Web-pandering to Mr Gates or...

What's the story, really?

Here is the story. A colleague of mine is currently staying at a hotel in France which offers WiFi services courtesy Meteor Networks. Now the way it works as I understand it is that you purchase time from the Meteor, then you establish a WiFi connection with the local router which at first channels you to their authentication page. There you authenticate yourself and off you go browsing at your leasure - until your time runs out, that is.

At least this is how things ought to be, according to the Meteor. Yet the reality of the situation appears to be a bit different. My colleague had stayed at the same hotel before and had tried using the same service and had discovered a rather strange pattern: the connection would kick in just fine if he booted his laptop under Windows and it would be defective every time he tried to boot up under Linux which is the OS he prefers to use. The defects would be missing blocks of webpages, malformated webpages and error messages indicating incorrect firewall/proxy settings.

My first thought upon hearing that was that Meteor - and its authentication engine - must expect Microsoft IE as browser and so, to deceive them, I set the HTTP ident sequence in the SeaMonkey browser on the laptop to identify itself as IE (IE 7 under Windows XP if I remember correctly). So off he went, and this time around when he fired off his SeaMonkey he can authenticate himself and connect to the web and receive his email via IMAP but can not properly browse as he keeps getting those annoying firewall/proxy related error messages.

I have emailed Meteor but have received no meaningful replies thus far. An engineer of theirs to whom I spoke on the phone yesterday could offer no good advice either as according to him all that's involved is simple DHCP initialization and web authentication after which you are good to go. According to him, there are no proxy servers involved.

So in short - I am puzzled. Any help in the comments or by email would be greatly appreciated. Specifically I guess the questions would be, what would cause this behavior? Can it be OS-related? If so, how? How do we tell - granted I have to do it from here and I can't get inside the Meteor's network.

Be that as it may - this is one good IT riddle, in my humble opinion. Have at it. And thanks in advance for any and all help.

Resume

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Revision 2
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Boris Epstein

Malden (Metro Boston), Massachusetts, US (map)

Contact

E-Mail: borepstein@gmail.com
Phone: 617.816.9654

Summary

Strong analytical abilities derived from both study and hands-on experience. Enjoy challenge and uncertainty. Seeking a position where I could contribute and grow, both professionally and personally.

Technical Summary

Twelve years of full-time experience in the IT industry. That includes programming, systems administration (primarily various versions of UNIX and Linux) as well as network administration.
Participated in development, installation and maintenance of large-scale IT solutions in fields as diverse as telecommunications, financial, internet hosting, e-commerce, etc. Have experience developing standalone applications from scratch as well as working in a team. Diverse client interaction experience both domestically and internationally.
Operating Systems: UNIX, Linux, MS Windows (XP, NT), MS DOS, Apollo Aegis, VMS
Programming Languages: C/C++, PERL, JAVA, UNIX (C-Shell, Bourne, Korn), Tcl/Tk, Lisp/Scheme
Tools: Emacs, MS Office, FrameMaker, VI
Hardware: IBM-compatible PC, HP, SUN

Timeline

February 2007 - present

Night Owl Deliveries
Boston, MA

On a part-time basis participate in the operation of an eCommerce restaurant delivery startup. Activities include IT consulting, data management, systems integration and sales.

April 2004 - present

Freelance writer and activist

Provide technical assistance to several online projects including Cooperative Research and New England JAVA Users Group.
In 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina helped coordinate volunteer relief activities in the Gulf and personally participated in those activities.
Currently work odd jobs to support myself.

July 2001 - April 2004

ARCON Corporation
Waltham, MA

Worked as a programmer involved in development and support of the ETMS air traffic management software for the FAA at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, MA. Specific area of concentration was the CDM component of the ETMS. The tasks included design and development of new functionality, as well as supporting legacy code. A large codebase together with the need for system reliability provide for a challenging task. The code was originally written in Pascal and later migrated to C.
The system was in essence a large transportation management system receiving and reflecting frequent (mostly once-a-minute) updates regarding the status of flights operating over the US airspace. Near realtime requirements were in place for processing and analyzing data which made for an exciting and challenging task.

December 1999 - April 2001

Boston Internet Group
Boston, MA

Performed multiple roles on a daily basis, including those of a senior system designer and developer, Windows NT and UNIX system administrator and web hosting support engineer. Key player in the technology planning and implementation area. As a sole expertise in a number of areas, including object-oriented design and development, networking, network security and systems management, advised other team members on various technology issues.
Main tasks included web site backend implementation for clients, in-house product design and implementation as well as day-to-day activities mentioned above. Most of the coding was done using object-oriented technology, with JAVA as a programming language of choice.
Provided critical insight which allowed to greatly improve stability and efficiency of the internal systems.
Clients included Davox Corporation (now part of Aspect Software), Pilates Store, Lobsters-Online, Inc. and others.

September 1999 - January 2000

Thomson Financial
Medford, MA

Worked as a UNIX administrator in a large-scale web and dataserver hosting facility. Was responsible for maintenance and troubleshooting of multiple industrial-scale UNIX servers in SUN, HP and IBM platforms. Performed database maintenance of SYBASE and ORACLE databases as well as data recovery and general server troubleshooting.

May 1999 - July 1999

GTE International (currently part of Level3 Communications)
Cambridge, MA

As part of the Y2K team worked on the remediation of custom SUN Solaris machines hosting clients' mission-critical WWW sites and applications. Complex upgrades and modifications had to be accomplished requiring an absolute minimum in customers' downtime. Tasks included upgrades of the OS, DB servers and various other third-party software. Custom scripting and coding was often required to facilitate the necessary transition.

November 1995 - May 1999

WorldCare, Inc.
Cambridge, MA

Originally hired as an outside contractor. Accepted a permanent staff position in a three months' time. Throughout my whole tenure was a critical part of a small and continually overtasked team.
Responsibilities included day-to-day maintenance and support of a network of UNIX hosts. Maintained code control systems. Designed and implemented a data backup/archival system for in-house use. Created web pages using HTML, PERL and JAVA. With the emphasis on publicly available software restructured the environment to optimize and economize the development and production process. Modified publicly available software for local needs using C, Tcl/Tk, PERL, JAVA, etc. Was also involved in equipment and software installation and support at client sites. Worked with medical applications and protocols including DICOM, ISG's VRS graphical application and AWARE wavelet compression. Wrote system installation and maintenance scripts. Modified and integrated various third party software packages. Worked with multimedia devices in medical data capture/processing systems. Set up and supported LANs and WANs.

July 1992 - November 1995

Kenan Systems Corporation (currently part of Alcatel-Lucent)
Denver, CO - Cambridge, MA

Participated in database design of SYBASE databases.As part of a product team supported development effort in a heterogeneous UNIX environment. Oversaw the operation of a distributed development environment which included multiple geographically disjoint locations. Wrote a suite of PERL scripts that encompassed the local customizations to ClearCase as required by the project. Other responsibilities included release/code management using ClearCase code control system, SYBASE database administration, system design activities.

Summers of 1990 and 1991

Unisys Corporation
Cambridge, MA

Participated in the development of ATMS (Automated Traffic Management System), an air traffic management and control system for the FAA. Coding was done in Pascal against a proprietary database. The network consisted of a multitude of Aegis hosts on the Apollo platform. The development was done under DSEE as an integrated code control and management environment.

Personal

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1969. Have lived in the US since 18 years of age. Attended Tver University (website in Russian) in Tver, Russia; Boston University and University of Massachusetts at Amherst graduating in 1992 with a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics/Computer Science in 1992.

References

Available upon request.

Link to original