cellio | Entries tagged with home-internet

Dear Verizon,

Thank you for the phone message alerting me to the impending expiration of the credit card I have on file with you. Unfortunately, the URL you gave in the phone message does not exist, and when I searched your site for "pay" and "credit card" I did not find the page (that you assured me exists) where I could update this information. Your URL contained "pay online", so I had high hopes for "pay".

So then I tried your "contact us" link, which tried mightily to direct me to chat, forums, help, and all manner of unsatisfactory-to-me (but easy-for-you) destinations. (Let's hear it for crowd-sourced support, eh?) When I reached the "send email" option I found a form (not an email address) that, among things, asked for my name, phone number, and email address (twice). It also asked for an account number, but since you bill my credit card directly I've never seen a paper bill and have no idea what that number is -- so that "sample bill" image didn't help. Your form required that I type something there and wouldn't let me type letters, so my plan to signal this with "unknown" was foiled. It wouldn't accept "?" either.

So, I'm sorry that my "account number" of 0 will slow you down, but you left me no choice. I hope you can still manage to respond to me, as otherwise we'll have to wait for Visa to decline a payment to you. On the plus side, I'll bet that will get you to talk to me.

By the way, I'd be happy to refer you to web-site developers who could greatly improve the usability of your site for a small investment.

Oh, also, I'm still waiting for the opportunity to spend more money with you each month for FiOS. Surely my neighborhood full of geeks, university folks, and the like would make it profitable for you to run fiber over here. Practically everybody else in the east end seems to have it...

We came home to no internet service tonight, but the failure mode is odd. We do have connectivity, but no DNS -- so that would be a well-understood problem, except that I can use ssh to get to my shell provide -- by name. I can also ping that host by name -- but I can't ping anything else by name. Does MacOS maintain some sort of cached state for ssh?

And when did browsers start rewriting IP addresses to domain names? I could visit my favorite web sites by IP address in principle, but when I type in an IP address the browser turns it into a domain name, tries to load that...and fails, because there's no DNS. WTF?

Verizon has been underwhelming so far, and I even mean compared to other Verizon experiences. At one point they said the line must be bad and they'd send a technician in a couple of days, then put us on hold for 10+ minutes. But how could it be a bad line if we have any connectivity at all? When the guy came back he said that there's an outage (previously he had said there wasn't), so with luck it'll come back on its own.

But if anybody reading this could tell me where to find some DNS servers that I'd be allowed to hit, I'd be grateful. I'm trying to find that on my own, but using the phone is slow going.

Today a friend (less technical than I), who lives about three-quarters of a mile from me, asked me which is better for internet: Comcast or Verizon FiOS.

I've been waiting for FiOS to reach my street for years -- and, according to Verizon's "what's available at your address" page, I'm still waiting.

*Sigh*

Dealing with Verizon has gotten less excruciating since I acquired the direct-dial number of someone in tier-3 tech support who seems to have a clue. We are definitely into the second-order problems now.

Muhammad (who I spoke with last week) did not approve of our modem, so he sent us a new combined modem/router (including wireless). It came today; if any paper it shipped with had included the modem's user name and password, I might not have needed to call for help in setting it up. The internet side of this is fine.

So far we have been unable to get the wireless to work with either Mac in the house (the only wireless devices we have). With WEP turned on, the password is simply not accepted. If we turn WEP off and go to MAC authentication instead, neither machine can see the network. If we turn off all security everything works fine, but we're not interested in doing that.

Right now our solution is to leave the wireless turned off unless we actively need it, but that's a short-term solution. To his credit, Muhammad said he would research this and call me back tomorrow. (I think he will; he also called earlier today to confirm the modem had arrived.) Muhammad isn't a Mac user (he called back to say "what OS?" and when I said "10.4" he asked if that was sufficient ID), so we'll see what happens. So far what Google is telling me is that other people with iBooks have had this problem.

Wireless is new to me (I've used other people's networks but never administered one). I thought it pretty much just worked out of the box these days, but I guess not.

( finally connected )

Our DSL was supposed to switch from Nidhog to Verizon today. Nidhog was reselling Verizon, so that should be a no-brainer, but this is Verizon we're talking about. Almost everything they told me in advance turned out to be wrong (some things were probably outright lies). We have no connection at home and now they're jerking me around.

