Curse you, Comcast!!!

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-04-13 09:42pm

Gah! Comcast is screwy today. My internet connection is jumping on and off every five minutes!

Apparently Tim Buckley is having the same problem.
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/

I just spent the last six hours wrestling with this stupid wireless network and cable connection. Quick run-down for you- about a week ago we started noticing our internet was acting kooky. Random disconnects, severe slowdown, etc. But during all this, not a single problem with the connectivity (according to those nice bright lights on the modem). It got increasingly worse, until last night where I wasn't able to be online for more than 30 seconds at a time.

We guessed that someone in the area was jumping onto our wireless network and hogging all our bandwidth, slowing things down. So I spent the morning setting up a secured wireless network for just our four computers here. No dice. Connection was still sketchy at best.

So spend another few hours on the phone with those retards at Comcast trying to troubleshoot the thing. We tried two different modems with no success, so they decide that we're experiencing signal loss, and they'll have to send out a technician to repair it. The earliest they can do it? Sunday. Four days from now. So I schedule the repair visit, tell them to go fuck themselves, and spend another hour tinkering with the whole thing myself.

In the entire CAD office I have finally got this single computer online in a fashion that allows me to upload the comic and post news for you. I'm pretty damned irritated right now. It's very frustrating when 80% of your business is run online, and you can't access it reliably.

And after troubleshooting, and finally calling Comcast, it turns out their tech support lines are completely clogged by...people complaining that their internet is down. They are apparently having global outages and people are losing their connections.

Now the weird thing. At the moment, Stardestroyer.net and another forum are working. Google is not working. Apple works half the time, and when it does it only loads the images on the top and not the rest of the page. IGN works. Google still does not. I can't reach the SD.net archive board either.

In five minutes I expect everything will stop working, and in five more minutes everything will work again.

It's getting very frustrating...

Darth Mall · Post by **Darth Mall** » 2005-04-13 09:50pm

This has been happening for the past few day. They are suffering from DNS outtages thats hitting them nation wide. I just got off the phone with the tech, and I managed to recive all the days of this month for free.

Of course it took me 5 tries to actually get thru and not get a busy signal

Your best bet is to try and find another DNS server to use for the moment.

Theres some more info up here, but apart from the we are suffering nation wide outtages, comcast has said nothing.

The tech I talked to said that this will hopefully be the last time this happens, but I seem to doubt it.

That would be asking to much. All I can say is that comcast is gonna be losing a bunch of money because of this.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-04-13 09:51pm

Check this out (sadly on a windows PC):

C:\>ping www.google.com
Ping request could not find host www.google.com. Please check the name and try again.

C:\>ping bbs.stardestroyer.net

Pinging bbs.stardestroyer.net [206.210.96.180] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 206.210.96.180: bytes=32 time=96ms TTL=134
Reply from 206.210.96.180: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=134
Reply from 206.210.96.180: bytes=32 time=108ms TTL=134
Reply from 206.210.96.180: bytes=32 time=114ms TTL=134

Ping statistics for 206.210.96.180:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 95ms, Maximum = 114ms, Average = 103ms

C:\>ping google.com

Pinging google.com [216.239.39.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=237
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=237
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=84ms TTL=237
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=237

Ping statistics for 216.239.39.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 82ms, Maximum = 84ms, Average = 82ms

C:\>ping apple.com

Pinging apple.com [17.254.3.183] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 17.254.3.183: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=53
Reply from 17.254.3.183: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=53

Ping statistics for 17.254.3.183:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 38ms, Maximum = 40ms, Average = 39ms
Control-C
^C
C:\>ping www.google.com
Ping request could not find host www.google.com. Please check the name and try again.

Works one second and not the next.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-04-13 09:52pm

Darth Mall wrote:This has been happening for the past few day. They are suffering from DNS outtages thats hitting them nation wide. I just got off the phone with the tech, and I managed to recive all the days of this month for free.

Of course it took me 5 tries to actually get thru and not get a busy signal

Your best bet is to try and find another DNS server to use for the moment.

Theres some more info up here, but apart from the we are suffering nation wide outtages, comcast has said nothing.

The tech I talked to said that this will hopefully be the last time this happens, but I seem to doubt it. That would be asking to much. All I can say is that comcast is gonna be losing a bunch of money because of this.

Thanks, but sadly, none of the links work. DANG YOU COMCAST!

I'll try holding and seeing if I can get a free month

Any DNS servers you can recommend?

