What do you do when your Home ISP is down?
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet. I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical. Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me. I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback. Sincerely, Mark Keymer
$big_national_ISP? Well, most problems I see are major and not just routing to one other ISP. My solution? Pull out the smartphone and tether if I really need to get on the web. Otherwise I sleep it off or do something else. I only call if it's hours/days in duration, or likely isolated to my property (errors, sync problems). Someone else with more time than me can sit on the phone with them to report it. If it was a small mom/pop ISP with a clue, I'd probably call though. On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
On 08/18/2011 08:30 PM, PC wrote:
$big_national_ISP?
Well, most problems I see are major and not just routing to one other ISP.
My solution? Pull out the smartphone and tether if I really need to get on the web. Or connect to the neighbors unprotected wifi... :)
--Ariel -- -- Ariel Biener e-mail: ariel@post.tau.ac.il PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html
I multi home instead… It works great! Owen On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:39 AM, Ariel Biener wrote:
On 08/18/2011 08:30 PM, PC wrote:
$big_national_ISP?
Well, most problems I see are major and not just routing to one other ISP.
My solution? Pull out the smartphone and tether if I really need to get on the web. Or connect to the neighbors unprotected wifi... :)
--Ariel
-- -- Ariel Biener e-mail: ariel@post.tau.ac.il PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Ariel Biener <ariel@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
On 08/18/2011 08:30 PM, PC wrote:
My solution? Pull out the smartphone and tether if I really need to get on the web.
Or connect to the neighbors unprotected wifi... :)
--Ariel
I can't believe that snuck past without anyone tossing in the obligatory http://xkcd.com/416/ ;-P Matt
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Mark, You think you have it bad? A couple years ago I called my cable Internet provider when my line broke. I won't name them because they since changed their system to something more intelligent. Anyway, the phone tree forced you to go through automated diagnosis before if would connect you to a live person. The system was in a funky state where it thought it saw my modem but didn't. So, for 45 minutes I was stuck in a computer-automated loop of "Power cycle your modem. Okay I see your modem. Your modem isn't working. Power cycle your modem." Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
It can be frustrating talking to their frontline people, but unless you have contacts there in network engineering, what else are you going to do? Just like I say to customers, if internet connectivity is that important to you, get two. I currently have BHN (cable internet) and Centurylink (DSL along with their PrismTV product) at home. Centurylink has been a disaster. Their DSL service has been about the least reliable internet product I've ever used, which unfortunately makes their PrismTV equally unreliable. The plan had been to transition from BHN to Centurylink, but that seems highly unlikely unless they can figure out how to get my DSL working properly. When we had a remote office a few blocks away from the data center, there too, we had dual service (BHN cable internet, and at the time it was Embarq for DSL). It's not hard to setup a linux firewall / VPN client to automatically switch the default route when one provider's service quits working. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Jon Lewis wrote:
On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
It can be frustrating talking to their frontline people, but unless you have contacts there in network engineering, what else are you going to do? Just like I say to customers, if internet connectivity is that important to you, get two. I currently have BHN (cable internet) and Centurylink (DSL along with their PrismTV product) at home. Centurylink has been a disaster. Their DSL service has been about the least reliable internet product I've ever used, which unfortunately makes their PrismTV equally unreliable. The plan had been to transition from BHN to Centurylink, but that seems highly unlikely unless they can figure out how to get my DSL working properly.
When we had a remote office a few blocks away from the data center, there too, we had dual service (BHN cable internet, and at the time it was Embarq for DSL). It's not hard to setup a linux firewall / VPN client to automatically switch the default route when one provider's service quits working.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
I use a somewhat similar approach… I needed fast, reliable internet access. I have Comcast Cable for fast and Raw Bandwidth DSL for reliable. The DSL has been rock solid and has only failed once in several years. Comcast at first (before I switched to business class) had trouble achieving one 9 of availability. I would estimate their current service somewhere between two and three 9s, since I don't count the random renumbering event against them. (If I counted those, it'd be two 9s). Owen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Lewis" <jlewis@lewis.org>
It can be frustrating talking to their frontline people, but unless you have contacts there in network engineering, what else are you going to do?
