[ale] OT: tech support hell at Mindspring

[Dow Hurst]

I've read the whole thread so far and have only this to say:

Back when Mindspring hadn't been absorbed by Earthlink and support was good, I 
loved using them for DSL even though they didn't support officially Linux. 
They would help once you got past the first level.  Now Earthlink support is 
much harder to get real help.  If you get past the first level or if you ask 
the right questions you can get help, but it is not worth it if you can switch 
to a Linux support friendly ISP.  I thought I knew what was happening on the 
PPPoE setup with Earthlink, but now I can tell it is quite erratic.  I have 
five firewalls that send me emails for PPPoE connection restarts. 
Geographically some are close to each and most aren't.  All are in Cobb or 
Paulding counties.  Two are recording fast idle timeouts on the PPPoE sessions 
of about 15 minutes on average and they are physically very far apart.  I get 
an email for each reconnection from all five firewalls.  The other three don't 
seem to timeout or get dropped but once every week or two.  The emails got 
frequent after real downtime of a day.  The two firewalls had different days a 
month apart for the downtime but immediately started the behavior after that. 
  I postulate that there must be some varying quality control on how Earthlink 
or Bellsouth has the PPPoE and DSL equipment setup around these counties.  I 
don't know for sure but am quite disappointed with the product now.  I hope to 
switch over to Speakeasy or Speedfactory over the summer.

For example, I get at least 20 emails a day from the NE Paulding located 
firewall and from the E.Cobb located firewall.  Two of the three not sending 
the frequent reconnection emails are located in E. Cobb not too far, a few 
miles, from the E.Cobb firewall sending the frequent emails.  The third not 
sending emails is in W.Cobb, near Kennesaw Mtn.  Plus, the downtime the two 
firewalls experienced was due to the change of login from the UID to the email 
address.  Were we notified that static IP accounts would change on a 
particular date?  No, we just couldn't get a connection one day.  Took me a 
full day to realize I needed to try the email as a login to get it working 
again.  Took me another day to confirm that I was getting the service I was 
supposed to even though I was getting dropped 20 or more times per day.  So 
the letter of the static IP contract is being kept by Earthlink but not the 
spirit since I am not promised a continuous uptime of any length of time.  I 
do get that static IP though.  Do you sense my sarcasm here?
Dow

PS.  My solution is to have a ssh connection to KSU inside screen that is 
pinging from one KSU machine to another.  The text output every ten or twenty 
seconds keeps the ssh connection alive and tends to force the PPPoE connection 
to stay alive.  Crazy what we end up doing?!

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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-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428            *
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744            *
1000 Chastain Rd. Bldg. 12                                 *
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:   dhurst at kennesaw.edu   *
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com *
Kennesaw, GA 30144                                         *
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