Very poor Internet connection

For no particular reason, I could not connect my computer to the Local Area Network at all since I returned to campus on Sunday after returning home to celebrate the mid-Autumn Festival. The following message kept showing: "Limited or no connectivity" and then a foreign IP Address is assigned to me.

Therefore, as can be expected, I can neither log into the Intranet or even the Internet. I tried repairing the connection countless times but all my effort was in vain. In the end, I resorted to forcing a LAN connection by manually configuring a connection. It worked, for a while, but I wasn't able to connect to the Internet (the Intranet worked fine).

As I said, the connection was unstable. Soon afterwards, I had no connectivity at all. So, I decided to change my network settings to automatically detect the network. It worked, at last! However, I noticed that my computer was assigned a new IP Address, something that will not occur normally as each LAN port in every room is assigned a Static IP. Initially, the last three digits of my IP Address was 130, but it changed to 155.

My joy was short-lived. Not long after that, I lost the LAN connection again. Therefore, it was back to manual configuration of my network, but this time configuring it to my new IP Address. It worked fine, but as I said, the Internet connection was so poor that I could hardly read the news in The Star Online.

But again, today, I lost my connection totally! Frustrated by the constant failure to connect to the network steadily, I intended to lodge a complaint to the IT and Media Services Department tomorrow when I tried to use my last resort: attempting to automatically detect a network. It failed once, initially, but upon my second try, it worked again! Funny though, I was assigned a new IP Address for the second time! My last three digits of my IP Address are now 137. How many times must the switch change my IP Address? I didn't know that Static IPs can change so frequently in such a short time.

Anyway, connection is still as bad. If it wasn't because of a software that I use (called "Your Freedom") to bypass firewall, I wouldn't be able to surf the Net now. Thankfully, I could do so via Your Freedom or else I wouldn't be able to login to Blogger at all! I cannot understand why the Internet connection lately has been so terrible; all I could think of is that there is a possibility that someone in my campus is hogging the Internet bandwidth.

For the past few days, I could not understand why the audio file that I hosted in Uploadingit would not play in my blog, and I thought it mighty strange that I could not even access the website. Today, much to my surprise, it was up again and there was a statement saying that a group of Germans hacked the website by launching a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. As expected, all the songs that I have hosted in Uploadingit are gone, so I'll have to re-host them.

Life in campus currently is still going on as smooth as the wind. The only drawback is that the current haze situation is also affecting the Tronoh area quite badly. Although my block is the nearest to the Main Hall, I could sometimes hardly see it standing outside my block. The haze was terrible a few days ago and visibility from my block was less than 1 km. I was contented staying inside my room for the whole day. Now, the haze has reduced but is still around. Our only hope is that it will rain soon so that the view will be clear as before. It was disappointing that while it rained almost daily in September, it hasn't rained at all since October started. Contrary to what we had learnt in Geography (whereby October is supposed to be one of the wettest months of the year), it feels again as if we were going to have a draught.

Despite having such clear skies, the haze made everything fuzzy and unsafe. More and more people are getting sick now. Let's just hope that all this haze nonsense will cease soon.