[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[Frank Whiteley]

<snip>
> > FRII has always been super reasonable and responsive for us, curious
what
> > the problem is and what steps failed to resolve the problems? Have you
> > talked directly with Barry or Andy attempting to resolve it?
>
> Well, it will take a couple more days to be sure, but whenever I'm home
> with my laptop, I use my parents' account, and for whatever reason, the
> modem servers on the other end will drop off the face of the planet for up
> to 2 minutes at a time (i.e. a 1 second ping to the IP on the other end of
> the PPP connection stops), but then come back. The odd thing is that NONE
> of the ICMP sequences are out of order or lost... they just come back with
> a time of... well... 120000 ms.
>
Some routers are capable of delaying pings as lower priority.  Are you doing
anything else during this time?  If you are using the pings to keep this
connection alive, this is against FRII's AUP as dedicated access <>
unlimited access.  The techs can see some of the reasons for connectivity
issues, e.g. lost carrier, remote terminate, idle out, ppp drop channel
(load based) on multilink.  However, they can't see retrains or
renegotiations on dynamic IP circuits as they are using ICG ports.  You
might have enough line issues to cause some retrains.  FRII offered to write
software for this support for ICG, but so far nothing's materialized.  I've
found that in many locations modems my train initially to a high speed than
can be reliably maintained and after enough retransmissions of dropped
packets, they will retrain or renegotiate a lower speed.  They may also
retrain or renegotiate back to a higher speed.  That's usually a couple of
seconds.  Try dropping your max speed by 1.3-3.9k and see if it doesn't
disappear.  I've found that tuning for a 'sweet spot' does a lot for
connection reliability and overall throughput.

> Last time I tried to debug it with one of their techs, I got the run
around
> and the "Well, we don't really have to deal with your problem because we
> don't support Linux"-spiel (an attitude that really turns me off to any
> ISP, since once you get stuff working, it's way easier to support than
> Windows), but by then it was time for me to go back home, so it never
> mattered.
>
I believe they consider it 'non-standard' configuration and there is some
presumption that if you are using Linux, setting up networks, servers, etc,
that you have a clue.  MAC and Windows support is very good.  They can
identify those items above for other users.  With MacOS X + running BSD,
expect several of them to become more clueful on *NIX issues.

> I'm using another number, and it's been OK, so far, but I've noticed a
> couple of oddities that are somewhat like I was experiencing before... and
> I just don't even want to bother calling tech support because I've got
> better things to do with my time than arguing with them about whether or
> not I know what I'm doing.
>
Again, they have a bit of restricted view of the vendor ports unlike their
former setup on PM3's.  They still use some PM3's for dedicated and static
IP dialups.

FWIW, the FRII's ICG dynamic IP dialup ports were upgraded to V.92 8/1/02

Frank Whiteley
Greeley