My Tech Notes

My number finally came up, I was able to register for new revolutionary file sharing service by Ubuntu Team called UbuntuOne. The service is still in closed-beta; see some reviews here, here and here.

(There isn’t much information (currently) on the official site, other than installation instructions, mailing list and bugs database)

This is a potentially brilliant idea, because it gives people a convenient way to support financially their favorite distribution, and with solid financial support this could become a reliable backup solution. Correct, there may be cheaper options available on the market, but you never know how long they’ll last (Streamload being a good example of that)

On the other hand, as of right now the service is hardly usable.

• It is clearly inferior compared to the popular (among Linux crowd) DropBox service, which provided 5 times more of paid storage, supports versions, has be better UI (web-based and client-side) and is compatible with every modern Linux distributions, Windows and Mac;
• It is still very buggy and incomplete. For example, when I added a file through Web UI, it never showed up in my Ubuntu folder, though synchronization the other way around worked fine;
• There are also browser-compatibility issues, e.g. with Google Chrome;
• Is this service supposed to be open source? I could not find any reference to the server source code anywhere, nor to any plans for future client-side API.

Mailing list appears to be relatively low-volume, and I am not sure many people are actually using this – which, given the modest, at best, progress of development and plenty of competitors, does not promise a bright future for this project any time soon, in my opinion.

But, whatever this is going to turn out, the idea was really a good one.

Labels: internet, linux, Ubuntu, web-services

I recently inquired RCN (my Internet provider) about their policy on blocking port. I didn't really expect an answer, but after a period of silence they responded:

Port 80 inbound
Port 25 inbound
Port 25 outbound
Port 135
Port 137
Port 138
Port 139
Port 445

In fact, the reason I posted this inquiry to begin with was that I noticed that port 443 (https) is now being blocked, or so it seems. However, from their reply it seems like no. Well, maybe I am wrong somewhere. In any case, it is good to al least have an official list from RCN.

Labels: internet, ports, RCN