A whois on those IP addreses points to Salesforce.com again, but this time in Staines (Middlesex, UK), though the admin contact is still in San Francisco…
Further tail-chasing is probably possible. A hunch suggests the answer could probably be paraphrased something like this: “The bunch who gave the lowest quote. Never mind where they are or whether they can actually do the job.”
…and are, presumably, merely selling on that “cloud” stuff to the lot to whom Ofcom have outsourced the licence management?
I eventually (when the “cloud” woke up and stopped timing out) managed to log in, view my licence, click on the little (i) to generate a licence document, wait for a while, and then download said document…
I know that there have been some “talks” with the RSGB who complained the first release of the upgrade was not fit for purpose. Maybe Ofcom gave their outsourced mob a damn fine kick in the doings and got some basic functionality implemented?
My account says “You have no licences”. Ofcom have confirmed by Email that I do have a valid licence and am permitted to operate, and that it is marked as live on their database, but admit that they cannot yet make it visible on the portal.
I did have to Email my PDF licence back to them to get this far. Prior to that they wrongly claimed my licence had lapsed, and offered me the choice of paying £20 to get M1MAJ back with a paper application or making a new online application and getting a new callsign for free.
Their “explanation” is that they transferred the “wrong version” of the licence from the old system to the new.
There do appear to be ongoing issues with Ofcoms new system. This has been reported on GB2RS and ARNewsline - if I remember correctly (could have been some other AR podcasts). The ACMA in Australia also had some issues recently with their licencing system (now fixed). It would be interesting to see if they also use some division of Salesforce…
I have just tried again. The new portal does seem to have been improved, slightly, since the last time I logged in.
As M0LEP said, you can now get to see your licence by clicking on the little “i” beside the callsign. After a minute or two, if you refresh the page the little “i” has changed into a different icon. Click on this and you get a pdf copy of the first three pages (only) of your licence! There still seems to be no way of seeing the remaining 20-odd pages of the licence.
It does not say when your licence is due for revalidation, and there is no way of revalidating it. (I am guessing that the revalidation due date will be 5 years after the “Issue Date” shown on page 1 of the licence).
And yes … my callsign is now G#3NYY “Replace # with an RSL in accordance with Clause 2 or Note c.”
Of course, Clause 2 and Note c are on pages of the licence which cannot be viewed or printed out!
Interesting… I’d put off registering/re-registering as I didn’t need to re-validate for a few years anyway and I thought I’d let everyone else find the bugs!
I re-registered and found I had no licences. I rang Ofcom, the phone was answered promptly and a lady with a lovely phone manner passed me on to spectrum licencing. I explained what I’d done to another man who was able to trace my old account and explain why it didn’t autolink. He said there were more updates on the way to the software. He said to give him an hour and it would be merged and I’d get a new email about what to do. 39mins later I got a mail and followed the link… Pazoow! All the licence present and correct and the date shown is when I think I was invited to re-validate my club licence and I did my own licences at the same time.
Apart from having to ring to get the accounts merged (and a future update will improve that) I cannot fault anything. Neither the experience of talking to Ofcom, nor getting the login and licences working. The website works for me, it’s fast, it renders well, it has the correct info and it works with all my tracker cookie suppression, ad blockers, privacy plugins running on my copy of Firefox. I generated a licence doc and that too worked without issue. Yes, there is no revalidate feature but I have 3.7 years before I need to do that again. So I’m happy my plan of waiting for the initial rush to die down and the early bugs to be swatted was wise.
Of course, YMMV but reasonably pain-free for me. Marks out of 10? 9 I think. Had it auto matched accounts 1st time it would be a 10 out of 10 experience.
Your exprience reflects what a GOOD support department can do. The system HAS problems, it was put in before all the bugs were ironed out, but thanks to a GOOD support group, they still have a happy client.
Now coming from the IT industry like both you and I do Andy, we would probably says that the system should never have been put in until it was perfect but we all know, the only real testing of a system happens when it goes live. In business software, pre-testing never catches all the bugs, often becuase the customer has omitted to tell you about some factors and requirements when requested!
…and as someone who uses salesforce (SFDC) daily and whose company has reputedly the largest data instance on it, I can verify it works very well, at scale, with better than 5 9s availability. It’s certainly a lot more scalable than any of the other systems we tried, and I’d put a lot more faith in someone who chose it over, say, a turnkey private ‘cloud’ (cough Australian census).
Having said that, it’s a service that folks customize, and the customizations are usually the source of the problems (again, speaking from experience)
The target for ofcom.force.com resolves to dcl4-frf.eu6-frf.force.com and having looked at some many millions of hostnames in my career I’d bet strongly that something with “eu6” in the name is not outside of Europe. That mtr dump was from a machine in Zurich and the last line says that the machine “dcl4q-frf.eu6-frf.force.com” is only 13.2mS away from Zurich. To give that context, the BBC news website servers are 26.6mS away from home near Edinburgh.
Suggests Frankfurt (frf) to me. They have a UK datacentre opened in 2014 but did open another big data centre in Germany last year.
Anyway, for the time being we are “in Europe” and Germany is also most definitely “in Europe” so that means EU rules about moving EU citizen’s data out of the EU has not be broken. Once we leave then all of our data can shipped off to the US without question for detailed “marketing analysis opportunities”.
The command is sent to a (Linux based) DNS - so the client OS is irrelevant. Whether the website http://www.whereisip.net/ is giving the correct location for the IP address is another question.
Up in the middle of the night like I sometimes am I thought I’d try out the new licensing portal, although I don’t need to re-validate my licence until next September.
Reading the comments here & the instructions on the Ofcom website I was not hopeful that my licence would be there as:
a) My old login was with a “username” not an email address.
b) No combination of username or email address / password were recognized when I tried them.
I clicked “register as a new user” & filled in my name & email address. After clicking on the link in the validation email & logging in I was amazed to find my licence listed correctly.
I can only assume that my licence has been transferred over from the old system linked to my name or email address as those were effectively the only details asked for on the initial screen, apart from choosing a “security question”…
I can see a potential vulnerability if that is the case for those who need to register for the new system like I did.
Other than that, once logged in everything seemed straightforward.
