BolehVPN News/Status/Fun

I was in the market for buying a new laptop cooler in April 2010. I had been previously using the CoolerMaster Notepal Infinite and although I generally liked it, it did have some build quality issues where the connector from the cooler to the USB port on the laptop was rather fragile and loose. This resulted in the fans not starting until I jiggled it. I had similar bad experiences with other Coolermaster notebook coolers so decided to try a different company.

My requirements for a notebook cooler this time were

1. Can be placed on my lap
2. Good build quality
3. Decent cooling

As Silverstone is a well known company renowned for its excellent build quality, the Silverstone Noble Breeze NB01 with its all aluminum body seemed like a good idea. It has three 92mm fans, supports up to 15.4 inch notebooks and 4 air intakes which ensured that it would still cool down my laptop even when placed on my lap.

I will just quickly go through the Pros and Cons and slot in my own experiences with it.

Pros

• Aluminum body and the 3 huge fans provide excellent cooling. In fact it probably has one of the best cooling especially when on load.

Graph taken from TestFreaks.com

• The large fans are reasonably quiet in operation.

Cons

• Weight: The NB01 is pretty damn heavy. Resting it on my lap with my notebook felt like placing a brick on my lap. It may however be designed to be used solely on the desktop and is a trade off for having an aluminum body.
• Price: I bought mine at RM184.00 which puts it among the most expensive notebook coolers available in the market
• Sharp Edges: The NB01 does have sharp edges along its bottom corners where the aluminum mesh bends and I have cut myself accidentally on it several times when placing it on my lap.

• Build Quality: I had bought this premium product hoping to have excellent build quality. However, upon arrival, when I moved the cooler, I could hear a rattling sound. I found out it was a screw that had gone lose inside. I contacted Silverstone and they took weeks to get back to me so I decided to fix it myself.
• No easy access: I then realized that there was NO EASY WAY to get inside the cooler. The screws were hidden below the rubber feet which meant you had to remove the rubber feet to get at some of the screws. The cooler was obviously designed not to be opened. This presents a huge maintenance problem especially when your fans get caught up in gunk.



Wrap-Up

I simply cannot recommend the NB01 cooler. Perhaps if you have a 15.4 inch notebook that you don’t intend to move often and just want to make sure it stays cool, then it would do the job well. However its numerous flaws especially the sharp edges are inexcusable in a premium product and at its high price point, it would make sense to just buy a different cooler unless you just have to have aluminum.

Gurren will be replaced with a beefier server in the same datacenter. The old Gurren will continue to run until the 7th August. Configurations will be updated once the server is updated.

We have activated a new server that is capable of bypassing most firewalls setting. If you can browse to https sites then you have 90% chances of bypassing those firewalls.

Since this a low end test server, we are limiting the server to a maximum 25 users simultaneous connections and only allowing access to private trackers during this test period.

However we must warned you that the performance is not as good as the other servers due to the TCP behavior which requires a very stable connection between the hosts and your desktop. We recommend this server only to those who has no way of getting out using UDP protocol and also to those who are using other ISPs that totally blocked UDP. Penangfon/Sentralfon etc users may benefit from this.

Access to this server is open to ALL PAID subscribers (New and Current). Please give feedbacks on the performance if you are using this successfully.

Please send an email to support[at]bolehvpn.net to request for the configuration file. Slots for this is limited, so hurry up.

Thank you.

PB

I just discovered this neat site that runs test to see if your ISP/throttling shapes you:

Glasnost

The test takes around 8 minutes and you will want to not have other internet applications/downloads running while you do this test.

Post your results in comments! I’m particularly interested with users of other ISPs besides Streamyx (which is a confirmed shaper).

All servers are operational now. However we have not received any updates why it went offline. Looking at the log, it seems the data center loss power because all servers are restarted.

Other than collosus users, the public trackers servers and boleh route 3, are working properly.

For collosus users, please log in and restart your rtorrent clients.

We apologize for this down time.

Regards

Pitboss

Luxembourg servers remain down and we have no received updates from them along with all of their customers.

Their phone too is offline so there’s simply no way to reach them. We’ll see what we can do about the PublicTracker settings in obtaining more servers but that being said this will take a bit of time and Lux servers have previously been quite fast speed-wise.

As of 8.30am, all servers located in the Luxembourg went offline. I believe this is the data center itself that went offline not our servers. We are currently trying to contact the data center to find out what is happening. However the data center provider’s website is also down.

This is mostly affecting public trackers, bolehroute 3 and colossus users.

Private trackers are all operational.

For public trackers, please use redbaron as alternative server.

We will provide an hourly update via http://twitter.com/bolehvpn.
pitboss

BOTH BolehRoute 1 (Apache) and Crysis are operational again as of 6.30am today (10/07/10).

All servers are now active, please refer to status.bolehvpn.net for live update of server load and performance.

During a datacenter upgrade and migration, BolehRoute 1 and Crysis went down. We have contacted our hosts to look into it and see what went wrong.

We will keep you posted on Twitter.

We do not have an ETA on this yet but we don’t forsee this to be a severe issue. Touch wood!