GREx 31 December 2017 GRExTrustBig TechGeneral In the current state of fake news, trolls and scathing comments, it’s refreshing to see that some people can still be positive. Let’s be honest, most people who take the time to go online and actually write about a product or service, are usually blowing off steam. In fact, the comments you usually see the most are about one thing, getting revenge:“the service was terrible, the product doesn’t work, it’s a scam or a rip off”.Especially with how many trolls and general negative interactions there are nowadays, the outlook can be bleak. Even so, many of us still give a glance or two at reviews looking for some guidance. At least to have an idea of what we're facing, there’s a comfort in knowing beforehand that a service is good or you can trust a product you want to buy. It’s nice to see that there are still people taking the time to write glowing reviews praising a wonderful experience they had. Like these wonderful posts expressing their opinion about car dealerships in Australia…“Had an amazing experience at Westernport Holden. Colin was fabulous to deal with. Love my new Spark with Apple iPlay, a girls got to have that! Would highly recommend to friends and family!”April 5, 2016“Love my new little Astra! Thanks for the great service. Big thanks to Peter for looking after me. I’d highly recommend them”22 February 2017“Love my new Juke! Thanks to Peter & the team, fantastic experience, I’ll be back!”8 June 2017All of these appear under Google Places Reviews. If they sound a bit repetitive, it’s because they were written by the same person.It’s interesting that these are just three of the 13 outstanding reviews Clara Padalini has written for the eight different car dealerships where she has bought over nine cars in the past three years alone. All her reviews are five stars, she has bought her “first new car” twice now, and she must really know the dealerships and workers very well by now, because recently, she’s averaging a new car every 6 weeks. What a life!If we were to break it down to numbers, Clara’s car-buying timeline goes something like this:3 years ago: She bought a new Hyundai i30 from Ferntree Gully Hyundai.2 years ago: She bought another new car—“my first new car” from Watson Holden & HSV.1 year ago: She bought a 3rd new car from Northern Motor Group.1 year ago: She bought her 4th new car, a Holden Spark from Westernport Holden.8 months ago: She bought 5th new car, a Renault Koleos from Watson Renault.3 months ago: She bought 6th new car, a Nissan X-Trail from Mornington Auto Group.2 months ago: She bought 7th new car, a Jeep Cherokee from Northern Chrysler Jeep Dodge.1 month ago: She bought 8th new car, a Holden Astra from Glen Waverley Holden.1 month ago: - bought 9th new car, a Fiat Spider from Northern Fiat.That amounts to:● 9 new cars in 3 years ● 7 new cars in the past year ● 5 new cars in the past 8 months ● … and 13 FIVE STAR reviews of 13 Melbourne car dealers Nothing against Clara Padalini really, she’s simply a perfect example of what’s happening in Google Places Reviews. Unfortunately she isn’t alone. There’s also Dominique Grainger, to name a fellow colleague who has also bought several cars in different dealerships and “loves” their work.She went to Mornington Nissan in November 2016Couldn’t have loved it that much, because the next year she went to Northern Motor Group NissanAnd she wouldn’t buy her car from anywhere else than Mornington Holden on that very same day!But a month later, she prefers to service her cars at Frankston Nissan instead:So, after going over a couple of these reviews we are left wondering“Do millennials really have the ability to buy a new car every year, every six months, or even more frequently?”Or, and this is just an idea, maybe Google should pay a little closer attention to its reviews pages and how it’s being used. Just a thought.References:Clara Padalini - Director - ADME Advertising P/L Google Places reviews link LinkedIn profileDominique Grainger - Advertising Account Manager - ADME Advertising P/L Google Places reviews link LinkedIn profileNote:Some of the data presented in this article may be different to the current reality as reported by Google and/or LinkedIn. This is normal. For example, most of this article was written 3-6 months ago. Dominique no longer works for ADME Advertising P/L. Google's algorithms and human action, by Google or the individuals highlighted, will also affect what you might find today in the above links. Automotive advertising executive buys 7 new cars in past year!