"Maddy" claimed that we would have uninterrupted service (aside from the momentary blip of the switch). We lost our connection overnight and the support person I spoke with this morning told me I should expect it to take until 6PM for them to connect us. That's a pretty loose definition of "uninterrupted" -- and that's assuming the claim is correct. By 6PM the business office is closed, so there's no one to escalate to.

The claim that I could create a temporary account and thereby get my router settings last night was, near as I can tell, utter fabrication, though it is possible that "Manu", his supervisor (whose name I couldn't parse through the accent), "Rauel" (this morning), and "Linda" (escalation this morning) were all wrong about that. All of these people told me, last night or today, that I would have to connect a single machine to the modem and setup would be automatic from there, and after that I could put the router back and it would work.

Err, what? Are they claiming that somehow, once I put my password-protected router back on the net, their software is going to reconfigure it? I don't think so. Everyone has been utterly unwilling to just tell me the configuration information I'll need (e.g. DNS servers). I predict that what they are actually going to do is configure a single machine and leave me to fend for myself from there (examine what they did to that machine, use the info to configure the router, and undo what they did to the machine).

"Linda" was supposed to escalate this and said someone would call me back on my cell phone "ASAP", but that hasn't happened yet. (That was at 9:30.) I guess I get to play support roulette tonight when I get home. (I'm posting this via email from work.)

One minor thing in my favor: if I have to connect a single machine to the modem anyway, it's going to be a Mac. I don't know Macs particularly well, but it seems less likely to get me routed to the undertrained, underinformed, English-limited support pool. (This morning I chose "Mac" on the phone tree and got to "Rauel", who seemed to actually know what he was doing -- but, unfortunately, he couldn't make them connect my service.)

If FiOS ever comes to my neighborhood I'll be thrilled. As soon as Verizon switches me over to it, I'm going to turn around and transfer my account to Nidhog (who now does FiOS but not DSL). Nidhog knows how to take care of customers!

Damn. The last local ISP in Pittsburgh, which has provided us excellent service, is going away. (I hadn't realized it had gotten quite that bad.) Our choices are Verizon (DSL) and Comcast (cable), so I've just submitted the order with Verizon. This should be a simple transfer (our ISP was reselling Verizon), but they have no apparent process for simple transfers, so we'll see. (No, not going to do Comcast, and not interested in switching technologies until the day Verizon deigns to offer FiOS in our neighborhood.)

With Nidhog (current ISP), service has been excellent, I had the owner's cell-phone number, and the very few problems were dealt with quickly and easily (even the ones that weren't really theirs to fix). Verizon claims 24/7 support but they mean online chat, which has obvious limitations. Getting a phone number at all was harder than it should have been, and I don't yet know the hours when it's staffed. (Not at 10PM on a Saturday.)

Edit: This wasn't clear from the mail I got on Friday, but tonight I learned that Nidhog is not going away completely. They are just ceasing to offer DSL. (I'd love to know what happened there...) If FiOS were available to my address I could buy it from Nidhog (so when it is I will, should it ever be).

Ok, you guys were right: Heroes rocks, at least so far. I picked up the first season recently; I was hooked after two episodes and have seen six so far. It looks like the second season will be released on DVD in August, which means I won't have too long a wait. Increasingly, I'm coming to think that this is the way to watch most TV shows. (I should also be able to return the first season of Lost to the person who lent it to me and exchange it for the second season soon.) Still, I want to get an antenna up on the roof too. (Note to self.)

We've been having some modem troubles (two modems with different failure modes), so we ordered another recently to experiment with. It looks like we have a family of modems -- maybe a breeding program. given the evidence, I'd have to say that Westel-ness is a dominant gene. :-)

My vet wanted to see Erik recently (just a quick check on something), so while we were there I asked if she could try again to teach me how to push pills into him. (Currently he gets his medicine ground up in canned food, as I seem unable to reliably get a whole pill down.) She demonstrated, then had me try... and she finally said "it's ok; mixing it into the food won't hurt him". I feel inadequate; even my vet gave up on me. :-) (Yes, I have tried that plunger-like gadget. I haven't found the cat treats that have pockets for hiding pills in, but I suspect he's too smart for that.)

A bakery run on the honor system seems not to be loosing money. Interesting idea. (Someone on my reading list posted this link, but I forget who.)

