.. articleMetaData:: :Where: Dieren, The Netherlands
[21-05-2002 09:27] Mr S., a customer reports that his ADSL connection doesn't work anymore. The first thing I did was pinging his machine, but of course this timed-out. The next thing I tried was a traceroute:
[root@kossu /root]# traceroute 62.131.156.x traceroute to 62.131.156.x (62.131.156.x), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 vuurmuur (10.1.1.1) 0.693 ms 0.274 ms 0.178 ms 2 10.0.0.138 (10.0.0.138) 1.862 ms 2.206 ms 1.285 ms 3 195.190.241.151 (195.190.241.151) 12.833 ms 12.523 ms 13.047 ms 4 195.190.245.70 (195.190.245.70) 22.285 ms 23.375 ms 22.010 ms 5 195.190.245.69 (195.190.245.69) 21.932 ms 20.835 ms 22.726 ms 6 10.26.2.3 (10.26.2.3) 30.100 ms 30.902 ms 27.864 ms 7 * * *
Yup, you see it correctly, there is a 10.26.2.3 address there. Clearly a problem with some router in the ISP's network.
[21-05-2002 09:33] I started calling the provider, Planet Internet (+31 33 454 0100), and told them what the problem is. After some annoying 'what is your customer number' bullshit they still didn't have any clue what I tried to tell them, so I asked for the second line helpdesk, those people are usually more clueful. Again, I explained the problem to Richard and showed them a traceroute. They could see that the same hop was faulty, and decided after 20! minutes of asking around that it is a problem with the telco's infrastructure and decided to feed them a ticket. So they did and told me somebody from KPN Telecom would call be back about their problem. I wondered what this had to do with the infrastructure, because it seemed clear to my that a router was doign bad things... but a la, I do not know everything of their mess so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
[21-05-2002 16:28] Mr Merol of KPN Telecom called me to discuss the problem. After around 45 minutes (yeah, they're very fast at KPN) we came to the conclusion that it was not a problem in KPN's network, cause the machine of the customer logged in every 10 minutes. So they decided to give the ticket back to Planet Internet. It was also clear to me that it indeed was a problem with the routers of the ISP (Planet).
[21-05-2002 17:23] I gave them some time and then called Planet again, but they didn't got the ticket back yet. So they went looking for it (yeah, it's by email, but looking for it takes 15 minutes for them) and of course they couldn't find it. But they decided to check again... and after 25 minutes of static I decided the drop the phone and go home... I've had enough of them for one day...
[22-05-2002 08:41] Well assuming an email doesn't take more than 15 hours to travel from one building to another I decided to call Planet Internet again. I explained the problem again to a nice girl, and she reviewed the ticket send back by KPN. Instandly by reading the word 'router' she told me that because it is a problem with the customer's router she couldn't help us and that we should try to connect with a Windows 95 box. I was a little confused by this and explained her that we don't have a router and that the KPN dude meant a router on their (the ISPs network). Promptly she said 'We don't have routers'. Now I expect helpdesk employees to be dumb, but not this stupid, so I asked for 2nd line helpdesk. Mr Pim didn't want to help me and send the ticket back to KPN for further analyses. Of course I didn't agree with that and demanded to listen to me and try to make a tracerout themselves. After a ten minute speech about procedures I finally got him to do a traceroute and YES YES YES he thought that 10.26.2.3 is not a normal IP address either. So his action was to make the tech people solve it... that didn't happen until 18:00, but atleast it works again :)