Will Slusher.net

Go crazy?

Don’t mind if I do!?!?!

Update: Weird… maybe all I had to do was yell loud enough about the problem…  After posting this I noticed that my page was much snappier when loading then it had been before…  I just stopped by the house and sure enough, things seem to be back to normal…  Weird…

Sheesh, what a mess… So, about a week ago I began to notice that my internet connection was getting a little sluggish. Web pages were slow to load, streaming media was having to buffer much more than normal… I figured the tubes were just a bit clogged…

…Well, things kept getting worse… A few days later I was down to slower than dialup speeds… When I finally broke down a called tech support it actually took me 15 minutes (I timed) to navigate the three pages necessary to find my ISP’s support number… Not… cool…

The interesting thing is though, when he walked me through an FTP speed test to the closest test server (on the same subnet as the equipment my DSL equipment would be connecting to) everything seemed peachy keen… At that point (very nicely and apologetically I have to say) he had to more of less wash his hands of things, since everything looked fine from my house to their equipment… His conclusion was that it had to be a clog in one of the tubes connecting them to the internets…

…Soooooo, I waited a few more days… and things are now worse than ever… I can’t open any webpages 99% of the time and even my terminal session lock up and time out after a few seconds…

At this point I’ve swapped out every piece of equipment with the exception of my really old DSL modem, so my best guess (since I think more people than just me would be screaming if their primary outbound connection was hosed) is that that has failed in some strange and interesting way that makes it drop packets that are going more than a few hops…

Soooooooooo… I availed myself of my ISP online chat support this morning, and after many “been there, done that” responses to his initial cut and paste troubleshooting steps I was able to convince him to send me a brand new modem…

I believe this is my favorite part of the conversation:

10:33:58 AM		Dwight H.	OK i have sent a new modem to the house as well you should receive that with in 2-3 business days.
10:34:32 AM		You	Excellent. I really appreciate your help. Will I need to ship the old modem back to you?
10:34:53 AM		Dwight H.	No you can destroy it.
10:34:58 AM		Dwight H.	When you get the new modem that is.
10:35:28 AM		You	Excellent… :)

Oh, you can bet I’m going Office Space on that baby… ;)