Day 19 - NPM woes; KGP Internet woes; Ubuntu 16.04 woes;

08 Mar 2017 100daysofwriting

I had a weird experience with npm install, it’s absolutely weird. I wrote a series of tweets about it. Hear me out again anyway.

I have the proxy for Kharagpur’s network on my computer and in all my setups. NPM typically reads them, or so they say, it didn’t when I first tried npm install, sure, no problem. I do npm config edit it should start working.

But over the past few days, the internet in IIT Kharagpur (more on this soon) has gone from okay to bad to absolutely worse. Right now, it’s probably at it’s worst point.

So, I npm install after editing the config file. It doesn’t work because the network is too slow, and the connection gets reset by the peer. I was done with this, a 4G hotspot should solve my woes. This is where it gets weird.

After connecting to the hotspot, I removed proxy declarations from my Ubuntu system settings. The Env variables are still there, but from step 1 it is clear that NPM doesn’t regard them, so I let them stay and ran npm install again. It didn’t work. It said that it couldn’t connect to the proxy. How weird is it that the proxy doesn’t work when you want it to work, and when you don’t want it to work, npm magically decides to take the env variables into account?

I have all four versions of the variables set up correctly. Namely: https_proxy, http_proxy, HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY. It’s not about that. It’s just some quirky behaviour.

The internet in Kharagpur is through the National Knowledge Network. Articles have been written about the internet speeds. As this article says, Youtube is literally the only site which can be used with the least amount of pain. Other sites just keep dropping, it’s highly irritating. To say the least.

Goodreads is perhaps one of the worst hit sites ever. I use Goodreads quite a bit, and it never seems to be able to load at all! Other CMS sites like TheAtlantic, Guardian, NDTV.com and all these news websites have also been hit. They tend to load their page at the second try.

Coming to the command line, pip, npm, git clone from Github or Gitlab seems to hang up in the middle and just say Connection reset by peer. PIP has the caching ability with the sudo -EH flag, so that’s still manageable. NPM is just completely hopeless (so much so that it can’t even make the first GET request to the registry! Some really dark times, if it has come down to a GET request to a registry). git reports the same connection reset error. Pushing through ssh seems to have been barely affected, that I am grateful for!

Since this post seems to be filled with rants about things that don’t work on my computer which has a BRAND NEW Ubuntu 16.04, I will also add this for good measure. 16.04 has given me a really really bad time, till now.

1. The mouse stops working for no reason at all. It is still pointing, but I can’t do anything else with it: no scroll, no clicking, etc. I have to restart the computer.

2. When I restart the computer and then play a song, it doesn’t play on the speakers connected to the headphone jack. I have to disconnect and reconnect them, for them to start working again.

3. The Internet is connected in a DHCP setting with an IP in the range 10..., but weirdly, in between the IP changes to 192.168..* and stays there. Internet obviously doesn’t work because the other things like the Router IP have also changed. This needs the disconnection and reconnection of the Ethernet cable

For some reason, this new Operating System isn’t playing well with my 2 year old Dell computer, and a 6 month old HP mouse. I am going to give this another shot, or just install Arch and be done with it. Maybe I will have better luck there! (Or something like Gnome or KDE or XFCE, which might solve the problems that I am having with the combination of compiz, X and Unity. HUGE might)

The last two posts were about Big Little Lies, the book, the TV series, the work. It would be remiss of me to not mention that I have now caught up with the TV series, and am eagerly waiting for the next episodes of both Homeland and Big Little Lies.

POST #19 is OVER