I just want to put in a tip o' the hat here to the BHN/RoadRunner *business* support people who handle Tampa Bay. I have had to call them, oh, 20 or 30 times in the last 5-7 years, mostly on behalf of clients, and their front line is *sharp*. They understand CIDR, they don't freak out about DNS, and they understand MTR -- hell, some of them *use* MTR. And they don't get scared when you know what you're talking about. Huzzah. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Thirded. As an enterprise account customer (with service at my home), I called them up, began to explain what I'm seeing, just to be interrupted with something to the effect of "Yeah, I see it. I'll get someone to fix it. Incidentally, how do you like your USR Router, we don’t see many of those?" Or, when they called me and said they are seeing a worrying amount of errors on my link and would like to send someone over to troubleshoot before there's an actual failure. (Bad coax cable in the attic). I'm not saying anything about Brighthouse, but the commercial RoadRunner support in Tampa is top notch, and that extends to billing and accounts as well. It's a very dramatic difference to the V****** F*** offering, which has better technology but never managed to send me a correct bill during a year of use. You can count bits delivered per dollar, or you can consider some of the less quantifiable aspects of service when picking an ISP. It's also sad that good, competent service is so rare it really stands out. -Toivo -----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 18:34 To: NANOG Subject: Re: What do you do when your Home ISP is down? I just want to put in a tip o' the hat here to the BHN/RoadRunner *business* support people who handle Tampa Bay. I have had to call them, oh, 20 or 30 times in the last 5-7 years, mostly on behalf of clients, and their front line is *sharp*. They understand CIDR, they don't freak out about DNS, and they understand MTR -- hell, some of them *use* MTR. And they don't get scared when you know what you're talking about. Huzzah. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:21:57AM -0700, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
I call. Frequently I'm the first to call in a problem. Turns out that I sufficiently impressed one of the helldesk twinkies (not a total bozo; he ran his own home net of FreeBSD and NetBSD boxes) that he put a note on the front page of my record saying something like "This guy Knows His Sh*t; listen to him and believe what he says." This one even knew about flushing the ARP cache after renumbering. If you can get past the rote scripting and "we only support Windows", you may well have a chance. I'm a cablemodem subscriber to a large ISP/phone/TV provider in .ok.us; that may nail it down sufficiently for most folks. Their helldesk scores above average in my book. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO mikea@mikea.ath.cx Tired old sysadmin
On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:21:57 PDT, Mark Keymer said:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
If I was busy with something mission-critical for work, the data center is 15 minutes from where I live. If I was busy with something personal-critical, there's scads of free wireless to be found within 5 minutes travel. If I wasn't busy with something critical, I have a PS/3 and too many guitars. ;)
Is it just me that has a hard time reading a paragraph when "there" and "their" are misused? Anyway, one time, I had a problem with a DSL line with AT&T, which had a trouble ticket from a storm taking down the connection and they had to replace a card somewhere. They said it was fixed but it wasn't working. After looking at the router, I was pretty sure they messed up the ATM PVC config on their side. I had to wade through the level 1 support for 45 minutes of reboot this, change this before they sent me to level 2. I told the level 2 exactly what I thought, and he said, hold on a sec, and said, yeah, you are right, I just fixed it, try it now. And it worked. Wish I had a special license to bypass all level 1 support.... On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
Obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/806/ -----Original Message----- From: Jay Nakamura [mailto:zeusdadog@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 2:06 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What do you do when your Home ISP is down? Anyway, one time, I had a problem with a DSL line with AT&T, which had a trouble ticket from a storm taking down the connection and they had to replace a card somewhere. They said it was fixed but it wasn't working. After looking at the router, I was pretty sure they messed up the ATM PVC config on their side. I had to wade through the level 1 support for 45 minutes of reboot this, change this before they sent me to level 2. I told the level 2 exactly what I thought, and he said, hold on a sec, and said, yeah, you are right, I just fixed it, try it now. And it worked. Wish I had a special license to bypass all level 1 support....
