Bad Behavior has blocked 257 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Powered by LifeTypeFor some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which). Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so.
However, the outages aren't quite outages, but just ping times of two seconds. And since Verizon is closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas, I couldn't get to anyone until today. But, after 88 minutes on the phone with tech support, the 3rd level tech agreed that the gateway (or its network card) is broken and put in a ticket to replace it.
I wish there was some way for Verizon to put a notice in the customer support form to not waste time with me, that I know about rebooting the modem, length of phone lines, interference with ethernet cords, electromagnetic devices near the momde (that was a new one - hadn't heard that excuse before), and also realize what a gateway is (The first and maybe even the second level support weren't aware that 10.6.3.1 does indeed point to a verizon computer -- hard to diagnose a problem when you don't believe a computer exists).
But, I got to be on the other end of a remote support call, which I hadn't done before. It is weirder than I expected. I don't have any idea if the guy knows what he is doing, and how likely he is to go to a random web page and download some virus if I wasn't watching. And once he manually changed the DNS servers and pronounced the problem with the gateway fixed, I knew I was in trouble.
But, after he saw the outage happen himself 5 or 6 times, he was finally convinced (though he did try to get me to reroute the ethernet wire, until I reminded him that I was on wireless...) He then told me about the server issue and that they were going to work on it, and it will hopefully be fixed by tonight. I think they must like to have the customer do something to make them feel as if something might have changed.
But, that's what I get for going with Verizon - and I did a pretty good job of remembering that I knowingly agreed to the cheap verizon prices including their poor customer support. And since my favorite technician has been over a couple times, the connection has been fine on my end, so now I just need to deal with remote issues, which don't happen very often. I guess this issue was frustrating since it wasn't a complete outage, other customers maybe aren't noticing it as much, and just figure the "internet is slow", so I am the only one calling in about it.
I'm having the exact same problem as well. It's January 11, 2008 and it's still not fixed. Pittsburgh area Verizon, 10.6.3.1 is the source of the massive lag, and.. i probably talked to the same retarded tech support guy. On one of the remote access occasions with tech, i detected a trojan.. almost immediately afterwards. My conclusion is that Verizon.. seriously sucks. FIOS sounds nice.. but it's Duhrizon we're talking about.
I'll be home on Saturday, and they are supposed to have a call scheduled to see if everything is fixed. I might have scheduled the call too early, since my trip changed, but hopefully I'll be able to talk to them on Monday.
Thanks for letting me know. I'll email them now and hopefully preempt the Monday phone call.
heh, their email support only allows 70 characters to describe the problem. That just barely allows me to paste the URL to this page.
Their email support is not actually a person, so the computer kept responding with random, irrelevant answers hoping I would stop emailing. So, I did.
Verizon hasn't made their scheduled phone call, but I also haven't seen any more network errors. I have been using the network for a couple hours today, so usually I would have seen it by now.
Just had a complete outage, so different than previously, where it was just really slow. Verizon said the reason they didn't work on it was because at the time when they checked, it was working fine, so they couldn't escalate it. Funny, their second level tech saw it go down two weeks ago, but apparently, that wasn't enough.
While I was on the phone it came up again, so "problem solved". Call back if it continues...
Same here. It went out around 1am then back on around 1:30? Seems like just enough time to fix a problem. I bet it was something stupid like a hard drive going bad, or maybe ram. I don't know.. but it seems like it's fixed now. I haven't had an internet brownout since that outage.
I haven't either. So, probably they had a purposeful outage to replace that machine, or a part in the machine, but didn't even tell their own people.
Today, verizon's DNS was down, which for most people, would result in a complete outage. But, fortunately for me, I have other alternatives, and one alternative was provided by Verizon last year, while on the phone, when the tech said, "I don't trust those DNS entries [the default entries provided by Verizon]. And gave me Level3 DNS entries to enter manually. I was on my laptop at the time, but never reconfigured my desktop, since it seemed kind of strange to not use the entries the technical folks say, and trust the word of a tech support guy. But, today, Heather suddenly stopped getting a connection (to some sites) and my laptop was fine, so I guess I'll switch the desktop over as well.
Verizon's default entries: 71.250.0.12 and 71.252.0.12.
Level3's entries: 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1
DNS Made Easy also provides DNS services for free for home users. I haven't used the free service before, but their paid service is excellent. There was one issue with a slowdown during a distributed denial of service attack on them, causing a false positive notification that my machine was down, but really it was their machines that were having issues.
They just emailed last week to say they added hundreds of new DNS servers to their redundant network, which is pretty neat - all of Lime Daley's incoming DNS is served by DNS Made Easy.
Hrm. 4.2.2.2 (Level 3) hasn't upgraded their servers yet for the known vulnerability (doxpara has a nice tool for testing whether you are affected or not) about DNS cache poisoning. I guess that's one way to get people to stop using your servers. Surprisingly enough, Verizon has updated their servers. So, the choice is: accurate results, but potentially hackable, versus flaky servers, but not hackable (at least at today's known exploit).
Unfortunately, the upstream servers I know about for Lime Daley haven't been updated. I'll probably need to install my own DNS server, and find a root server or something to connect to.
Ah - one of the older upstream providers has an upgraded DNS server - I need to look up how the /etc/resolv.conf file works - I think it goes in order, so I should be good to go, unless that server goes down, in which case it will failover to the poisonable one. But, close enough for now.