General

RedGifs Not Loading with PLDT Philippines

So, one lonely night I noticed that when using the Narwhal Reddit App with PLDT that any Redgifs content takes an incredibly long time to load. We’re talking 2-3 min minutes to load like a 10mb gif.

I did a bunch of testing by routing my iPhone traffic through my Macbook and checking the requests and found that…

  • ✅ SSL handshake is quick — PLDT is not intercepting TLS or blocking Redgifs outright.
  • ✅ DNS and connect times are fine — the routing to api.redgifs.com starts fast.
  • 🚨 The response trickles in at 466 B/s, which is unusable and indicates serious throttling or congestion after the handshake.

This strongly suggests that PLDT is either:

  1. Throttling traffic to api.redgifs.com, OR
  2. There is usual PLDT fuckery going on with their routing

If I compare this to Sky Cable, where this same request returns in under 1 second and I have no issues loading Redgifs.

As usual there is simply going to be no way to get this information in front of anyone at PLDT who has any understanding what this means, or how they can fix it at their service level, so I have made changes on my router to route all requests for…

  • api.redgifs.com
  • media.redgifs.com
  • files.redgifs.com
  • userpic.redgifs.com


…Via my secondary Sky Cable WAN which means that Redgifs content loads as expected 👍

The official Reddit App seems to cache RedGifs content into their v.redd.it CDN so this problem is only with Narwhal or accessing the Redgifs.com website directly.

This is an FYI for anyone wanting to get their “fix” from RedGifs and being frustrated with PLDT not loading the content in a timely manner 👊🍆💦

Do your downloads Pause or Stop/Start?

Are you finding that your downloads behave strange from certain websites? Like, the download is still active but it seems to pause over and over again? Or has a Stop/Start pattern?

Try disabling UDP Flood Defence on your routers Firewall! On a Draytek Vigor, this is under Firewall > Defence Setup.

You can also just change the maximum packet threshold to 65535, however if you have a 1gbps internet connection then this will still result in an issue.

Happy Downloading 🥳💻

Apple iMessage “An unknown error has occurred” cannot sign in on MacOS – Solved!

The Problem:

For a number of months I have had an issue with being able to sign into the Messages (iMessage) app on MacOS on my Macbook Pro. What happens is that I try and login, but the loading circle will rotate for 2-3 minutes and then “An unknown error has occurred” will be displayed.

It doesn’t matter if you disable Firewalls, disable anti virus, or boot the Mac into safe mode, this issue seems to persist without a solution.

I did mange to find some related solutions that kind of half worked, but none of them seemed to correct the issue on a permanent basis. For instance, this command ran in a Terminal window did seem to force a reboot and allow Message to login ONLY if you ran it whilst keeping the above error & Messages app open.

sudo -v ; killall -9 accountsd com.apple.iCloudHelper ; defaults delete MobileMeAccounts ; mkdir ~/Library/Accounts/Backup ; mv ~/Library/Accounts/*.sqlite* ~/Library/Accounts/Backup/ ; killall -9 accountsd com.apple.iCloudHelper ; sudo reboot

That line essentially deletes some iCloud info and then forces the computer into an immediate reboot. As stated, though, this command only seemed to work for a limited time and then if Messages stop syncing correctly or SMS messages failed to delete correctly between an iPhone and a Mac then the “An unknown error has occurred” would return when trying to log back in.

The Solution:

The solution to my problems was quite a simple one, it is literally a few steps…

  1. Ensure that MacOS is updated to the latest version. At time of writing iOS 16 introduced a ton of syncing issues with MacOS Big Sur. However, on October 24th 2022 MacOS Ventura was released with an update to Messages which seems to have fixed the iCloud messages syncing and SMS not deleting issues.
  2. Try and login to Messages, and get the same “An unknown error has occurred” error as before.
  3. Close Messages using Command + Q to ensure it is fully quit.
  4. Open FaceTime on MacOS. It should be logged in if you have activated FaceTime on your Mac in the past. But if not, go ahead and login.
    1. If you have the same error message trying to login to FaceTime. Leave the error on the screen and then open Terminal and paste in the code above. This will force a reboot of your Mac and then it should allow you to login to FaceTime without any issues.
  5. Once logged into FaceTime, keep it open and reopen the Messages app.
  6. Messages *should* open without an issues.

