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Author: jitdor
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Google starts charging for public IPv4 addresses in GCP
If you have taken a look in your January 2020 invoice from your GCP subscription, you would notice a new line that resembles this:
Compute Engine External IP Charge on a Standard VM: xxx.xxx Hours [Currency conversion: USD to SGD using rate 1.352]
(more…)Edit: Google is currently discounting the public IP charges 100% for the first 3 months until 1 April 2020.
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Activating Google Mobile Services on a HUAWEI MediaPad M6 8.4″
My Huawei MediaPad M6 8.4″ tablet has just arrived as a replacement for the everyday tablet that I broke earlier. Shattered glass and shit. Being a super-thin bezels sucker, I find the M6’s sub-S$400 pricetag irresistible. It even has harman/kardon audio… but I was soon disappointed to find out that it doesn’t support aptX codec. In fact, the only Bluetooth codec it supports is SBC. Crap. Being a China-only model, the M6 does not come pre-installed with Google Mobile Services (GMS), which means we will need to deal with the dreaded GMS installation issue.
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AdGuard – blocking ads and trackers at the OS level
Everyone loves ad blockers, so long as your livelihood does not depend on advertising. Pretty much everyone I know is running some sort of ad blockers in their browsers, such as uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus; and the newer Firefox browser even comes with an in-built ad filtering engine! (Which is great btw) But browser extension is so 2009. Let’s read on to find out how you should be dealing with ads and trackers filtering in 2020.
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1-year free cloud instance with 3TB transfer
Came across a free 12 months VPS offer. You get a full year’s worth of cloud instance with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 40GB SSD as well as 3TB data transfer. That is 750 hours per month of free usage, which you can either leave it on 24/7, or spin up 750 instances for 1 hour. Either way, it is within the free tier.
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SpeedTest Singapore script
One of the first few things you would do after getting your hands on a new cloud instance is probably to run a few bandwidth measurements on speedtest.net. I certainly do. But it gets a bit tedious having to find out the Singapore servers without a GUI.
Fueled by my own laziness, I have created a
(more…)sg-speedtestscript which would automate the whole process – installing the necessary packages (and removing them thereafter), testing all the Singapore servers and printing the results on the screen. All in the time while you go grab a coffee. -
ViewQwest has crappy network peerings into China. Period.
ViewQwest. China. Slow. You can make any sentence with these three words without negating them and the resulting statement will be true.
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AWS Lightsail US$3.5/mo instance reviewed
This is a personal, independent review of the service which I have paid for, and is in no way affiliated with AWS.
As mentioned in the inauguration article, I was in the market for a VPS with excellent internet connectivities to improve my streaming experience for content hosted in certain countries. My household streaming consumption is about 1.6TB per month, of which about a quarter, or 400GB, could use some accelerations.
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My favorite Traceroute tool
Traceroute helps you quickly find out the network path and measure the transit delays of packets across the internet. The standard implementation displays only the IP or rDNS entries, which may not allow you to identify the geographic path at first glance.
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Allow only Cloudflare CDN servers to your web servers
We love to use Cloudflare CDN because it improves latency and uptime, and the price is just right (free) for the starter pack.
Normally, a web server’s ports 80 and 443 would be opened to the public internet, with access restricted by selected IP ranges by either ASN or country, depending on what the administrator has configured. But if you are using Cloudflare’s CDN service, you can permit TCP 80/443 access only to their servers, and block all other incoming requests. You can then fine-tune access control using Cloudflare’s web application firewall. It would greatly reduce your web server’s attack surface.
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Comparing cloud instance performance across different providers
If you have been in the market of shopping for a cloud instance, you will notice the offerings are deceptively similar: 1 vCPU + 1GB memory with a 20GB disk and 1TB bandwidth, for the same price. Are they really similar though?
Far from it.
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