Off topic: Anyone remember where to find the old Morgan Von Vebb video with the consoles being smashed? I'm trying to find it but I can't reach the archive forum

Darth Mall · Post by **Darth Mall** » 2005-04-13 10:06pm

Praxis wrote:
Any DNS servers you can recommend?

Well a quick look thru of one of the aformentioned links lists 4.2.2.1 (primary) and 4.2.2.2 (alt) as ones that work.

Hope that helps.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-04-13 10:26pm

You rock. Thanks!

Darth Mall · Post by **Darth Mall** » 2005-04-13 10:33pm

Praxis wrote:You rock.

Your welcome.

Hopefully they get their shit sorted out soon, or as much as I love thier 4mb line and apparent lack of caring on how much I download and upload, i might have to reccomend to my mom we look for a new service.

So many people have been asking me for help over aim because I seem to be the only one who knows whats happening.

Best of luck, and I hope this helps any other comcastees.

Wicked Pilot · Post by **Wicked Pilot** » 2005-04-13 10:36pm

I too have Comcast and it's been shitting itself for at least the latter half of today. Usually it's blazing fast, but man is it sucking now.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-04-13 10:50pm

Oh goody. I got a free day.

Darth Mall · Post by **Darth Mall** » 2005-04-13 11:16pm

Praxis wrote:Oh goody. I got a free day.

That sucks. I just called and said, look I know your DNS is messed up, can i get money back because this is the third time in a week.

The tech, went to "look" to see how much I was able to recive and he told be that I could get back for the days we've had so far this month (which is what I meant in my earlier post). I am planning on calling back at some point when they aren't being deluged by thousands of callers, and trying to get more.

Best of luck with you and geting more free time.

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2005-04-14 12:23am

I've been hit by this damned thing as well. Fortunately, I had a list of the ORSC nameservers on my HD that I was using to diagnose someone else's network problems a few weeks ago, so I'm mostly unaffected. I'm going to try to call Comcast up tomorrow to get a refund on the past few days, as 6+ hour DNS outages should not be happening, no matter how incompetent you are. Combined with the 2 GB/month newsgroup cap that was imposed in January and the price increases, I would have bailed except that my phone lines aren't compatible with DSL.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2005-04-17 02:10am

Public DNS servers

Chmee · Post by **Chmee** » 2005-04-17 02:20am

Reason No. 1,042,617 that I don't get my Internet access from the cable company ......

Why Comcast is chasing DNS outages
-Posted by Phil Windley @ 5:04 pm

If you’re not a Comcast customer, you’re probably blissfully unaware of the problems that Comcast customers have been experiencing the last few weeks. If you are a Comcast customer, then like me, you’ve likely experienced serious downtime and you’re probably wondering what’s going on. I’ve heard a few things through the grapevine and what I’ve heard hasn’t made me very comfortable.

I speculated on my blog that Comcast was getting early warning signals of impending disaster several weeks ago and that they ignored them. What I’ve heard since is that Comcast essentially got caught with their pants down trying to support millions of customers on inadequate infrastructure. They’ve been getting hit with recurring distributed denial of service attacks to their DNS infrastructure–such as it is. The root problem seems to be that Comcast has a DNS architecture that consists of lots of scripts and some DNS software running on a couple of servers.

Because they’ve got no management tools and little or no failover, when they get hit, they can’t respond effectively. They’re essentially fighting a five alarm fire with a bucket brigade. As a consequence, they have had multiple, multi-million customer, multi-hour outages.

What’s amazing is that such a huge service provider has been so neglectful of a core part of it’s architecture. They ought to be using one or more reliable DNS service providers with rock-solid architectures, fail over, and management tools.

I can sympathize with Comcast’s position. Excite@Home got themselves in this predicament and that, combined with an unsympathetic board, was their eventual undoing. Ultimately, broadband companies have to face the fact that they differentiate on service and not much else. If they’re not investing in the infrastructure that makes that service rock-solid, then they’re setting themselves up for longterm failure.

CIOs ought to ask themselves what their DNS infrastructure looks like. Are you running it yourself? Should you be? Outsourcing your DNS is not all that expensive in the grand scheme of things and is one less headache you’ve got. Building a DNS infrastructure, not to mention training system administrators, to handle these kinds of attacks isn’t easy and yet it may be the weakest link in your online presence.

If you’re a Comcast customer, what can you do in the meantime? I was able to solve my problem because I had access to an alternate DNS provider. You may not be as lucky. I’ve also heard that setting up a local DNS cache (which many of the new consumer-grade routers do automatically) also helps. A friend sent me these instructions for setting up a DNS cache on an OS X machine. I’m sure similar instructions can be found for Linux and maybe even XP.

Link