Tag: Technology

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The day without the Internet

OK, maybe it was just a few hours without the Internet, but that isn’t as catchy a title.

To continue my story from yesterday, a tech came out today to swap out my cable modem and remove the filters from my cable so cable TV worked again. The tech came out and I thought everything would go smoothly. He said he’d remove the filters and call in to have the modem reset as that modem could be used for residential customers (learn something new everyday as I didn’t think it could). So the TV got fixed quickly and then when it came time to get the cable modem working, things went down hill. The tech quickly realized that I knew far more than him about networking, so he put me on speakerphone to talk to the guy at the office. The guy at the office was pretty good at following the script, but didn’t have a clue. When he asked what version of Windows I was running, I knew there was trouble. So the tech did all the troubleshooting of checking the cables, asked about splitters, etc. I, of course, knew this was a waste of time as the same cable modem (he didn’t swap it out, yet) worked 30 minutes before…the only difference is that I turned my router to DHCP; I even plugged my machine directly into the cable modem and only got a self-assigned address. The tech said that he could come back and replace the cables and I told him that it would be a waste of time to do that. Some miracle happened and the modem started working a little while later before the tech left, so I thought all was good.

At this point, my network was kind of a mess as I unplugged stuff to get things going and had only hooked my MacBook Pro into the cable modem. When I unplugged it and plugged in my Airport Extreme, it failed to get an IP address so I power cycled the modem as I thought it had grabbed the MAC address of my MacBook Pro and only wanted to dole out one IP address. The cable modem didn’t come back online. OK, I power cycled it again and called the cable company. Of course, I got no where and they put in a call to have the tech call me back. In the meantime, I unplug and plug stuff in and even put the cable modem at the first point where cable comes into my house to eliminate splitters (yes, I knew that wasn’t the problem, but wanted to have ammunition when the tech called back). No luck. I then plugged the cable modem back into my setup and moved the power cord and somehow it came back online. Perfect, so I unplug it and put the wire back and the modem didn’t come back online.

My wife got quite frustrated as she saw what I was going through and how I wasn’t working (which I don’t like to do), so she called the cable company back (now almost 5 pm) and got connected back to a local help desk person (the national help desk people are utterly useless). This person, Mike, really started digging into the problem. I explained that it wasn’t the tech’s fault, it wasn’t the wiring, and that it was a provisioning problem. He said that, yes they were having provisioning problems for the past 2 days and he’d try to send stuff to the modem. He managed to login to the modem, but it still wouldn’t provision (I learned that the modem re-provisions every time it power cycles and at other times when it re-syncs). He wasn’t all that familiar with the modem I had and I come to learn that it is only used in residential for people that pay $9.95 per month more for the home networking option. This option is for the completely clueless people that can’t setup a basic router even though just about all routers today are idiot proof. So while Mike is off researching something, the cable modem comes back online. Mike gets back on the phone and said that the tech that was out today was a television tech and didn’t know the data side so that kind of explains why he appeared clueless when it came to computers. Mike said that I could swap out the modem by going to their office or they could have a tech come out again. I told him that it was online and he was pretty shocked as he had never heard of that before.

So as long as I don’t unplug my cable modem, I should be good to go. However, I’m going to go down to their office on Friday (if they’re open) and swap out my cable modem so that the next time I have a problem, the support folks don’t scratch their heads trying to figure out why I have this modem/router without the home networking option.

I hope that I’m almost done with this fiasco; I thought a simple request could be handled quickly, but throw a comedy of errors, I ended up wasting a ton of time and getting quite frustrated. Up until yesterday, I had nothing, but good things to say about Time Warner Cable.

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Breakdown in customer service

Three years ago, I signed a contract for my business class cable modem service. I was quite pleased with the service, but over a year ago I stopped hosting my own websites and my own email, so while the extra bandwidth was nice, I didn’t need the static IP addresses nor the priority service for my cable modem (once they said that they’d come out within a few hours to replace the modem, but it turns out they were able to fix the problem remotely). The switch will save me about $55 per month. This may not be a lot, but I rather it in my pocket than theirs.

So I scheduled an appointment for today to swap out the cable modem as the modem I had was not only a modem, but also a router and a 4 port switch that was for business class service only. I saw the tech in his truck outside in the appropriate window (12:30 – 2:30 pm), then get stuff from the back of his truck and expected him to ring the doorbell to come in. Well, he didn’t, and I went back to work. Awhile later I checked and he was gone. Hmmmm, that was odd. I called the cable company, (got dumped by their automated system 2 or 3 times and had to call back), spoke to someone that said the tech didn’t need to swap out the modem and he closed the trouble ticket. I was told that I could setup my router (or computer) to automatically get an IP address (DHCP). I did this and promptly lost connectivity. I called back in, spoke to the national help desk and spoke to someone that read the script quite well, but wasn’t much help; “can you check the light on your NIC? Is it red?” I played along and said no (my Macs don’t have NICs as Ethernet is on the motherboard, so it isn’t a card). I basically just got her to transfer me back to the local helpdesk to schedule a new tech to come out and swap the modem like should have been done in the first place. So another tech is scheduled to come out tomorrow. I switched my Airport Extreme Base Station back to static IP addressing (I did take a screenshot of the configuration before I switched it the first time so I didn’t have to dig through my notes if it didn’t work) and was back online. OK, that should be the end of today’s excitement. However, it isn’t.