I have a question for the Hebrew-literate. Please humor me. How would you say "I will thank you" (masculine, singular)? I thought I knew, and then I heard a different formation in a song, so I asked a native speaker, who provided a third option. (I think "odecha", song was "odeka", speaker said "odelecha". It's entirely possible that "odecha" is biblical and "odelecha" is modern, but what's with "odeka"?)

Recently (to investigate something), I added a third-party tracker to some of my posts in order to see where the hits are coming from. This was meant to be temporary, but I've found it interesting to see just how big the internet community is, so I've continued to use it at times. So, I don't know who any of y'all are (and publishing on the internet means I might never know, and that's cool), but I'd like to say hello to my regular readers in Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and Cambodia (!).

We are having weird modem luck. I thought all DSL modems were basically the same, but apparently not. Our old (bought in 1999) modem has started dropping signal -- it's eratic, but when it happens it lasts for a few hours. My DSL provider mailed me a new one (a level of service I did not expect) and it's reliable but universally slow. So our current mode of operation is to use the old one until it drops and then switch to the new one for a few hours. Weird. So I think we need to buy a new modem that is both reliable and fast, but since I thought they were all the same I now don't know what to look for. (We have basic DSL. Someday I hope they well run FIOS to our neighborhood and we'll switch.)

Recent conversation:
Dani: We're out of (book)shelf space in the library again.
Me: Maybe we should assemble that last bookcase we bought.
Dani: We're out of shelf space in the library again.
Me: You built it and filled it already? So we need to buy more?
Dani: We're out of wall space to put bookcases...

(I assert that he is incorrect on that last point, but it hinges on a dispute between practicality and purity. Or something like that.)

We bought some CFLs (in two different color-tones) to try again, and installed some in the ceiling fixture in the living room (the packaging contained no dire warnings about that, unlike the last one). Freaky white and bright, so some tuning is called for, but there might be a bigger problem: flicker. The switch is a dimmer, but we know CFLs don't dim so the switch is at max. (Truth to tell, we don't dim regular bulbs in that fixture, either.) Does the mere presence of a dimmer switch doom CFLs? That would be annoying.

A couple links:

A few nights ago I made these lamb chops, which I've made before and which are amazingly good.

The ten plagues, done in peeps (from someone on my subscription list, but I've lost track of who). Twisted! Funny!

Wednesday night our DSL was out, not for the first time (we get little glitches, and occasionally outages of an hour or so). This one ran longer than usual, so around 10PM I called to report it. I got the same person I've always gotten when I call, no matter what time; it's the same person who sold me the service in the first place.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Our service has been out for a couple hours. I've done the usual debugging and power-cycling.

Him: It seems to be you. Happen much?

Me: We get this from time to time. Is it likely to be our 1999 modem?

Him: Yeah. I'll send you a new one, or you can come pick one up.

Me: I wouldn't have expected our service to come with a free modem. I was going to buy one.

Him: I'm happy to send it.

It came in today's mail, so as soon as we hit Radio Shack for some filters, we should be good to go. Kudos, Nidhog!

From Telerama's network-status page, chronicled here for posterity, a partial log of what went wrong, with some implied lessons in customer service. (Their log is short on technical details, FYI.)

( most of you don't care; some might enjoy train wrecks )

This morning our new service with Nidhog kicked in. Yay! To the best of my knowledge Telerama is still not back.

DSL partially came back tonight (so over 3 days of outage). I can get to my shell account and read mail, but non-cached web pages (like, say, anything on LJ) are timing out. (Name service works; HTTP service then times out. Dunno what that means given that outbound ssh/telnet works.) Dani can get to his Telerama shell account but can't use it to read his email, which resides on a different Telerama server.

Friday we ordered DSL service from Nidhog, a small provider I'd never heard of before Thursday but that said they could get us up quickly. The swtich-over is blocked at Verizon now; the folks at Nidhog thought we might get connected today, but I guess not. (I am tentatively holding a Wednesday appointment with Comcast, but I hope to cancel that.) The person I talked with at Nidhog seemed clueful and eager to please; I imagine that they can pick up a significant-to-them pile of new business if they do this right. I'm all for that. :-)

Several of my coworkers use(d) Telerama and we have a wiki, so naturally there's been some information-sharing. The discussion there led me to discover that Telerama has dropped its price for our service level, yet they never told us or reduced our price. Which, you know, might not be unreasonable (caveat emptor) if they ever actually delivered the promised connection speeds... Well, with luck we'll be done with them soon. The cause of the outage, according to the press, is a $30,000 bill with their provider that they cannot pay. I didn't expect service to come back at all.

