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View Full Version : ISP Troubleshooting FAQ whaddya think?


mattb
9th June 2001, 03:01
I am a senior network engineer for a prestigious ISP, but I can't be alone with this experience.

I have had to go through with every ISP I have ever used (except my current employer :eek: )
- You get a line be it cable/adsl/PRI/T1/ISDN whatever
- Everything on your side works fine on the first day
- Then a couple of days later, you can't ping anything outside of the ISP's network or you no-longer get email, your pings have taken a crash course in astro-navigation and seem to be keen to practice, your bandwidth has done a runner for australia?

If the above isn't bad enough, you decide (against your better judgement) to call your ISP, a big mistake.

The call goes something like this:
Rep: What the problem?
You: I can't ping anything outside of your network there seems to be a problem.

Rep: Can you.......<there now follows a whole series of pointless steps that prove what you said in the first place>

Rep: Well it must be something with your configuration.
You: It was working 10 minutes ago......etc etc etc

My suggestion is that I write some kind of FAQ for troubleshooting and you can hit your poor long suffering tech rep with the business as soon as you get on the phone.

SmartMonkey
9th June 2001, 23:20
One of my mates found a unique way round this.
He rings up the ISP and they say not our problem, its further up the line. Anyway it turns out that the ISP is connecting to UU net, so using his magic book of numbers he rings UUnet's NOC, and voila before you can blink UU net have jumped on his ISP and it was sorted!
Laters
SmartMonkey

bvark
10th June 2001, 19:40
Magic book of NOC phone numbers = http://puck.nether.net/netops/nocs.cgi.

[However, as a former NOC staffer, people who phone up and don't buy service from me get told to call their upstream - I don't fix my customers customers or my peer's customers problems unless they're paying me.]

My advice for troubleshooting your connectivity problem:
Get a traceroute.
Get another one to somewhere else.
Get some pings.
Get some reverse path traceroutes from traceroute.org to your site.
Get some more traceroutes (no, really, we love traceroutes - they're like NOC pr0n).
Set up a looking glass on your side of the connection. If I had threpence for every time someone said 'looks fine from this side', I'd be a rich man (well, I'd be able to afford a can of coke).

I can recommend being a transit free ISP - not having some clueless a**hole at your upstream pushing your packets to mongolia really makes life easier :-)

Pumpkin
24th June 2001, 23:52
All ISP's suck.

Some suck less than others.

Cabe
26th June 2001, 22:55
Touch Wood

/me taps noggin

Freenetname have been fine, the one problem I had and they sorted it within 20 mins, and I was back online. This was at 2am as well!