Comcast is idiot sauce, but improving in patches.
If you are in the USA and have Comcast high speed internet, you may have had to call them on certain occasions. If so, you are familiar with their particular brand of pain. I’ve had 2 run ins with them lately, one good and one bad.
Our Terayon cable modem basically sucked, dropping the connection and requiring a reboot about once a day. This is super awesome if you and your roommate are on vacation and you want to get to your home server for some reason. I called and complained about it and Comcast sent a tech to deliver a new Motorola modem within a day, and gave a $20 credit to boot. This is the first time I had dealt with Comcast and not wanted to pull my eyes out. (The story of 4 weeks of calling them to get internet at my last place is for another time)
The modem is only half the problem. I’m dealing with mail routing and money online right now and half of the pages I hit aren’t loading. I want to crap my pants. This is not the “the connection kinda works” time. Traffic hops around to a few routers before getting to The Internet At Large, and unfortunately one of those routers is currently puking its guts out.
poppy@vanburen:~$ mtr --report panel.dreamhost.com HOST: vanburen Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 192.168.10.1 0.0% 10 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.8 0.1 2. ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 3. ge-1-6-ur01.sf19th.ca.sfba.c 0.0% 10 12.2 9.7 8.6 12.2 1.2 4. te-9-1-ur02.sf19th.ca.sfba.c 10.0% 10 9.5 10.1 7.7 12.6 1.8 5. te-9-1-ur01.sfgeary.ca.sfba. 0.0% 10 10.3 10.1 8.3 15.0 2.4 6. te-9-1-ur02.sfgeary.ca.sfba. 0.0% 10 9.2 10.5 8.2 16.3 2.4 7. te-9-3-ur01.sfpine.ca.sfba.c 10.0% 10 8.0 9.9 8.0 12.3 1.2 8. te-9-3-ur02.sfpine.ca.sfba.c 20.0% 10 10.1 12.9 8.8 20.0 4.3 9. pos-0-7-0-0-ar01.oakland.ca. 70.0% 10 9.7 10.2 9.7 10.6 0.5 10. pos-0-15-0-0-cr01.sacramento 10.0% 10 13.8 15.6 12.4 26.8 4.5 11. COMCAST-IP-SERVICES-LLC.TenG 0.0% 10 16.9 17.5 15.3 27.0 3.4 12. TenGigabitEthernet7-1.ar1.sn 0.0% 10 16.9 16.1 13.4 22.9 3.1 13. 64.209.105.26 0.0% 10 22.6 23.8 21.4 29.5 2.7 14. panel.dreamhost.com 0.0% 10 26.9 24.1 22.3 27.3 2.0
Hop #9’s packet loss is the one to look at. Somewhere in Oakland CA there is a router lying prone, waiting for the reaper. So I called Comcast, expecting some of this newfound awesomeness.
My first call went to some loud, squelchy bit-bucket. I should have taken that as an omen. The second call got routed to a phone operator who had no idea what I was talking about, and told me that she couldn’t connect me with a network admin / tier 3 support / whatever they call it. All she could do is “file a ticket”. I’ve seen that router barf before, but mtr is showing spikes of 95% failure rate at midnight pacific time.
Maybe I don’t know enough about network equipment, but this sure sounds like a machine that’s either going to
- imminently fall over
- give terrible terrible performance like this until enough people complain to get the damn thing swapped out for something working
I believe odds favor #2. Sigh. Nerd venting done. I was just so happy about the modem that I figured maybe they changed.