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 02:09:03PM -0400, Eric Wieling wrote:
Obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/806/
Damn, that's _fine_! -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO mikea@mikea.ath.cx Tired old sysadmin
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 18:09, Eric Wieling <EWieling@nyigc.com> wrote:
Obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/806/
Obligatory dilbert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc2Ks3lQew8 (the first part regarding tech support)
I agree, AT&T DSL support won't help me unless I remove my Cisco 1721 and re-connect their crappy modem I was forced to buy, even though with the debugging on the Cisco I can tell them exactly what's going on. (Small rant -- Why won't AT&T offer symetric DSL for business customers??) (Long-time lurker here, I loved the thread about what everyone has in their home rack, gave me lots of good ideas for new toys) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Greg Smythe -----Original Message----- From: Jay Nakamura [mailto:zeusdadog@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 2:06 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What do you do when your Home ISP is down? Is it just me that has a hard time reading a paragraph when "there" and "their" are misused? Anyway, one time, I had a problem with a DSL line with AT&T, which had a trouble ticket from a storm taking down the connection and they had to replace a card somewhere. They said it was fixed but it wasn't working. After looking at the router, I was pretty sure they messed up the ATM PVC config on their side. I had to wade through the level 1 support for 45 minutes of reboot this, change this before they sent me to level 2. I told the level 2 exactly what I thought, and he said, hold on a sec, and said, yeah, you are right, I just fixed it, try it now. And it worked. Wish I had a special license to bypass all level 1 support.... On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
Comcast goes into that mode every once in a while. I finally started getting around it by telling them that I had attached a computer. They would then ask "Windows or MacOS". I'd tell them this computer runs Cisco IOS. We went through their whole script and they finally escalated to someone with more clue, but, even the slightly more clueful person never figured out that a computer running IOS was my 7206 VXR. (that router was subsequently replaced with an SRX-100). Owen On Aug 18, 2011, at 1:27 PM, Greg Smythe wrote:
I agree, AT&T DSL support won't help me unless I remove my Cisco 1721 and re-connect their crappy modem I was forced to buy, even though with the debugging on the Cisco I can tell them exactly what's going on.
(Small rant -- Why won't AT&T offer symetric DSL for business customers??)
(Long-time lurker here, I loved the thread about what everyone has in their home rack, gave me lots of good ideas for new toys) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Greg Smythe
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Nakamura [mailto:zeusdadog@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 2:06 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What do you do when your Home ISP is down?
Is it just me that has a hard time reading a paragraph when "there" and "their" are misused?
Anyway, one time, I had a problem with a DSL line with AT&T, which had a trouble ticket from a storm taking down the connection and they had to replace a card somewhere. They said it was fixed but it wasn't working. After looking at the router, I was pretty sure they messed up the ATM PVC config on their side. I had to wade through the level 1 support for 45 minutes of reboot this, change this before they sent me to level 2. I told the level 2 exactly what I thought, and he said, hold on a sec, and said, yeah, you are right, I just fixed it, try it now. And it worked. Wish I had a special license to bypass all level 1 support....
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet. <snip> I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
I've had great luck by working through the system a couple of times until reaching a level 3 or 4 tech and then working things through. If you work with them, have them make a note on your account that acknowledges your technical skills and lets you bypass front line staff. I almost never get stuck talking to front line staff anymore, and I know my feedback has been helpful in problem resolution more than a few times :) Get to know the techs, best solution, but it takes perseverance the first few times. cheers Jeff
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:17:07AM -0700, Jeff Johnstone wrote:
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet. <snip> I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
I've had great luck by working through the system a couple of times until reaching a level 3 or 4 tech and then working things through. If you work with them, have them make a note on your account that acknowledges your technical skills and lets you bypass front line staff. I almost never get stuck talking to front line staff anymore, and I know my feedback has been helpful in problem resolution more than a few times :)
Get to know the techs, best solution, but it takes perseverance the first few times.
