[TriLUG] Re: OT: Dial-Up ISP

[Rick DeNatale]

On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 13:00 -0400, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> They do, but the network they support ends at the cable modem.  The trouble
> is that sometimes, when people call and have issues, it's hard to isolate a
> problem on our network from a problem on your network, which is why support
> folks typically have people connect their PCs directly to the CM for
> troubleshooting.  That way, we eliminate more variables.  But if our tools
> indicate that a cable modem is up and running properly, that the SNR levels
> and transmit and receive power levels are okay, it gets more difficult to
> identify problems. 

Sometimes, however the ISP has even more trouble identifying problems on
their side.

A few weeks back I had an outage for 8 days.  The first day I called my
ISPs support line and they said that they were having system wide
problems, so I waited. Later in the day it came up but was slow as a
dog, email would dribble in via fetchmail, I seemed to be able to access
their news server, but web access was atrocious and the dns seemed to be
floating intermittently.  I called them back and they said that it
SHOULD be working.

I tried to help them by running traceroutes to well know sites, The
traceroutes would take upwards of 7 minutes if they got through in 30
hops at all.  I could ping these sites intermittently. I NEVER could get
a VPN connection.

This all looked the same whether I did it from my Linux machine, or any
of the Windoze laptops, or for that matter using the diagnostics in my
Netgear router. I managed to talk to an "engineer" once who promised he
would work on it and keep me up to date. This was one case where being a
Linux user seemed to help since they thought I knew what I was talking
about.

I even went out and bought a long crossover cable so that I could hook a
windoze laptop up to the DSL modem. I had to do this since we've got a
substantial structured wiring system and the modem is in one can with
the phone stuff, and the router is in the second can with the network
stuff so the crossover cable is inside the wall.

Finally after bitc^h^h^h^hcomplaining several times to the support line
management they finally managed to fix it without telling me what was
wrong.

Actually up to this point I'd been very happy with them. I'll stick with
them past this first strike, particularly since I don't want to go with
RR and these guys have a mini-monopoly on phone and DSL here in Heritage
Wake Forest.