You can then go into Messages > Settings > iMessage and ensure your emails and phone numbers are the same as on your iPhone. You can also sign out of Messages and then try and sign in again to ensure the issues is fixed.

I have found that it takes messages about 24hrs to properly sync messages with iCloud. For me, I will have a sort half baked sync happen, but then once I leave my Macbook Pro M1 with the lid down over night, the next day the messages seemed to be fully synced.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be on MacOS Ventura for iMessages to sync fully and for SMS messages to be correctly deleted between devices. Big Sur seems to have tons of issues due to the way that Apple reworked iMessages on its other devices with things like Editing messages and a Deleted Messages Folder.

Now I just need to work out how to get SMS messages to correctly delete on my Apple Watch (4+ years and counting). I have a Series 4 and an Ultra, but any SMS deleted from my iPhone or Mac will not delete on the watch. Also, if i delete an SMS on my watch it will not delete on the iPhone or the Mac. iMessages seem to delete fine, and SMS messages do change read state from Watch > Other Devices, but the “Delete Flag” never seems to sync between the Watch <> Other Devices 😡 It is so time consuming manually deleting SMS messages from the Watch interface and it drives me insane.

Sky Cable Philippines’ broken internet connection to Hong Kong and Singapore

I’ll open with this; chances are if you are reading this from a Sky Cable Philippines Broadband connection then it probably took well over a minute to load the page, that’s if the page even opened at all! The reason for this is that this website is hosted in the UK and to connect from your Sky Cable connection to this server you would have likely been routed via ae-13.r01.tkokhk01.hk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.31) which amongst a growing number of other hops seems to grind to a halt. You would be forgiven in thinking “If this is happening outside of the Philippines then why are you singling out Sky Cable?”, the answer is because this ONLY happens with Sky Cable and not any other Philippines ISP, and this issue is starting to affect many other websites including Apple’s download servers, Amazon S3 Hosting, and even Sky Cable’s own website hosted in Singapore. All of these sites when served or routed through certain CDNs/Hops in Hong Kong or Singapore will not be able to serve you traffic above 20~100KB/sec, or in the case of Apple a slightly better max speed of about 300 KB/sec. That’ll take you well over 5 hours to download an iOS update!

Introduction

Let me go into more details, and let me get some things out the way first, because I am sure there will be things you are thinking before we get to the end of this post.

  1. My current line speed with Sky Cable in the Philippines is 55Mbps which works out at around 6.875MB/sec when downloading files from the internet. If you do not know the difference between Mbps and MB/Sec then please go read this.
  2. I also have a 5Mbps PLDT line which maxes out with a file download speed of about 600 KB/Sec (Just over half a megabyte a second).
  3. That means the PLDT line is 11 times slower than the Sky Cable line, yet as you will see later on, the PLDT line can reach download speeds on problematic servers well above what Sky Cable can.
  4. All my tests are fully repeatable at ANY time of the day, there is zero argument for network traffic being the cause of these issues.
  5. These issues have been confirmed by two other people using Sky Cable lines.
  6. I had been trying to get Sky Cable to acknowledge this issue for nearly a year without anyone understanding what I’m talking about.
  7. Finally a month ago I started speaking with one of the head engineers for Sky Broadband via Facebook who initially acknowledged and confirmed the issues. I’ll be referencing some of my conversations with him later in the post.
  8. NOTHING has been done to fix these issues and I am sure they are affecting the majority of Sky Broadband customers in some way, the only reason why this has gone unnoticed for so long is because the median speed of Philippines internet users is so slow that everyone is used to things taking an age to download.
  9. I’m certain that if this was a UK or USA ISP that it would be all over Social Media, and in the USA you’d probably see a class action lawsuit or something due to the lack of coming anywhere close to providing a service to these servers that could be deemed reasonable.
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