Everything is Broken

So I probably didn’t mention the incident last weekend when three Smart Broadband employees came and sat at my house and watched files download. I was demonstrating to them how slow my connection is, and the fact that it is impossible for me to download any large files, or watch any streaming media. I’ve been complaining about this for the last 5 months, on and off, so I was delighted to finally get some response.

The three stooges sat around, watched files download, watched videos on YouTube, and one of them snuck in a quick visit to his Facebook page. They talked in Tagalog to a couple of guys on the phone, and continued to watch files download. After an hour I decided to bring things to a head. “So, this is pretty pointless watching these files download,” I ventured. “Maybe you could do something about it?” The lead guy told me that he’d talked to someone in the main office and they’d upgraded my connection. So why were they still sitting around watching files download, I wondered, and why hadn’t they told me they’d fixed it. I signed their piece of paper and they left. The connection remains the same — no streaming video, no large file downloads, no OS updates. Not much of an internet connection at all in fact.

But that’s not all. 5 days later the whole connection died. I got an IP address, and could ping their gateway, but no email or web browsing was possible. After talking to the support line for half an hour, I determined that it was their DNS servers to blame (with pretty much no input from the support person). He confirmed that, in fact, the DHCP server was giving out the wrong DNS server IP addresses, and that I’d have to manually enter the correct ones into my router. Incredible! They’d updated the DNS servers, but forgotten to update the DHCP server which handed them out to everyone!

And that’s not all! Today the same thing happened. No Internet. I removed the “correct ” DNS servers from my config, allowed DHCP to give me the “incorrect” ones, and now everything works.

Not Smart. Broken.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under General IT, Philippines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.