Test your crappy Primacom cable internet connection for packet losses and automatically report them to Primacom.

The story

After Primacom didn't manage it to provide the 200Mbit/s connection I signed up for within 5 months, they refused to let me withdraw from the contract and in addition started charging me money for a stranger's contract. Now the poor connection quality (with up to 80% packet loss on a regular basis) forced me to sign up for an additional VDSL contract.

I thought, it would be a good idea to keep Primacom informed about the awful quality of service they provide.

The software

These scripts can be run in background (preferably on a piece of hardware like the Raspberry Pi) and check your internet connection by pinging an external host. As soon as packet loss is being detected, a Selenium script is being run which automatically fills out Primacom's customer contact form with your data and submits it. In addition to that, a log-file with all connection details is being written to $HOME/primacorn.log.

Info: The scripts won't be able to report to Primacom if your connection has 100% packet loss!

The setup

What you need:

• Linux, Ruby and Selenium with PhantomJS.
• A Raspberry Pi (or similar hardware) to run this stuff on.

Usage:

primacorn.rb requires some environment variables to be set. Check out the .env.example in this repository. You can either set them manually (by prepending them to the ruby /opt/... command, e.g. PRIMACOM_FIRSTNAME="John" PRIMACOM_... ruby /opt/...) or source them from a file:

$ primacorn "google.com" 3 10800 "source $HOME/.primacorn.env && ruby /opt/primacorn/primacorn.rb"

The primacorn shell script requires the following arguments:

1. host to ping: The host (-name or IP) to ping, e.g. google.com.
2. loss threshold: The threshold after which the specified command should be executed. For example 3 would result for the script to wait for 3 packet losses before escalating.
3. action interval: The interval for escalations to occur, in seconds. If command was executed then the script would wait at least so many seconds until it would execute command another time, even if the threshold was hit.
4. command: The command to execute. In our case it's the primacorn.rb script.

The warning

Dear Primacom, you're an awful company. Even more awful (and ridiculous!) than German ISPs in general. I would like to inform you, that I've already started working on my next project: An AI bot that calls your customer service to report packet loss with speech. From multiple phone numbers. Simultaneously.

You have been warned.