In article , Dave Hinz wrote:
On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 15:45:02 GMT, Doug Miller wrote:
In article , Dave Hinz
wrote:
On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 09:41:30 -0400, Paul Kierstead
wrote:

That is one nice set-up, Dave. I don't like my bandwidth providor much,
don't use their email services and their DNS used to drop all the time,

Does the name sound at all like "voyager.net" by any chance?

Oh, geez, don't get me started on Voyager. For years, I had an account with a

local ISP. Hardly ever had any technical problems, and when I did, the
customer service was superb.

That would be execpc, yes?

NetDirect.net, actually.

Then the local outfit was bought ought by
Voyager, and almost immediately everything went in the toilet. Dropped
connections, dial-up modems that wouldn't answer, sloooooow connections, at
least fifty times the amount of spam... and absolutely clueless customer
service.

Yup.

The last straw was when I called for about the seventeenth time to
complain about the slow connections. They insisted it had to be a problem in
my configuration (which hadn't changed for six months). Told me to run
traceroute to show where it's getting bogged down. OK... connection between
me
and them was just fine. Two hops farther, though, it was a *very* different
story - repeated timeouts between two of *their* machines.

The droids don't like it when the caller understands more than they do,
do they.

Not really. :-)

The customer
disservice rep told me to reinstall Windows. Yeah, right. I told him, sure,
I'll do that, just as soon as you explain to me how anything on *my* machine
can cause packet timeouts between *your* servers.
[snip an all-too-familiar story]

Sometimes you just can't fix the stuff, but if the droid couldn't recognize
that it was their own switchgear where the traceroute was dying, well,
it's hard to get good helldesk people.

I eventually did get him to realize that it was *their* equipment causing the
problem, and he kicked me up the line to a second-level tech who did a little
more digging, and actually admitted that they had a server configured
incorrectly. But did they *ever* fix it? Nooooooooooooooo.....

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt.
And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?