[ale] OT: tech support hell at Mindspring

[Robert Heaven]

I have Earthlink DSL (with a Coyote Linux firewall) and one thing I've
noticed is, about once a month my DSL service will go down for no
apparent reason. When this first started happening (about 6 months ago)
I, like you, started calling customer service and they were reluctant to
help but, I would persist and finally get someone who could talk linux.
(usually after they transferred the call back to Atlanta from India)

It only took me a couple of phone calls (and some looking at my
firewall) to figure out how to resolve the problem consistently. What
I'm seeing on my firewall is, the pppd daemon is crashing for no reason.
(that I can see) The resolution is to: unplug the DSL modem for 30
seconds, plug it back in and let it go through it's startup then, when
it's finished I just start up the pppd daemon and it works well for
another few weeks.

I also talked with my son, who works for Earthlink in the Atlanta NOC,
and he explained the problem as being something to do with "reaching a
connection limit because of stale connections caused by tunnel drop
outs". So, it appears that power cycling the DSL modem and restarting
the pppoe regularly is a good idea. (it helps clean up the stale
connections) This is probably why the Indian on the phone always says to
"reboot everything and call back".


On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 20:04, Jim Philips wrote:

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> On Sunday, I woke up to find I had no ADSL connection. I tried all of the 
> local tricks I usually try. Nothing helped. So, I started calling Earthlink 
> tech support. The first guy got noticeably  defensive when I told him I was 
> using Linux. I explained that I saw no software errors in the log. We checked 
> out all lights on the modem and that was all in order. Then he started 
> insisting I had a hardware problem. He wanted me to swap out ethernet cables. 
> I lost the connection before I could tell him that my ethernet card was 
> blinking when connected. I called again. The next guy seemed even more 
> clueless about Linux and more on the defensive. He finally said he couldn't 
> help me with Linux. I explained that if nobody there could help me, I needed 
> to cancel my account. He said he would see if he could find somebody to help 
> me. The next person to pick up the phone was with cancellations. I was 
> incredulous and demanded somebody who could help me with tech support. A 
> woman came on who promised that a more knowledgeable person would call me 
> after 5 PM that afternoon. Nobody ever called back. That night I called 
> again. I again got a person who said she couldn't help me with Linux. I asked 
> if she could connect me with somebody who could. The next person who came on 
> the line told me I had been connected with the wrong department. I asked her 
> to please reconnect me with tech support. By this time, I was getting pretty 
> steamed. I then got connected to an Indian woman (in India?) who was kind of 
> bewildered that I didn't use Windows. Finally, I said: "Look, all operating 
> systems that connect to you use PPP and PPPoE. They DO have something in 
> common. Can you help based on what you know?" So, she walked through starting 
> up my software. When that was the same as before, she said: "In this 
> situation on Windows, I ask people to reconfigure their PPPoE software and 
> that usually works." I said: "That's a really sensible suggestion." Then I 
> lost my telephone connection. So, I reconfigure rp-pppoe and everything 
> started up again. Doh!
> 
> I spoke to no less than eight people. The Indian lady was the only one who 
> seemed willing to help. The rest of these guys should be worried about the 
> Indians taking their jobs, because they are just a bunch of smartass 
> slackers. Anyway, now I know that I need to talk to Speedfactory.
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