later that night:
Ok, so signal steadily dropped after my call to tech support at 5:30, and at 6:45 when I had 70% packet loss consistently for over 15 minutes, I called them back and asked to reopen the trouble ticket. That's when I got to talk to Eric Cayton.
Eric felt that I shouldn't be able to ping their mail servers, but I didn't really want to question him too deeply on that, all I wanted was to reopen the trouble ticket. Eric had other ideas.
Among them, was this plan: Unplug the DSL modem for 45 minutes to "let the server recyle the IP address"
m'kay. fine.
Then, he wanted me to plug my laptop directly into the modem, and disconnecting everything else so there were "no variables." and set my IP address on the laptop to my fixed IP. He felt that my wireless connection and my router could be "interfering with the signal." He then carefully called out the gateway and dns server numbers he wanted me to use, which made sense, let's be thorough. He told me that after the 45 minutes had gone by, to try pinging the local gateway and call back so they could see where the packet loss 'starts."
He would not explain what exactly they need to "recycle" so I'm thinking they're caching MAC addresses, and that's the timeout? Got the verbal equivalent of a blank stare on that one, so hmm.
During this call, I was again suddenly getting solid traceroutes and 0% packet loss, again with no explanation. I confess that by that point I was a bit angry and my tone was harsh. I'm not proud of this, just tellin it like it was.
Right. Must be suppertime. I took a walk.
Sidenote - while out walking, I took a casual survey of my neighbors, since where I live folks actually go outside, take walks and talk to eachother. "Do you use Cavtel?" "Are you having any trouble today?" Amazing - most of the replies were 'Yeah, can't get on the net today." or "Phone's out, must have been the storm." but when I'd ask if they had called tech support or repair the consensus was "No, I don't have time to play games with those folks, you sit on hold forever and then they can't help you." Hmmmm....
Came back, got it all set up. Line light on the modem, but no signal, nada. Tried a straight cable, tried a different crossover cable. 100% packet loss when pinging directly to cavtel; pinging my local gateway gave me "host is down."
Called yet again (8:30) and got Jeff NoLastName, who was very polite, and did not giggle when I pointed out that Eric's plan had taken me all the way from intermittent net access to absolutely none. Jeff got very confused about the gateway pinging thingie, and was struck dumb for a moment when I repeated the comments of his colleagues about traceroutes not working on their servers, and inability to ping their mail servers. His comment wins the Tactful Award of the Day: "Let's just start with where we are now."
He was unable to ping my local gateway IP either, and commented that it should be something other than the one I gave him, which is when it became apparent that somewhere down the line, someone had entered the wrong IP address on my ticket. *sigh*
He made another astonishing discovery - when he pings my modem, instead of it replying with my static IP, it gives him a ping timeout at 64.83.47.45, which is close to where my traceroutes were dying first thing this morning. I mentioned that last time I checked, that IP was somewhere in a router bank just south of my neighborhood, and asked him if they'd had any other calls from this area. He thought about that for a second and then said "yes, but not with this type of
error."
I pointed out that judging from the way my trouble ticket was handled today, it would take a very persistent and knowledgeable customer to understand that the trouble wasn't something they had done to their own computer. He paused for a moment, and then said "I'm going to open up a network trouble ticket on this, and escalate it to a network tech."
Jeeez loueeeze, that took long enough.
New trouble ticket #276119
No guarantees that any progress would be made on it anytime soon, or over the weekend. This particularly sucks since I've got several systems to configure and need network access to get all the updates done, not to mention all the other things I normally have to get done via the net during my typical working day.
Nothing accomplished while talking to Jeff, but he did first declare that Cavtel does not cache MAC addresses affiliated with accounts or static IPs, but about 2 minutes later, said "well since you seem to understand this stuff, I will say that the upper level routers do log MAC addresses."
Ah, so the non-cached MAC address was probably what Eric thought he was "recycling," and since my laptop has a different one, I couldn't get a connection even though I had a solid line light on the modem. Everything went back to its previous unreliable state as soon as I reconnected the modem to my wifi router. I'm beginning to wonder what the definition of "fact" is over at the Cavtel cave.
time now 9:14 pm, smtp server says::
PING 64.83.1.225 (64.83.1.225): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=1 ttl=251 time=2952.21 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=2 ttl=251 time=1961.97 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=3 ttl=251 time=970.875 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=6 ttl=251 time=594.428 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=7 ttl=251 time=820.861 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=8 ttl=251 time=2567.16 ms
64 bytes from 64.83.1.225: icmp_seq=9 ttl=251 time=1577.43 ms
--- 64.83.1.225 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 30% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 594.428/1634.99/2952.21 ms
*sigh*