whoo hooo!
I got some mail.
Hey, it's been a tedious weekend so far, and the lovely and talented Vanessa, who just happened to catch the phone at 'cave-tel' this morning, was upfront enough to admit that there are NO network techs or admins working on the weekend, so I can just give up any hope that something will improve in the near future.
She did however, ping through and then trace the routes to the CO on Hull St. and said any fool could see there is a problem there. She read through the trouble ticket, which does actually exist this time(!), and came back on the line to ask me why the third tech felt I should check my settings when it was obviously a packet loss problem on their network and that I'd already told him so. Yes, I did complain about previous techs asking me to "go to the start menu" and yes I did get the number for her direct line.
Meanwhile, although someone apparently kicked the slats on the mail server this morning, I still can't get a decent DNS throughput and have been trying since last night to download Patchburn 3.1.1 for Panther, so I can at least finish configuring this guy's new superdrive.
Every time I finally manage to get the file, which is tough at 0.6kb/s, lemmetellya, it comes in corrupt, which is probably due to all those poor little packets getting all confused when they're so far apart.
2:06 pm -
I've talked to Vanessa twice now, and each time, right after we are connected by phone, suddenly all my pings come back, I can trace the routes to the servers, mail arrives, webpages load and birds sing. I'm utterly baffled, especially since it all dies off again right after we hang up.
One of my neighbors called to tell me she was suddenly able to get onto the Web site she needed to see, and downloaded a file, but shortly after that was unable to get to her mail again, guess what time she was able to connect? Yep, and nope, I have no explanation for this, but at least Vanessa was willing to listen to my description of the voodoo when I called her back.
Still later - ok, it's clear that the connection improves while I'm on the phone, but that doesn't make any sense, unless there's some serious voltage problem on the line. I'm no engineer, but it seems like that would cause all kinds of buzzing, or at least set off some alarms back at the DSLAM... oh right, there's nobody there, it's the weekend.
*sigh*
10:30 pm - Shameless geekitude, I know, but I had to get some work done, and the connection is almost packet-loss-free while I'm on the phone with tech support, so I'm pulling files as fast as I can while on the phone, sitting in the tech support queue, with the phone lying on the desk in front of me. Hey, what can i say, I'm a geek, it's Sunday night, and I need to finish the stuff I should have been doing on Friday.
Almost forgot this little oddity -
After I kept harping about the packet loss to the second and third tech on Friday night, traceroutes started dropping at 64.83.47.46 for me, and 47.45 for the folks inside the Cave. Vanessa said she seriously doubted that they "fixed" the situation by dropping packets there, and while we were on the phone for a longer period this afternoon, she was eventually able to ping my router, and then traceroute to here as well.
She thinks there's a problem with their router at 47.46, and has documented everything we talked about, so she claims that she will call me back at noon tomorrow (Monday) to tell me what they found out. She said recently there was a similar set of symptoms at another CO and they discovered a loose wire that was giving intermittent connections. None of this helps me understand why I can get a signal while I'm on the phone to one of their numbers though.