(no subject)
Nov. 18th, 2018 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiGood morning, Internet!
When I got up this morning, I wanted to check on various things and my e-mail and perhaps procrastinate productively if I encountered any frustration. Couldn't load the website for my credit union, real-estate listings, personal e-mail, work e-mail, Google, or the Washington Post. Re-start Firefox; still no joy.
Hmm, I think, something's wrong with my Internet access. How to figure out what's wrong? I can ping my router. I see that it has a reasonable-looking IP address from its DHCP server. I can ping both the DNS servers the router lists on its configuration page. So, looks like my RCN-supplied router is working. Then I try "ping www.google.com"; 100% packet loss. Well, sometimes hosts block ping, right, so that doesn't definitively tell me anything. But I try pinging several other things out there in the world, and it's all timeout. Then I try traceroute to try to see where things break down. When I traceroute the DNS servers that my router knows about, it reports a complete route, which each hop resolving to something with an rcn.net hostname. When I try "traceroute www.google.com", I get one hop-- yes it goes to my router-- and then all *** from there on out. Clearly, something is broken between my RCN equipment and the rest of the world, right?
Spend a couple of hours not on the Internet, hoping that RCN will spontaneously figure out that there's a problem and fix it. A couple of hours later, the situation is exactly the same, and the teenager is going to get up soon and give me grief for not doing everything possible. I dig out an old RCN bill to find the number for technical support.
When I talk to technical support, I recount the results of all my experiments with ping and traceroute, to try to make the case that it's not just the one website I'm trying to reach, it's no my browser, it's not my computer, it's not the WiFi connecting my computer to my router, and it's upstream of my router somewhere. It's a very weird conversation. I get the impression that the technical support person on the line doesn't understand anything I said other than "I can't load any websites in my browser." Everything I said after that-- every sentence I uttered containing either "ping" or "traceroute"-- could've come through to him as "blah blah blah", I can't tell. He says a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense to me. He says he's "clearing out the communication with the router," and then that he has "sent a signal to my router". Everything stops working for a minute-- even the first hop to my router-- and then, everything works! The tech seems surprised that everything now works; he seems to think that the "signal" he sent was just diagnostic, and shouldn't have had the effect of fixing anything. When I ask "did you do something to fix it, or is it a coincidence that it just started to work?" I get back what sounds like befuddlement.
OK, I get it. RCN does not bother hiring people who know the first thing about IP routing to man the first-line phones. Why bother, when 99% of the people who call also know nothing about IP routing? They have some script, and in the course of going through the script they trigger some things that will fix many of the common cases, and if not the call gets sorted into the appropriate bucket at the next level. The guy didn't have to understand a word of what I was saying besides "it doesn't work"; he just had to push the "it doesn't work" button, and some automated scripts fixed the problem behind the scenes. Sometimes when I call, I don't even get a human being on the line; an automated phone tree robot offers to "reset my modem" and that works just fine. Why did my call get kicked to a human being this time? It just added more time and frustration to the process when I tried to have what I thought was supposed to be a discussion of my network problems to a guy who really wasn't any more capable than the phone tree robot.
When I got up this morning, I wanted to check on various things and my e-mail and perhaps procrastinate productively if I encountered any frustration. Couldn't load the website for my credit union, real-estate listings, personal e-mail, work e-mail, Google, or the Washington Post. Re-start Firefox; still no joy.
Hmm, I think, something's wrong with my Internet access. How to figure out what's wrong? I can ping my router. I see that it has a reasonable-looking IP address from its DHCP server. I can ping both the DNS servers the router lists on its configuration page. So, looks like my RCN-supplied router is working. Then I try "ping www.google.com"; 100% packet loss. Well, sometimes hosts block ping, right, so that doesn't definitively tell me anything. But I try pinging several other things out there in the world, and it's all timeout. Then I try traceroute to try to see where things break down. When I traceroute the DNS servers that my router knows about, it reports a complete route, which each hop resolving to something with an rcn.net hostname. When I try "traceroute www.google.com", I get one hop-- yes it goes to my router-- and then all *** from there on out. Clearly, something is broken between my RCN equipment and the rest of the world, right?
Spend a couple of hours not on the Internet, hoping that RCN will spontaneously figure out that there's a problem and fix it. A couple of hours later, the situation is exactly the same, and the teenager is going to get up soon and give me grief for not doing everything possible. I dig out an old RCN bill to find the number for technical support.
When I talk to technical support, I recount the results of all my experiments with ping and traceroute, to try to make the case that it's not just the one website I'm trying to reach, it's no my browser, it's not my computer, it's not the WiFi connecting my computer to my router, and it's upstream of my router somewhere. It's a very weird conversation. I get the impression that the technical support person on the line doesn't understand anything I said other than "I can't load any websites in my browser." Everything I said after that-- every sentence I uttered containing either "ping" or "traceroute"-- could've come through to him as "blah blah blah", I can't tell. He says a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense to me. He says he's "clearing out the communication with the router," and then that he has "sent a signal to my router". Everything stops working for a minute-- even the first hop to my router-- and then, everything works! The tech seems surprised that everything now works; he seems to think that the "signal" he sent was just diagnostic, and shouldn't have had the effect of fixing anything. When I ask "did you do something to fix it, or is it a coincidence that it just started to work?" I get back what sounds like befuddlement.
OK, I get it. RCN does not bother hiring people who know the first thing about IP routing to man the first-line phones. Why bother, when 99% of the people who call also know nothing about IP routing? They have some script, and in the course of going through the script they trigger some things that will fix many of the common cases, and if not the call gets sorted into the appropriate bucket at the next level. The guy didn't have to understand a word of what I was saying besides "it doesn't work"; he just had to push the "it doesn't work" button, and some automated scripts fixed the problem behind the scenes. Sometimes when I call, I don't even get a human being on the line; an automated phone tree robot offers to "reset my modem" and that works just fine. Why did my call get kicked to a human being this time? It just added more time and frustration to the process when I tried to have what I thought was supposed to be a discussion of my network problems to a guy who really wasn't any more capable than the phone tree robot.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 08:51 pm (UTC)There are times I'm pretty sure that that's NOT the problem that I do the reset just to be sure - and I do it via phone because it's easier than going downstairs and power-cycling the modem in its inconvenient-to-reach location. More times than I want to think about it actually fixes things.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 09:28 pm (UTC)