AT&T Broadband

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Howdy,

        Anyone know what's up with AT&T Broadband in Minnesota? They appear to be blocking *everything* from 24/8 to 24/8 that isn't
port 25/tcp 110/tcp 80/tcp 443/tcp, or icmp. Everything else is being dropped into a growing black hole..

Please clarify:

You live on 24/8 as an ATT broadband subscriber. You try to communicate with another ATT broadband subscriber on 24/8. Your outbound packets to said subscriber on 24/8 are dropped unless destination port is one of tcp ports 25, 110, 80, 443 or icmp. The rest of your outbound packets to the internet as a whole are forwarded as usual.

Is that a reasonable re-wording of your original post?

                                                Thanks,
                                                Matthew S. Hallacy

-c

2

Please clarify:

You live on 24/8 as an ATT broadband subscriber. You try to communicate
with another ATT broadband subscriber on 24/8. Your outbound packets to
said subscriber on 24/8 are dropped unless destination port is one of tcp
ports 25, 110, 80, 443 or icmp. The rest of your outbound packets to the
internet as a whole are forwarded as usual.

Is that a reasonable re-wording of your original post?

Yes, this is correct.

-c

      Matthew S. Hallacy

3

Sounds like an issue for the e-mail or telephone support
people at your provider, then. It's amazing what you can find
out by actually picking up a telephone these days.

  --msa

4

You're actually suggesting calling up phone support for a residential
cable Internet service?

Come on: these people wouldn't know what 24/8 meant if every piece of
networking equipment with an IP in 24/8 landed in front of their office.
They wouldn't know what TCP ports are, either, and they'd probably just
say "sorry, we only support Internet Explorer and Outlook Express"

Oh, and email support is generally worse... Often, it goes to /dev/null
and you don't even get to be "entertained" by a reply that doesn't have
anything to do with the question.

IMHO, the best way to get problems fixed with these things is to
befriend their admins, and the NANOG mailing list seems like a perfectly
good place to find out who they are...

Vivien

5

Call AT&T Broadband's tier one support for help ("er... you need to check the web site, have you pushed the on button on your computer, er... sir?")?

You're kidding, right? After escalating to their tier three, they still couldn't handle a simple call to fix the DNS on the netblock I was on. I was stupid enough to think they could. Never again.

Best Regards,

Simon

6

You're actually suggesting calling up phone support for a residential
cable Internet service?

Come on: these people wouldn't know what 24/8 meant if every piece of
networking equipment with an IP in 24/8 landed in front of their office.
They wouldn't know what TCP ports are, either, and they'd probably just
say "sorry, we only support Internet Explorer and Outlook Express"

Oh, and email support is generally worse... Often, it goes to /dev/null
and you don't even get to be "entertained" by a reply that doesn't have
anything to do with the question.

Wow. And I thought that this only happened in the UK. But then again,
Network Solutions have this automated 'bob' that returns a randomised reply
based on the checksum of the first line of the message. Or so it seems. When
they like. Maybe.

Nice to see the misery shared.

Peter

7

Hello Majdi,

  I was hoping that our former differences in opinion would not be reflected here,
they haven't before this, and I hope they aren't again.

  As for this problem, I did call our friends in Canada about it, the
first tech was absolutely confused and told me to hold, then transferred me
to level 2 support, who promptly had me reboot my cable modem, reboot my
machine, and (try) to walk me through my network configuration (fortunately
I can remember all the dialog boxes in Windows for this). After finally coming
to the conclusion that I wasn't stupid they filled out a form on a web page that
sends messages to AT&T's NOC. In the past they have proven to be useless, this
time however enough people complained, along with the message to this list, and
the filter was removed this afternoon. Hopefully the unintelligent person who put
such an awkward and useless filter in will think twice before meddling in their
router config again.

  I didn't feel that it was completely off topic here, considering a lot of
people depend on their access at home in emergencies, how would you feel if you
suddenly found that you couldn't ssh, or telnet in to the system that you were
trying to fix? Most people are not able to, or prefer not to get internet access
from their employer.

  On another note, I'm looking for a mailing list related to network outages
AT&T/MediaOne specific, or Minneapolis/Minnesota specific, if there are none I'm
willing to start one for sharing contacts and collaborating on problems, if there's
an interest in this please mail me privately.

        Matthew S. Hallacy

8

You have to realize really how far the Residential Tech Support (is your
computer on?) is from Network Operations in terms of communications.
Most NO would ever probably tell Tech Support is "Just tell the customer
a router is down or a fiber cut or something."

- James

9

<rant>
Here's my #1 help desk gripe. I call up and the person answering the phone is totally incapable of opening a ticket, and totally incapable of passing the information (or me if it's too technical for them to grep) to someone who can do something with it. You name 'em - all the help desks have this problem. Management want the statistics, and the help-desk want to close tickets to show performance. The customer has the problem, it's their problem, and the help desk is not going to take ownership or responsibility for the problem other than making the customer go away and the ticket closed. The help-desk is incapable of opening a ticket assigning responsibility to the company ("oh, it's us... we goofed").

Let me give you a real-world example. I call up with a problem (i.e. I can't connect to a specific VPN gateway because it requires my IP address to resolve forwards and backwards in DNS), and I know how to fix the problem (i.e. "you're PTR records say that when they're supposed to say this"), someone on the help desk telling me a router is down or a fibre is cut gets me really annoyed, and really quickly, because it has absolutely *NOTHING* to do with the problem at hand. The problem got solved by AT&T buying MediaOne and renumbering, but their help desk was completely incapable of assigning someone to fix their DNS.

