so my wife text's me........

[icecream-guy]

says the internet is not working....

me and my IT knowledge, I respond "the whole internet??"  as I usually do..

when I get home from work, she says I need to fix the internet connection, I respond, "oh, that makes they job MUCH easier"



She said she called ISP , and they told her to do something on her laptop to make it work 

so I'm troubleshooting,  turning off the pc firewall, using icmp to ping around. I can ping my firewall inside and outside can't ping the DSL modem inside interface. no arp on the switch, ping the network broadcast address, no luck.

so I take my spare PC,    I think I know what's wrong...configure it up with the ip mask and gateway so it's on the same network as the modem/firewall. again, I can ping the firewall, not the modem, no arp again.  can ping other things on the same network (tv's).

so I get on the cell phone, browse and find the default network ip for the modem,    reconfigure the ip mask and gateway for that network.  can ping the modem now.  browse the internet, etc. reconfigure the modem inside interface to the correct network. everything is back working. 

so I ask the wife, " did ISP tell you to take a small sharp pointy object and insert it into a little hole on the modem for 30 seconds and release."   her response was ..... yes..   

she defaulted the modem to the original config, no wonder the internet connection  wouldn't work.

[dlots]

ISP Helpdesk: "We can't figure out what's wrong, please poke this little buttion for 30 sec."
Customer: "Ok:.... Done"
ISP Helpdesk: "We now know what the issue is, someone somehow reset the modem to default.  I am afraid we can't help you with that"
*Click*

[deanwebb]

Don't you just love calling in an ISP tech support, having done some basic troubleshooting and they STILL read from their script?

[Otanx]

Don't you just love calling in an ISP tech support, having done some basic troubleshooting and they STILL read from their script?

This is more the fault of the company than the tech. Having been in their shoes back in my early days it sucks. You are graded on stupid metrics, and those grades are important for pay raises, or seniority. In the place I worked the better your QA score the higher you were on the seniority list when it came time to pick shifts twice a year. So of course I played the game. I didn't care if John Postal himself called saying we were blocking TCP/225. He was going to reboot his modem first. I don't know when QA is listening, and I am not going to end up on the weekend swing shift because the QA guy gave me a bad call score.

OK rant over.

When my wife complains about our internet being slow I just point out that a single user complaint typically indicates an end user PC problem, and until several users complain it isn't worth the effort to try to troubleshoot a network issue that may not exist.

-Otanx

[deanwebb]

All my kids know how to turn the router off and on again.

We only call when we need an RMA or there seems to be a general outage.

[SimonV]

Perhaps you'd be better off running it in bridged mode and terminating the PPPoE on the firewall itself?

I don't have a firewall at home anymore, so I had to put my modem back in consumer mode and it's so goddamn awful. I think a lot of these consumer boxes have trouble handling a high session count.

[deanwebb]

Now I have to start another thread... I have bigger questions to ask...