Through some act of God or maybe just a certain person I know in the North Central division, the Internet has returned here. I used to have two Internet connections, one for the server, one for personal use. But now it’s just one, so if things go down, there’s a total feeling of disconnection. Oddly, despite things being down for 2 weeks I’ve not been too bothered, though I think that’s partly because I’ve barely been on anyway.

Anywho, the problems started (again) on the 8th, when the web just died, the crappy SMC business gateway reported the upstream ranging was in progress and just sat there. Comcast sent a guy out the next morning but things were back up when he got here. Then a week later it goes down again the same exact problem. I call once more and the Comcast person says they’re having problems with the headend, I think maybe she meant CMTS, but who knows, she says to give it 24-48 hours. Things come back up shortly a couple days later and go down again, this time the upstream ranging is fine but I can’t ping the Comcast DNS servers I’ve been given. So I call once more, now they’re saying they’re having DNS issues. The weird thing though is that apparently incoming traffic is still working fine, but I can’t ping jack on the outbound. I can’t even get into the internal customer admin pages on the modem either, even when I plug directly into the server.

At this point they’ve already said they’re going to give me a week free, now she’s saying a month since it’s been down for over a week. I keep asking if they should just send someone out to replace the modem but this guy is saying to just give it time for the DNS stuff to be sorted. “Fine whatever, I give up, I don’t care, just sort this out and give me the credit”, that’s about all I say. I’ve already been on the phone with them for at least 2 hours to get this stuff sorted and it’s been too long for it to be down. Topping it off the service didn’t work well at all from day one, I had the modem replaced twice, and the current one is only working well because I got some “special” firmware running on it. Before the firmware the modem had to be logged onto and the firewall reset once a week.

Finally, Julie calls Comcast today hoping that the feminine touch will do the trick. After a bit she hands the phone to me and this guy isn’t any more helpful. The entire problem I’ve been having is that I can’t log onto the modem as a cusadmin to see anything, I can’t tell what he’s doing remotely or anything. But he’s telling me the settings are fine except the subnet mask, it should be .252 not .0, uh, err, wrong. I keep asking about the DNS but he says it’s fine, and there’s no issues. The issues with the DNS and the other crap were apparently resolved already so there’s no reason why our Internet shouldn’t be working. I still can’t ping jack from the router, and I plug the server directly into the modem. Whatever he did though made it so the cable and traffic lights wouldn’t even come on after power cycling the gateway and such. He ends up just giving up and sending someone out tomorrow morning.

Fed up, I give in, call the real help. After about 20 minutes of digging, we finally get the modem back online, she gets in remotely and we get it going again so I can log on as cusadmin. Turns out that Comcast had turned on DHCP even though we’re static, had the subnet wrong, and had disabled the manual DNS entries. She also switched the port to half duplex since apparently the SMC has issues with auto detection. After all that I can finally log into the modem, can see everything. She mentions something about some work being done switching the rules in the RIP to force business customers to use the business DNS not the residential, so we switch to those DNS servers and everything magically works again, switch back to the residential just as a check and stuff stops again.

This is a huge rant for no purpose, but I just don’t get why someone in a completely different division without complete access to my modem can sort stuff out in 20 minutes but it takes the Northwest Comcast people 2 weeks, and 3 service calls and they still couldn’t do it. I guess their solution to everything is not bother on the phone and just replace the modem regularly.

Now I just have to call up and cancel the service call and make sure they give us that month free that they promised. Hopefully it doesn’t go down again after I call.