SamKnows Ofcom Monitoring

[#1]

I have volunteered for this project, and received the D-Link white box last week. It is all set up and as far as I can tell from my usage stats, doing its thing.
However I have received no acknowledgement or notification of its appearance on the network from Samknows. Has anyone else joined the monitoring trials fairly recently? How long after the box went lived did you get the e-mails ( is it the end of the first week?, month?

[#2]

It was a little over two weeks after I connected my box that I got an email with my access details on.

[#3]

I too was wondering the very same thing. I had assumed that as soon as the box had 'phoned home' it would've triggered an e-mail from them to at least provide confirmation of it working, if not the full details as to where to go from there.
Mathew

[#4]

Hi Wisty,
i have recently signed up for this.
how long from signing up to getting anywhere was it?
are we talking months?

[#5]

Thanks dvorak, I will wait a little longer. Like MJN I guess I am getting to the stage where I expect most things related to the internet to be automated, and to happen in real time.[ I just renewed a domain  registration with 123-reg, and by the time I had closed the browser window, the e-mailed receipt for the payment had arrived.]
Peter - my e-mail traffic shows I got an acknowledgement of signing up on the 27th April, which asked me to run the speed tests. I think I originally volunteered at the beginning of January ( based on my browser history)
After running the tests on the 28th April I got the acknowledgement E-mail which asked me to agree to the T's & C's on the 17th May, which I did. The Box shipped on the 18th and arrived on the 20th. Hope this helps.
Regards

[#6]

I think I first volunteered at the end of March, or early April. The rest of the timing matches, except I only got the box yesterday, and plugged in last night. I think my usage stats show it to have started work, but I too have no other confirmation yet.
I have an odd setup over DHCP, so I've emailed a tech question to check it will work OK. Lets see what answer I get...

[#7]

I e-mailed Community@samknows.com on the 23rd to query the situation. I  got a response on the 24th asking for mac address or unit ID. A reply on the 25th gave me the link for statistics.
All working well ( and plusnets stats look good!!)

[#8]

A final update - I got what looks like the "official" e-mail this morning 30 May (10 days after the box was connected) informing me that the box was connected and giving me the same details as I received in the e-mail on the 24th.
That's roughly in line with dvorak's two weeks.

[#9]

Same here. Some interesting graphs...
Because of the way my DHCP works, I suspect that the box is measuring DNS response times for my internal caching name server, rather than realistic ones, What kind of numbers are you seeing there? I'll post mine later, but I can't get on right now...

[#10]

I got an email on Wednesday saying they couldn't see my unit (probably because it was sat in it's box on my todo pile!).  I connected it on Wednesday night, and received my connection email yesterday morning.  As others have said, the stats are looking great for Plusnet!
Phil

[#11]

Quote from: WWWombat

Same here. Some interesting graphs... Because of the way my DHCP works, I suspect that the box is measuring DNS response times for my internal caching name server, rather than realistic ones, What kind of numbers are you seeing there? I'll post mine later, but I can't get on right now...

Have you put your internal DNS server in to your router's configuration?

[#12]

Quote from: WWWombat

I suspect that the box is measuring DNS response times for my internal caching name server, rather than realistic ones, What kind of numbers are you seeing there? I'll post mine later, but I can't get on right now...

The daily averages for DNS Response times on my graphs are consistently 30ms. The highest maximum is in the low 50's  the lowest minimum is just under 25ms.

[#13]

Latency has been the most interesting for me; it periodically makes a step change. I believe this will be due to BT making a routing change between my exchange (near Brighton) and the Plusnet datacentre. Changing gateway made no difference (even when I switched between PCL and PTN/PTE which are in different places in London).

[#14]

Quote from: jelv

Have you put your internal DNS server in to your router's configuration?

No - the router isn't running my DHCP; I handle that on the same machine that runs the DNS cache. IIRC, I originally did things that way to distribute data related to Netbios in the DHCP configuration, and to be able to load my own software onto a machine using Bootp - both things which couldn't be added to the router's DHCP implementation. Putting the DNS cache data there was a side-effect, although I now make some small use of it in Master mode for internal things, that would break if I just deferred to the router as a DNS server.
I checked with Samknows, and they can cope just fine with the DHCP server sitting on the LAN side of the white box, instead of the WAN side. I've not had an answer back about how they evaluate the DNS response times - whether by using their own servers, or by hooking into the router's config (thereby depending on the DHCP data).
I've had one go at configuring my DHCP daemon to give different DNS servers to different hosts - but I broke my whole DHCP setup doing that, and haven't had chance to try again yet.

[#15]

Quote from: wisty

The daily averages for DNS Response times on my graphs are consistently 30ms. The highest maximum is in the low 50's  the lowest minimum is just under 25ms.

Thanks. How does those compare to the latency you see over the DSL connection - either from traceroute or ping commands?
My results show 13-15ms mostly, but sometimes up to 20ms, whereas my minimum ADSL latency seems to be about 13ms (ping time to the first plusnet central, and that matches my TBB graph). If I were hitting the cache, I'd have thought I'd be getting lower single-digit values: I can get 1-2ms results using dig on a linux box, when I think the cache is involved, so there's no reason why the white box can't get the same.
Those numbers suggest that the box is not hitting the cache - but if that is the case, how is the box measuring *my ISP's* DNS response time? Or perhaps it hits my DNS server in such a way that it the name is not found in the cache, and it always forwards the request out to Plusnet.
It calls for some experimentation, but I'm a little loath to play too much. Someone else is going to be believing the results here,,,