+1. I find it unfortunate that I've _had_ the opportunity to get to know the helldesk and local techs. People have a bad habit of taking overheight trucks down the street just behind my house, pulling the drop down from one of the two poles that theoretically support it at each end. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO mikea@mikea.ath.cx Tired old sysadmin
On 08/18/2011 07:21 AM, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
I used to use Virgin Media in London for cable services, TV, phone & Internet. TV and phone were fine, never had a problem. Internet was routinely a hassle. About every 3 months we'd have problems during peak hours with the PoP we were connected to or something nearby. Others friends near us but on a different POP were fine, and our 20Mb connection would drop down to 1Mb with soaring latency in the 500ms+ region and ~70% packet loss. Latency was high enough that I switched to using my cell phones GPRS connection for SSH for on-call. Phoning their tech support was always a hassle. Sitting there through the script, translating stuff from Windows instructions to Linux on the fly (The first time I called I dared to suggest to them I was running Linux and got told they didn't support 'hacker' operating systems, tech support person didn't appreciate it when I told him it was what their servers ran, which I knew from having colleagues who'd worked there). It was the same routine every time, waste 30 minutes speaking to first line support people, bounced from one to another then up to the supervisor, before finally being passed to someone with a technical clue who would spot the problem within about 30 seconds and schedule an engineer to go out and do whatever it is needed done. If the main phone line hadn't been disconnected long before we moved in there and had such a steep re-connection fee I'd have got DSL as soon as it was clear it was going to be a regular problem :-/ Paul
On 18 August 2011 10:21, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
I live in a fairly rural town of about 5000. I have pretty good cable Internet but I also subscribe to my telco provider's ADSL as a 'backup' connection if my cable Internet goes down. It's an expensive solution but unfortunately necessary since I work full time from my home office. I am also frustrated by the 20 minute telephone call by local ISP support while they go through their flow chart of possible issues before they can dispatch someone to fix the problem but I understand the need for diligence before bothering a higher tier of support or the engineering people. Now if only I could find a provider who offered some real connectivity in this area. My local telco wants big bucks for a monitored DSL circuit and the DSL in this area sucks really bad because I'm pretty far from the C/O; hence why I use my cable Internet the most and DSL is just a backup. My cable Internet provider offers no such business services in this area to 'a residential address'. Pff. -- Landon Stewart <LStewart@SUPERB.NET> SuperbHosting.Net by Superb Internet Corp. Toll Free (US/Canada): 888-354-6128 x 4199 Direct: 206-438-5879 Web hosting and more "Ahead of the Rest": http://www.superbhosting.net
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I have a couple of solutions to this problem. 1) I've got a backup Verizon 4G LTE modem giving out wifi. When the DSL goes down, I have code that will switch the house over to 4G LTE. 2) The DSL circuit is monitored by a set of scripts, and it's modems and associated switches are tied into an RPC (Remote Power Controller.) If the circuit fails to pass traffic, my scripts will walk the entire network (routers, switches, servers) as a admin would trying to find the bad device. If a device is unresponsive, it reboots it. If the provider's DSLAM dies, my DSL modem will just sit there and power cycle over and over again until their DSLAM returns. If you want it, python code to control a baytech rpc is here: https://github.com/netik/rpc3control -john
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Mark Keymer <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
Ooh, heck. I'm going through this at the moment. I noticed a website that doesn't load some of the time. After a bit of digging, I discovered that it doesn't load only when our ISP has given us an address in the 2.97 range, but fine in other more 'normal' ranges. Bit of digging later seemed to confirm that a router 12 hops away in Cogent's IP space (38.*) in Boston is replying with "destination net unreachable", or simply dropping the connection on the floor. So, looks like that router doesn't like previously bogonised IP space. Fair enough. I thought I would actually give this to my ISP to fix, to see what would happen, and used their online tech support forums to do this . I reported it last Tuesday, the 9th of August. Acknowledged on the 11th of August, given an incident number etc. So, this Tuesday they reset the card in the MSAN at the exchange, cutting all phone and Internet for 20 minutes. After a bit more of "the issue is still with Networks", as of today, we've got as far as them asking if I use their DNS servers or someone else's. I've sent them the output of nslookup from their own, OpenDNS and Google, showing the same IP response from all three. We've even had confirmation from another subscriber elsewhere in the country that the same thing happens. So, nine days in, we're still waiting for someone within "Networks" to try and connect to this website themselves from their own IP space; they've still not decided that this issue isn't occurring from the exchange to our house. This ISP has 4.2 million residential subscribers, so is fairly sizable. I'm going to be interested in how long it takes to get to their routing guys. It's going to be enlightening to see what happens. Alex
I turn off Halo and go to bed. Holy cow there's a woman there! -Hammer- "I was a normal American nerd" -Jack Herer On 08/18/2011 12:21 PM, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3 hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all is good and that it must just be me.
I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my Home ISP. and would love some feedback.