My employer restricts internet access, even on the alleged "guest network" that clients can use. Our parent company (real parent, not adoptive parent) has wireless in their part of the space, but it's locked down and I've heard conflicting things about getting access. Thus far I'd been unable to get the right people to make the right settings to get on, and I wasn't sure how hard to push. (I mean, it's not like they owe us or anything.) I brought my laptop in today, figuring I'd go to a public access point sometime during the day.

This morning I just happened to walk into the building with parent-company's top dog. I took the opportunity to ask, all casual-like, whether their wireless network was open to us. He said something like "it should be; you'll need to get access", and I mentioned that my DSL was out at home and I was hoping to get my iBook on their approved list, and he perked up at "iBook" (he's a Mac snob) and, well, one thing led to another and by the time we had reached the office entrance, I was explaining that I was new to the Mac and trying to find out what all the fuss was about, and he was enthusing about "oh you must try this, and let me show you this, and...", and by the way sure he'd call $IT_GUY and get me onto their network, which he did right then and there.

The signal doesn't reach my desk, but at least now I can go to (or near) their space and get network access, without having to leave the building. Yay!

Meanwhile, Telerama's customer-support number is now redirecting callers to the collections department of their provider. Essentially, they're trying to sic their customers on their source and get us in the middle of a "he said, she said" fight about a past-due payment. (Telerama claims they were cut off with one day's notice. I don't know if that's true, but this just makes them look even more incompetent. Among things, if they had any notice at all they should have notified their customers!) Even if they don't die as a result of this, I think we need to find service elsewhere, and quickly. I wish FiOS was available in my neighborhood.

I understand that sometimes DSL service fails for hours on end. It can happen to anyone.

But. You should answer the damn phone when people call to report problems, or say that you're closed (though at 7:30PM that would be unreasonable for a local ISP). What you should not do is have your voice-mail system claim to be routing the call to a representative and then go our to the movies or something while the customer waits. (And, psst: doing this after offering someone a rep for "new sales" is especially braindead.)

Telerama used to have clues. I hope to learn in the morning, via my then-working connection, that they still do and that they've been somehow hacked. That's not how I'm betting, though.

It is, of course, not in the least Telerama's fault that access from work is severely curtailed (even if I bring in my own machine so I can't possibly expose corporate assets to the wilds of the net). This merely adds to the frustration. There's a free hotspot at Pita Pit near work, so I think I know where I'm getting lunch tomorrow. :-) (Suggestions for free hotspots near Squirrel Hill welcome, in case this goes on for a while. I already know about T-Mobile at $6/hour.)

This morning we had no network, and I work for people who assume that if I'm allowed unfettered access to the internet I'm going to set up a kiddy-porn business fueled by stolen credit card numbers, so I actually do rely on checking email (and LJ) in the morning before work and in the evening when I get home. When our DSL provide said "nope, no problems here" I began to suspect our venerable modem (circa 1999; we tried to upgrade once but then we couldn't use our phone for voice so we reverted). But, it turned out, the problem was in the LinkSys router and intermittant. I connected directly to the modem and was fine, but that obviously doesn't work in a multi-computer household. When I reset things to use the router I had a brief glimmer of network access -- enough to establish an SSH connection and then it died again. I called Dani to warn him that this might not be the best night for his planned Diablo game.

Tonight things had deteriorated; the router wasn't serving bits even long enough to make an outside connection. Dani went off to the land of hardware while I tried to harvest the current machine for its settings (things like static IP address, gateway, etc). Yes, they're now written down and stored in the box the new router came in. The half-life of router connectivity was low and falling -- I turned it on and connected to the admin console and then it failed, and after a pause I did it again and just barely got the second page of settings, and after that no matter how quick I was with the plug and the browser refresh I wasn't getting any more. It's one of the odder hardware failures I've seen; I expect "work" or "don't work", but not this.

Dani came home with two options (after confirming a return policy). First we tried the no-name combination modem/router (with wireless and wired). The installer software (yes, software) was annoying and we couldn't get a connection. The documentation sucked. We set it aside.