Network Engineering 31 October 2017 Network EngineeringBig TechRPiExpert Key points: Average Telstra DNS resolution speed is 23ms, 5 times faster than Google and 4.2 times faster than OpenDNS With over 10,000 discrete tests, run every 30 minutes for 7.5 months, the test observations are representative and the results are comprehensive Telstra's DNS infrastructure is not only way faster, it appears more reliable than both Google and OpenDNS too All network engineers understand the importance of DNS. The reachability, performance and reliability of networks are all key operational metrics that are seriously impacted by DNS problems. Seriously. A lot of thought and engineering grunt goes into building and maintaining DNS operational infrastructure. ISPs in Australia and elsewhere in the world, love to mess with their DNS servers to cheaply and easily implement redirection & blocking of target domains due to Government (or parental) censorship, alleged copyright infringement, whatever. A simple bypass for this basic blocking technique is often switching DNS servers, or resolvers, to a non-ISP public DNS server, like Google's 8.8.8.8 or OpenDNS's 208.67.222.222. Internet users in many countries use this simple bypass method. But are there any downsides? DNS name resolution speed is important so I thought I'd do some tests to see if there are any speed differences between say, my home ISP Telstra, and the Google and OpenDNS public DNS servers. One would normally expect the closest DNS server, your ISPs, to be the fastest due to physics but there is more to "fast" than just propagation delay. It didn't take a lot of research to come to the conclusion that namebench, written a few years back by a Google engineer would probably be a good choice. It appears well regarded and will run happily on a headless Raspberry Pi computer running Linux, which is easily configured to take test measurements every 30 minutes or so, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. I use Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers for many and varied purposes and this was a perfect opportunity to use one. I started with a standard headless RPi as I usually do. I live in Melbourne, Australia, my ISP is Telstra and I subscribe to a HFC Internet service with extra speed boost. I also use my Telstra cable modem/switch/router/firewall in switch mode or bridge mode or "NAT disable" mode. Goodness gracious - so many names for the same thing. The net result of this configuration is that each of the 4 ports on my Telstra modem will give me a public IP address. Thanks Telstra! I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite plugged into one port for my main home connection. The other 3 public IP ports are available for experiments, just like this one. By using a bridged connection like this with a public IP address assigned to the Ethernet port on the RPi, I give the test the best chance of accurate and uninterrupted measurements. Experimental design What exactly are the tests? Every 30 minutes, namebench will try and resolve the IP addresses of the (Alexa) top 50 Australian domains with each of the 3 DNS servers (or resolvers) in the test. They are Telstra’s 61.9.133.193, Google’s 8.8.8.8 and OpenDNS’s 208.67.222.222. That’s 150 DNS resolutions per test, every 30 minutes. Preparing and running the test RPi First, I created a headless Raspberry Pi. Next, I SSH'd into the newly booted RPi and installed Python. sudo apt-get install python-tk Downloaded namebench. wget https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/namebench/namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz Extracted it. tar xvfvz namebench-1.3.1 Changed directory to namebench. cd namebench-1.3.1 Downloaded the (Alexa) top 50 Australian domains list. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/synaptec/dns-test/master/top-50-domains-au.txt Test ran namebench. ./namebench.py -q 50 -i data/top-50-domains-au.txt -O 61.9.133.193 8.8.8.8 208.67.222.222 That gave me an output something like this: Then I configured a cron job to run it every 30 minutes. Because I was using a public IP address, I added some extra security to the RPi to minimize the risk of it being subverted and penetrated. If you were to replicate this experiment behind your home Internet (NAT’ed) router, you wouldn't normally need to be concerned about adding that extra security. Initially, back in early January this year, I was just going to run the tests for 2 or 3 days, enough time to get 100 test measurements. But I got distracted, forgot about it, and the experiment ran for around 7.5 months and executed just over 10,000 discrete test measurements. Data analysis You can check out the raw data and analysis at this GitHub repo. Box plot Cumulative frequency plot Response time timeline Based on the 95% confidence intervals, Telstra’s DNS mean response time is 5 times faster than Google’s DNS mean response time. Based on the sample, the standard deviation for Telstra response times is 3-4 times lower than both OpenDNS and Google. This means that Telstra's response times were very stable over the entire 7.5 months of the testing. OpenDNS and Google both had significant spikes/peaks which may indicate equipment maintenance, network conditions or other issues. The performance of both Google and OpenDNS improved in early June, which is interesting. Google's performance appears to degrade from early August. Telstra smashes Google in DNS speed test