Sincerely,
Mark Keymer
On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:21 AM, Mark Keymer wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I'm on Cox Business Services, a Cable Modem network. The bad news: I pay more for less bandwidth. The good news: I don't have a lot of "it stopped working" problems. Once upon a time when I had frame relay access to the house, I might one day see 30 ms RTT to Cisco and the next see 500 ms. I once was measuring RTT to Cisco using PingPlotter (for those of you with Windows machines, it's a great diagnostic tool) and was able to measure a DDOS happening at Cisco (stable RTT all along the path from here to there, but from the first Cisco campus machine on it was crazy). A couple of weeks ago my delay at the house suddenly jumped at 2:00 AM; for sanity's sake I checked ping RTT to the Cox router in front of me and saw the same behavior. My guess: one if the computers in the house decided to download a large patch to be updated in the next day. For the most part, thats the extent of the issues I see. When I do see an issue, I call Cox and slog it through. Yes, I get ID-ten-T problems, and I get people that think the problem is between my chair and my keyboard. Generally speaking, I get courteous service and the problem eventually gets fixed.
I remember when I used to use our cable company for internet. It sucked. I had business service from them and everytime any issue would occur(even if is a routing issue like you mentioned) they want to reboot the modem, computer, etc and end the call with would you like us to dispatch someone to your house. Like that is going to fix it. I now use two isp's at home with a dual wan router I setup to load balance the two connections. They are both local ISP's but it costs just slightly more than I was paying to the cable company and has been decent. At least they don't want to send someone to my house every time I call :)
Report the problem on Twitter or Facebook. It is a common issue that support staff go via a scripted process. You can play, I'm the IT manager of a fortune 500 company, to see if they still consider you as a luddite, but really your only option is to either try to escalate the call (talk to supervisor), or have them to escalate the call (please put in your ticket system the following so it reaches one of your engineers on call). On 8/19/11 5:21 , "Mark Keymer" <mark@viviotech.net> wrote:
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
If my primary connection is down, I switch to my backup. At one office we have both Comcast cable and Verizon FiOS so if one is out, we just switch to the other. It's possible, but no cases so far where both were unavailable. At home I have FiOS, and if it's down I switch to a MiFi cellular hotspot (slow as balls compared to fiber, but it lets me do what I need to do in a pinch). -Justin
I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are not very technical.
Why would you put yourself in such a situation? - Arrange for two or more diverse fiber entrances to your house - Put atleast one Ds3 microwave link for emergency access - Have diffrent routers terminate each link - Redundant interconnects inside the house, no single ethernet switch - Run a ISP proven IGP (M-ISIS) - Run IBGP and have your redundant peer routers to talk EBGP at a exchange point that has physically diverse swithes - Add a hadfull upstreams in addition to your exchange point peers, and make sure the private point-to-point links are diverse - Establish contacts with the organisation on the remote I did not list it, but you need to make sure you have emergency power, generators, UPS and batteries etc to keep things running. Put your routers in two compartments that are isolated from flooding and fire.. -P
On Aug 19, 2011, at 8:18 AM, Peter Lothberg wrote:
Why would you put yourself in such a situation?
- Arrange for two or more diverse fiber entrances to your house - Put atleast one Ds3 microwave link for emergency access - Have diffrent routers terminate each link - Redundant interconnects inside the house, no single ethernet switch - Run a ISP proven IGP (M-ISIS) - Run IBGP and have your redundant peer routers to talk EBGP at a exchange point that has physically diverse swithes - Add a hadfull upstreams in addition to your exchange point peers, and make sure the private point-to-point links are diverse - Establish contacts with the organisation on the remote
I did not list it, but you need to make sure you have emergency power, generators, UPS and batteries etc to keep things running. Put your routers in two compartments that are isolated from flooding and fire..
And don't forget to make sure your grandmother has at least 40Gbps to her CRS-1 clothes drier. Regards, -drc
Apologies for answering in-thread the question in the subject (jumping in if you will), but in the event of network failure, I brew beer, and drink beer previously brewed. Brewing beer is fun, tasty, and requires no internet access. The alcohol eventually helps me forget my lack of internet access.
I work on the Helpdesk for the ISP I have at home and since *most* of them are fairly compotent I'd just call up or just head into work and do it myself. Then again I can't remember the last time I had to call them for a problem that was actually on their network. On the flip side we get the occasional call from some people I like to call "IT Professionals" who are usually clueless but like to think they know how to troubleshoot the issue and bypass the trouble shooting while demanding the problem be escalated to the wholesaler then look like a fool when it turns out to be a modem or internal cabling issue. Tech's who actually know what they're talking about are far easier to deal with and when everything relevant has been done it's logged or escalated with a minimum of fuss, I'd like to be able to add notes about customers actual clue but I don't think it'd go down well if it got out with peoples ego's and all. -- Thanks, Grant
participants (31)
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