So plan B was a newer LinkSys box, on the theory that we'd already climbed the learning curve. It took about 5 minutes to set up. It works fine. It took until 10:00 to get there, but we're back now. Whee.

I'm still suspicious of our modem's remaining lifetime, but with luck that's a problem for a different day.

Rumor has it that the DSL provider we've been happily using for several years may be going poof. I found a list of providers serving the area, but it's just a list, no reviews. I'd be interested in hearing from local people using providers other than Telerama (current) and Verizon (previous, rejected for sucky quality on pretty much every front).

Our needs are fairly simple, but we do require always-on service (no PPPoE stuff with its manual activation and whatnot) and we much prefer a fixed IP address so we can support incoming service. Reliability (with good support when that fails) is more important than cost, though obviously we'd like to keep costs reasonable. All other factors being equal, I prefer to patronize local companies over national providers. We do not have wiring in place to support cable, so we're not looking to change technologies at this time.

And if anyone has information that would counter the remors about Telerama, please let me know. We've had nothing but quality service from them and we'd hate to be part of a stampede based on bad information. However, we also don't want to be stranded, and this doesn't sound good right now.

The fine folks at Telerama lent us a modem with which to test. (We've been having random short-term network lossage.) The test modem, however, is unhappy in new and novel ways.

With the test modem, pings and SSH connections get through just fine, but web browsing isn't happening. (I saw one page get to "transferring..." before failing, but most sites timed out at "resolving host". Reminder: other uses of name service were fine.) I cleared the cache and restarted the browser, which didn't make a difference. Dani reported the same behavior with a different browser on a different machine. Restoring the original modem made the problem go away.

So that was oddity #1. Oddity #2 presented itself when I picked up the phone to call tech support about oddity #1 -- and found a very noisy line. After switching to my cell phone, I talked to someone who suggested that the noise is due to a lack of filtering on the phone line and he has no clue why the selective network service would be happening. But the old modem doesn't produce noise on the line, and all I did was swap the cables to the new modem and turn it on. I definitely didn't change any configuration on our phone lines.

Could it be that some modems have this filtering built-in and others don't? That seems weird to me, as the person I talked to seemed to be saying that the filtering has to be done to all jacks, and I certainly got the noise on a different jack than the one supporting the modem (which is consistent with that). I know that BellAtlantic came in and did something to our phone line before installing DSL 5+ years ago, but it was a change at the box and not at the jacks.

Both modems are Westell, though of different vintages.

I am now officially perplexed.

We get our DSL service through Telerama. Allow me to sing their praises.

We've been seeing apparently-random short network outages just often enough to be annoying, and this is new behavior. The problem could be the DSL service, the modem, or a physical problem on the line, but how do you tell which?

So I wrote to Telerama's support folks to ask if they had any thoughs on this. In particular, had they received similar reports from anyone else? They had not, so they guessed that it probably wasn't them.

They then said "here, let me file a trouble ticket with Verizon on your behalf" and, when the results of that came back today, "sounds like your modem; would you like to borrow one from us to test with?".

I really didn't want to have to go out and buy a modem on the possibility that that was the source. Now we don't have to. Yay Telerama for helping us out with something that's not really their problem!

Tonight while driving through Squirrel Hill I noticed a large crowd walking up the sidewalk. As I parked the group reached me and I saw that they were protesting the war ("no blood for oil" being the pervasive chant). I walked with them for a block or so, raising the average age a bit, before veering off for groceries. It occurred to me only later that its placement on Veterans' Day was probably not an accident.

Our usually-reliable DSL service has been having random short outages for the last several weeks. (Usually 10-15 minutes, a few times a week.) I'm not sure how to test whether it's the DSL service itself or our 5-year-old modem, though, short of acquiring a test modem. So I sent mail to our provider asking if they had other reports and/or debugging hints. (I noticed in passing that their service hours now end at 8PM. I've had productive conversations with them at midnight in the past. Oh well. 8PM is reasonable; I'd just gotten used to hacker hours.)

Ok, Embla is capable of making normal meowing sounds, as opposed to that quiet chirpy thing she usually does. It just has to be Important. Like, say, being trapped between the window and the screen on a cold evening. For calibration purposes, the time a contractor sealed her into a wall she was silent for a long time, even though I was in the room calling her.

