Internet woes

And Jason is, right now, in a foul mood.

Right smack in the middle of the great and mighty NUS itself, global knowledge enterprise, world class campus, touted for incredible IT facilities. Right smack in the middle of it all resides Jason. And lo and behold, speedtest.net gives him a 12kbps reading. For those who are unsure what this entails, this is slower than streamyx. Much slower. Dialup-style super-slow snail pace internet.

-.-

Nevermind. Nice people like Hoa recommended getting nus vpn, which apparently stabilises the connection. All right! that should be easy! Just go right to the computer centre website and look up vpn client for windows and ~~

The thing dies on vista.

Like hell MULTITUDES of goddamned people use vista in NUS. How long has the thing been out? No new version? No workaround? Not even a friggin NOTE at the website that says "Oh yea, doesn't work on vista. We're workin on it"? And so I spent hours and hours trying to get things to work in Vista, using suggestions like using a webvpn service, and was amply rewarded with blue screens of death.

Sigh.

And then there was Ubuntu! Yay! Wonderful operating system, with lotsa cool stuff and a load of free, legal open source software. And guess what?

I can't get the friggin client to work on Ubuntu either!!!

Like freakin GAH!!

W00t more hours of work. Like hello! I'm supposed to be working on my mountain of assignments so why the hell is NUS' fantastic IT facilities makin me go round and round in happy little circles wrestling with speeds that make me bang my head against the keyboard doing simple stuff like browsing Wikipedia?

Alright, downloaded vpn-client source for linux. Followed installation instructions. Some weird error indecipherable by linux noobs like me occurs. Jason slams his head into his desk. Retry, after installling some packages here and there. Same problem. Jason contemplates the tempting prospect of flinging his laptop out the window then doing the same to himself. Decided to try webvpn, tumbled around Ubuntu and a very slow internet looking for installation instructions, then wrestled with installing JRE under the breakneck speeds (downloading file, estimated time left 2hrs 39mins) Finally done. Firefox crashes at webvpn login. Well no surprise, activeX controls always suck anyway. After going around in more random circles, decided to try downloading a different version of the nus vpn client. This time compilation and installation actually worked! Wow! Uber! Now... what? Go to nus vpn web page. Read something to the effect of "Guess what? We're providing this thing but we ain't givin no support cos we're all windows people and linux people can take care of themselves while linux noobs like you can just get caught in the middle and consider suicide".

By now my brain was hovering somewhere between completely shutting down, blowing apart scattering brain bits everywhere, and commanding me to do something random like eating my speakers. Nonetheless, the show must go on! And after more google hunting on the usual fantastic connection speeds, I finally found out that you could connect to nus vpn using a program called vpnc. Brilliant, except how the hell do you use it? And so, after more shuffling and piecing information from various outdated websites together, I finally, finally managed, after several tries, to get on nus vpn.

This, had better, be worth it.

Sigh. NUS. NUS. What are you doing with your IT facility reputation? Speeds have been terrific before. You've got the friggin infrastructure, now start making it goddamned deliver!