio-conferences that would’ve used about 50MB of data, plus a 30-minute video-conference which, itself, will have used about 180MB of data, and several SSH sessions (yeah, I’m old-school that way) that would’ve been another 50 MB or so, it would have increased that 15.431 GB to at -least- 15.711 GB (but should probably be much closer to 16GB), it still reads exactly 15.431 GB of usage:

image

Up until this morning, this thing has been pretty much spot-on with usage reports.

I’m calling shenanigans. Something very strange and very suspicious is happening with Verizon’s data counters.

edit: OR maybe Verizon’s very own bandwidth metrics tool is being unexpectedly DDoS’d by actual customers trying to get some information out of it.

Improvised Fix

I broke the grille for the rooftop air conditioner when I pulled it down to clean the filter. It’s generally not a good idea to run these things without a filter – especially so in humid environments – so I improvised a fix.

Well… more like an improvised splint from some zip-ties and a pair of chopsticks.

If it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid.

Weekend Day-trip

An afternoon adventure. Lunch with giant root beer in Elkhart on the way up to Michigan. Decided it would be worth it to see Lake Michigan so we ended up at the Warren Dunes State Park. Littles got to play in the water. We got to sit in the sand. Bella got to bark warnings to the other dogs about water being “dangerous”.

Data Protection: In progress

I have a 2nd-generation Drobo in the house. Once per week, we have a planned power outage (yes, really, follow along) for about 10 hours. House server and media libraries all get shut down cleanly and powered off before power is cut to the house. Not a big deal, right?

Power it all back up 10 hours later and Drobo occasionally says, “Hey, you’re missing a disk… replace the one with the red light.”

Occasionally.

So, I reseat the drive… then wait three days for the array to rebuild.

Three. Days.

Yep, first world problems.

It’ll only get worse as I upgrade those disks to 3 or 4TB capacities.