(What was she doing there tonight? Well, our sink was plugged up, so we had initiated chemical warfare, but the chemicals gave off mustard gas or something, and we had to open the windows to help with dispersion. I didn't notice the cat on the windowsill when I pushed the window closed later. Fortunately, she was quick to alert me.)

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

Ever since the power surge (and resulting replacement of Linksys box and one other hub), we have been noticing sporadic weirdness on our network. We use DHCP to hand out IP addresses (doesn't everybody?). The Linksys box is configured (by default, if I recall correctly) to start handing out addresses at 192.168.1.100. The Linksys itself is 192.168.1.1. As best I recall, these are the same settings we used successfully on its predecessor for close to three years.

So now, every now and then, it will hand out the address 192.168.1.2. And that unlucky machine will be able to see the LAN but not the internet. Rebooting usually does not fix it, but creative sequences of reboots of all machines and power-cycling of the modem and Linksys usually do the trick.

We cannot find any common factor when this happens. Sometimes it just does.

Tonight, when I found myself the unwilling owner of 192.168.1.2, I decided to try an experiment: I gave myself a fixed IP address without changing anything at the Linksys end. I guessed that I should use 192.168.1.1 for the gateway and name service, rather than the "real" ones; after all, the Linksys box is supposed to resolve the interface issues between the local machines and the network, right?

This worked perfectly. In fact, in a rare Windows moment, I didn't even have to reboot!

I assume that as the other machines encounter the wayward 192.168.1.2 we'll make this adjustment on them, too, until nobody's using DHCP any more. Then we'll forget about this until some unlucky house guest wants to plug his laptop into the network. :-)

I feel like this is an ugly hack. I have not solved the real problem. But at this point I think I'm going to stop looking for it.

Because there is a strict quota on hardware happiness, I found that the 4-port hub we had lying around is really only a 2-port hub. (One is "uplink", which seems to be magic and does not work with anything I tried to plug into it, and one is just dead.) So I can't get rid of the cables strung across the floor just yet.

Ah, what a joy. I have cast out the demons of stupidity (that would be Verizon) in favor of Telerama. The installation was nearly painless, the pain involved was a problem at our end (not theirs), and the tech-support people (who answer 24 hours a day, by the way) were cheerful, helpful, and not clueless bozos like the guys over at Verizon. (I almost wrote "Luddites", but they obviously don't reject technology wholesale. It provides them an income, after all.)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: pleased

You've just got to love support conversations that include phrases like "how long did you say this has been working for you?" and "who told you that?".

( Whee. )

Well, maybe tonight I'll be able to figure out what's wrong with the damned network connection. Off I go... (It's got to be between the modem and the outside world, and thus Verizon's problem. But the modem itself is the only part I can't either swap or drop out of the loop, so it could be an actual hardware failure. I'll admit, though, that I am trusting in Westel not to light the "ready" light if there's no signal coming in.)

Current Mood: annoyed

Last night our home network connection was dead, but I didn't have a lot of time to investigate it. (I tried all the simple stuff.) This morning it was still dead. I just tried pinging us from work and it appears it's still dead. Grumble. This means I have to start taking things apart... (Yes, I have a firewall and thus won't answer pings. But I should get a rejection notice, not silence, if the connection is there.)

The modem activity light flickers occasionally, but I don't know if that really means anything. The chain is: modem to linksys box to router box(es) to desktop machines. None of the machines that are presently network-aware can see the internet, though I can see the file server. (Dani can't, but his machine is flaky that way so that's inconclusive.) Presumably this means the problem is at or beyond the modem, but I know from past experience that Verizon won't talk to me if I admit to the real wiring. They want the modem to be plugged into a single machine and they'll want me to mess around with my TCP/IP settings even though the problem is not there. Bah. I've got to improve my mental model of all things Windows so I can fake my half of that conversation. :-)

Well, homeward to see if there are any quick fixes before heading out to D&D.

Monica

Verizon, surely you can do better than this

weird DSL problem

not fair!

Verizon, round N

DSL followup

the joys of Verizon

DSL :-(

random bits

random bits

good customer service

Telerama's support log

smoke signals

at least something is going right...

gee, thanks Telerama

hardware failure (but not all at once)

call to brain trust: DSL in Pittsburgh

modem weirdness

good customer support

Thursday bits (protest, DSL, feline antics)

family visit

networking weirdness

DSL

network

(no subject)

network connection

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