[ale] OT: dealing w/comcast

[Jim Popovitch]

Sid Lane wrote:
> does anyone know any secret #s, names, URL, voodoo rituals, etc. to 
> bypass the subclueless level 1 "techs" at comcast?
> 
> we had intermittent packet loss this morning which my wife called in 
> (she works from home) then handed the phone to me (3 more min and I'd 
> have been gone!).  I told her ("tech") I was getting 50% packet loss to 
> the dhcp assigned gateway to which she replied "try pinging yahoo".  
> after trying to explain that yahoo probably doesn't allow icmp (not sure 
> but wouldn't assume not) and even if the do we already know the problem 
> is at or "south" of the gateway she insisted so I played along.  I told 
> her I got a resolution failure to which she replied "try running a 
> traceroute to yahoo".  I tried asking her what she expected to learn 
> from that since DNS was failing 

Save yourself some headache and replace your DNS server settings with 
two of these DNS servers provided courtesy of Level3.

    4.2.2.1
    4.2.2.2
    4.2.2.3
    4.2.2.4

Comcast's DNS servers are notoriously problematic. (probably due to 
stupid immature 4ack3rz who are customers inside the Comcast network)

-Jim P.


> but she was determined to stick to the 
> script so I dutifully ran it knowing good and well what the result would 
> be.  she then told me to "turn off your firewall - we can't ping you" 
> (can't ping ME? WTF does that have to do w/anything?  to be fair, I have 
> no idea how to do that on windoze but she wouldn't even pretend to help 
> me until I rebooted into it) at which poing I had had enough and said I 
> would call back later (hoping for someone less clueless; more so 
> certainly isn't possible).
> 
> anyway, does anyknow know the "secret handshake" to get escalated to 
> someone who knows what they're doing?
> 
> 
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