Rebuild and Reprovision

Sometime last night my Speakeasy ADSL line went down. I could probably check this server’s logs and figure out exactly when that happened. I’m not sure what happened and neither is Speakeasy. I tried the usual tricks: rebooting the computer, rebooting the router, rebooting the DSL modem, plugging a computer directly into the DSL modem without a router in between, verifying router and IP addresses, and so forth; and none of that helped.

What eventually fixed the problem was Speakeasy rebuilding and reprovisioning the circuit. This was something only they could do, and it immediately fixed the problem. Thus the problem seems to have been on their end in their part of the network, not on my end in my LAN. However all their tests from their end showed that the circuit was up and running and the DSL modem was responding properly, so the tech wasn’t sure why that worked.

This is at least the second time I’ve had this problem. The difference between Speakeasy and consumer grade ISPs like Verizon or Cablevision is that figuring this out only took us about 20 minutes on my cell phone instead of two weeks and a couple of days waiting at home for a technician to show up. I actually got through to a competent tech with no hold time, and was able to discuss matters like ping and traceroute, and never got asked to reinstall my operating system or waste time doing other pointless tasks. In other words, I got somebody who understood the issues at a reasonably deep level and thought about the problem instead of someone reading off a script.

Still, the problem is quite annoying; and I wish it would stop happening. At least next time I’ll remember to ask for a “reprovision and rebuild of the circuit” before I waste a lot of time debugging my LAN.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 5:24 AM and is filed under Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.