Sify Broadband Annoyance on Linux

Some Internet Service Providers don't grow with time. Needless to say they fall apart. Sify Broadband (in India) is one such ISP. Even it lags behind MTNL in terms of technological awareness. Please read on if you are interested in further rant about Sify.

Due to some compulsion I had to subscribe Sify Broadband. And I contacted the local Sify Internet Agency (Annoyance No.1: this ISP does not provide internet direct to the consumer, there is always an agent who takes a good amount of service charge every month, alas!). The Sify agent of my locality is a total noob. He had no idea about IP configuration on Linux. Well, I configured it as per his given details.

I got connected to Sify LAN. But could I browse the web? No. (Annoyance No.2: You have to install a certain Sify Connect app). Instead, every page were redirected to a Sify server page that prompted me to install a Sify dialer. I chose to download the linux dialer (from something like http://210.18.11.199:81/bbandclient/...1.3-bin.tar.gz). Extracted the tarball and ran an install.sh file. The dialer was installed successfully. But did that run? No. (Annoyance No.3: On running that dialer it prompted that libssl.so.4 was missing). Bullshit! It displayed some error message stating libssl.so.4 and libcrypto.so.4 were missing, whereas both were present though their version numbers were different. Not a big deal, I made symlinks to those required files from the versions that existed in my /usr/lib.

su
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.4
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8 libcrypto.so.4

After the above dirty commands I ran sifyconnect as a non-privileged user. It did not work. (Annoyance No. 4: you've to be root user in order to run that sifyconnect dialer). Then I again issued "su" followed by sifyconnect. It worked. Sify Sucks Big! Phie on the Sify Broadband dialer developers who think it is necessary to have admin/root privileges to run that BS TCP/IP sifyconnect dialer. Well, no relief thereafter. I never saw persistent connectivy in Sify. There have been frequent "invalid sessions" and "autologout". I had to login every now and then.

The last and biggest annoyance is that Sify charges much more than that of Airtel or MTNL for comparable bandwidth. No wonder, it has always been the last resort for consumers. Grow up Sify competition is getting stronger!

Anyways, I am switching to MTNL.