[GTALUG] TekSavvy or Rogers blocking apt user agent

[Giles Orr]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2019 at 21:27, Jamon Camisso via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> On 04/11/2019 21:24, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> > Is this happening to you?  I will assume so.
> >
> > - my main internet connection is directly through Rogers.
> >
> > - I use Ubuntu infrequently.
> >
> > - when I do update it, I have had no issue.  Most recently: a couple
> >   of days ago.
> >
> > The ip address in the wireshark log is 91.189.91.23 (AKA
> > economy.canonical.com).  When I point (Fedora) firefox at it, it claims
> > that it cannot connect to a web server there.  Of course that's with
> > Firefox's User Agent String.  ping does get responses.
>
> Teksavvy have done something on their end:
>
> https://twitter.com/TekSavvyCSR/status/1191486635764068355
>

Wouldn't it be great if they said WHAT had caused it rather than just "we
fixed it?"  If you told us the how, we might have more faith that you
wouldn't do it again.  But more and more, technical support departments are
hiding these outcomes - either to disguise what they think could be
regarded as incompetence or because they're afraid it might reveal secrets
about their processes or infrastructure.  Both have some validity.  Having
been in the position myself [1], I get that it's not appealing to reveal
the process and problems discovered, but I'm still a believer in
transparency.

[1] I'm in "Operations," here's just one example.  We upgraded Debian on a
back end server which in turn broke Chrome 49 - but it took over a week to
figure out that HAProxy was the reason for the Chrome 49 breakage.  We then
upgraded HAProxy again (to Debian backports) which fixed Chrome 49.  Yes,
we still have to support that.  And this has led to a big dispute at work
about whether we should be notifying people and on what level of upgrade
...  You get the idea.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20191105/554039a1/attachment.html>