I also found that it was -much- more possible to talk to someone with a clue if I posed as someone on the global Internet, trying to use services which were operationally impacting me (such as DNS and rDNS). When trying to get something done at any NOC, -don't- say "I'm a customer of yours" at any point in time, else you get transferred to the tech support lines and nothing -ever- gets done.
With @Home, the fact that you were a customer might not have been an issue. I'm not an @Home customer. Several months ago I had to deal with what turned out to be a horribly misconfigured Win2K box, but seemed (from looking at the logs on the DNS server that was getting pounded) to be a DoS attack of some sort. I called @Home's main corporate phone number in Redwood City. (A mistake, yes. I should have checked Jared's NOC list.) Three times I explained what was going on, and used the phrase "denial of service". Each time I got routed to tech support. The fourth time, I called, screamed bloody murder at the receptionist, and insisted to be transferred to someone in Security, and made a couple thinly- veiled legal threats, and that worked. Of course, @Home is also the company that junk-faxed me, violating US federal law, and then when I called and asked to be transferred to their legal department, got told they were going to find someone who could help me and had someone from *Marketing* call me. So they may just be clueless. Point being, @Home may or may not be typical of big ISPs/NSPs. -- Steve Sobol, BOFH, President 888.480.4NET 866.DSL.EXPRESS 216.619.2NET North Shore Technologies Corporation http://NorthShoreTechnologies.net JustTheNet/JustTheNet EXPRESS DSL (ISP Services) http://JustThe.net mailto:sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net Proud resident of Cleveland, Ohio