All I want to hear is that the information has been taken down, repeated back to me, and a ticked number assigned. I will sleep peacefully knowing I am in the capable hands of a professional (whether that is true or not, I don't care). I don't want to open my control panel or change my resolve.conf when the problem is not mine to fix.
</rant>

You have to realize really how far the Residential Tech Support (is your
computer on?) is from Network Operations in terms of communications.
Most NO would ever probably tell Tech Support is "Just tell the customer
a router is down or a fiber cut or something."

- James

From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Simon Higgs
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 1:26 AM
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: AT&T Broadband

> > Yes, this is correct.
>
> Sounds like an issue for the e-mail or telephone support
>people at your provider, then. It's amazing what you can find
>out by actually picking up a telephone these days.

Call AT&T Broadband's tier one support for help ("er... you need to
check
the web site, have you pushed the on button on your computer, er...
sir?")?

You're kidding, right? After escalating to their tier three, they still
couldn't handle a simple call to fix the DNS on the netblock I was on. I

was stupid enough to think they could. Never again.

Best Regards,

Simon

--
All your .sig are belong to us

Best Regards,

Simon

10

I understand your point, but for every person who calls and who truly
does know what they are talking about there are probably 3 or 4 who just
think they do. You don't want to pay big bucks for top technical people
to answer the front-line calls, and those people hate when something gets
passed to them anyway. So you have minimally capable people answering
the phone who are told not to transfer the call to the next level until
they check all the idiot things that could be wrong (which probably gets
a large percentage of their calls).

It would be nice however, if after one call when you prove that you do
know what you are talking about you get a different number to call which
bypasses the "is your computer plugged in" people.

John A. Tamplin jat@jaet.org
770/436-5387 HOME 4116 Manson Ave
770/431-9459 FAX Smyrna, GA 30082-3723

11

To add to the rants about AT&T Broadband:

By way of context:

- our system is a former MediaOne system - at least to a degree, the old
Continental folks actually knew what they were doing (as opposed to the
TCI folks) - that went way downhill when MediaOne bought Continental, and
went all to hell when ATT bought MediaOne

- I'm on the local cable board, we've been negotiating a renewal for the
past year and a half - they WANT to keep me happy and give me phone
numbers to call that go to "executive technical support" instead of normal
technical support

So what happens when I have a cable modem problem:

- if I call regular technical support, they insist on running through the
"reboot your cable modem, reboot your computer" crap - even if BOTH cable
modems in the house have the same problem

- then they'll escalate to a senior tech, who repeats the whole procedure

- then they'll send an email to "operations" - it appears that the
front-line support folks:
--- have no access to tools or status information about the network
--- have no direct access to the folks who handle routers, dns, dhcp, or
any other such equipment/facilities - all that's done by a completely
separate operation that only talks to support via email (in our case, it's
the RoadRunner organization - I assume for the ex-TCI systems it would be
@Home, though who it is now is unclear)
--- have no direct access to the folks who handle wires, on-pole
equipment, and other outside plant - again, commmunications via email only
--- have no direct access to the folks who visit houses and work on inside
wires or cable modems

- in other words, there are four organizations involved in resolving a
problem, and none of them have any direct lines of communication, or even
report to the same chain of command - RoadRunner is a separate company for
example

- every time I call back, I have to go through the same procedure

- and finally, they seem to close tickets without verifying that anything
has actually been fixed

12

- then they'll send an email to "operations" - it appears that the
front-line support folks:
--- have no access to tools or status information about the network
--- have no direct access to the folks who handle routers, dns, dhcp, or
any other such equipment/facilities - all that's done by a completely
separate operation that only talks to support via email (in our case, it's
the RoadRunner organization - I assume for the ex-TCI systems it would be
@Home, though who it is now is unclear)
--- have no direct access to the folks who handle wires, on-pole
equipment, and other outside plant - again, commmunications via email only
--- have no direct access to the folks who visit houses and work on inside
wires or cable modems

This is probably because the people you talk to are employed by an 'out
sourced' call centre company who has at some point in the past sat down with
their client and built a call flow chart with all the things that these
people should say, ask and do.

IP is a commodity now, just like voice. Here in the UK only one mobile
(cellular) operator employs their call centre staff direct and I understand
that they 'overflow' into a 3rd party call centre at busy times too. I
have't been a customer of commodity IP services in the UK for a little while
(I mean dial-up, DSL is still a premium product here sadly) but the same
applies in general.

They have a script, and they may have a backup technician for every 10 front
line call staff. This person will get passed calls that fall off the flow
chart. When this person doesn't know how to help, they will either try to
loose you (literally) or they may be feeling kind and forward the problem
onto the actual company via e-mail; especially if they are hearing a trend
in the calls over the last hour or so...

The 'tier three' people probably don't work 24 hours like the call centre,
and so they get to their e-mail the next morning. You get the picture ?

I worked with the NOC-type people at one mobile operator for a while on a
network management system and like in the IP world the people at the front
line do know their jobs and will deal with problems but the route that
problems take to get from a customer to them is usually long and torturous,
and 95%+ of the issues they dealt with were initiated by the network
management systems and not user reports. Nothing new here then...

Peter

13

good point - though, of course, one would expect better from AT&T

I remember the legal process for transferring ownership of the system
ffrom MediaOne to AT&T - AT&T swore up and down how they were going to
bring so much more technical, operational, managerial, and financial
expertise and strength to the system than MediaOne ever could - what a
hoot

I guess I'm still spoiled from all those years I spent at BBN - building
and supporting large networks for various government agencies and
corporations - folks who actually cared about building serious network
support organizations.

Sigh..

Miles