I went to turn on the TV about 4:30 pm and saw that we had no cable signal. Ah, now I remember the first person I spoke to said that the tech just had to put filters on the line and didn’t have to come into the house. I don’t believe filters are used to change me from business class to residential service; it is a different modem and different routing on the network (the business class IP addresses are on a different subnet than the residential addresses). I spoke to someone else at the cable company who must have realized that something very bad had happened and transferred me to Thomas who I suspect is a supervisor and he apologized and called me back about 15 minutes later to say that he’d try to get another tech out earlier than my appointment tomorrow and he had no idea what the tech that came out today did.

So let’s recap. I asked to change my business class RoadRunner Internet service to residential RoadRunner service. What did I get? My cable TV got disconnected and I’m still on business class RoadRunner (I can tell as my IP address hasn’t changed). I hope that this story gets better tomorrow.

On a side note, every time I talked to a person, I was asked for my name, address, and last 4 digits of my Social Security Number or password on my account. As I didn’t immediately recall the password on my account, I used the last 4 digits of my SSN. It wasn’t until I spoke to the 4th person that I was told that my SSN wasn’t on my account and that I had to give the account password. Luckily I remembered it. Hmmm…so much for having an account password when most of the representatives don’t even care what response you give!

(When I get around to it, this post will get turned into a letter to Bob Barlow, President of Time Warner Cable-San Diego. While I should have written down everyone’s name, I didn’t, but the notes on my account should tell the story.)

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Replaced a tuner with an Ethernet switch

Last weekend I replaced our radio tuner with an Ethernet switch (a 24 port NetGear switch as I ran out of ports on my 8 port switch) as we never used the tuner and even when we did, it was hard to get a station that wasn’t fuzzy. (OK, it physically replaced it, but didn’t replace the functionality.) It almost seems that the radio tuner is on the way out, at least in our household. My wife listens to XM Radio in the car and we listen to XM Radio in the house.

The second part of replacing the tuner was to get a SqueezeBox Duet. I was looking on eBay for a SqueezeBox Classic as I already have 2 of the 2nd generation units and we wanted to be able to have music setup for me, my wife, and my son separately without having to change the music. Since our house stereo system is setup for 4 sources, the SqueezeBox was the perfect solution. (I couldn’t believe what the SqueezeBoxes were going for on eBay; Amazon had it for $237, so I wasn’t going to pay more than $200. After a little looking, I found the Duet for $270 after rebate and then Tiger Direct had a $20 credit for using PayPal which made it about the same cost.)

The SqueezeBox series of devices are perfect for us. We stream XM Radio on them and with the web interface, we can change what is playing from our laptops. The Duet adds a new dimension to our listening; I can now control all 3 SqueezeBoxes from one handheld, WiFi based remote. It is a bit costly, but in the day that I’ve had it, I can’t say enough good things about it.

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Google’s CalDAV – Not quite the perfect solution

This is my main topic for the week! After converting all my calendars to use CalDAV, I’ve started to see the limitations. First off, you can’t enter events on the iPhone and have them sync back as the iPhone treats them as read only calendars. Second (and I hope there is a way around this), I got invited to a meeting today and couldn’t add it to one of my CalDAV calendars which creates a problem that I need to solve as I want to deploy CalDAV to my company in the upcoming months.

I’m back to BusySync for one calendar (the one I use for meetings for work). Hopefully I’ll figure all of this out without pulling out too much more hair.

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AppleTV and Boxee

I got an invite to Boxee the other day and just got around to installing it on my AppleTV which went pretty smoothly. It seems interesting, but haven’t had much time to play around with it. I took the opportunity to use ATV USB Creator to install it instead of the old Patchstick I used before. I had to re-install part of my SqueezeCenter software after upgrading to AppleTV 2.3, but I’ll document that in another post when I get a chance. I think that installing the SqueezeCenter software with the ATV USB Creator will be much easier as it installs SSH 2 instead of SSH 1 so I’ll be able to use Transmit to upload files and use BBEdit’s SFTP feature to edit files.

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Securing Open Directory on Leopard Server

Awhile ago I wrote about how insecure Open Directory was on Leopard Server. I was not the first person to have discovered this, but apparently no one has found a real workaround. I did find information on how to secure it, but then you can’t use Directory Utility to properly setup the machine. After much head bashing, I have completely given up on securing individual components of Leopard Server. It would appear that the only way to secure it is to use a VPN, turn on the firewall to block all, but VPN traffic, and set Open Directory and iCal Server to NOT use SSL. Turns out there are bugs in the iCal (CalDAV) server that don’t handle a GoDaddy SSL certificate.

It still amazes me that an experienced software engineer like myself can’t secure a server designed for small business that don’t have an IT person. Maybe this will work in Snow Leopard.

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To Migrate or to Not Migrate

My new MacBook Pro arrived today and I had to decide how to set it up. Apple has a great Migration Assistant for transferring information from an old machine. So I could either use that or do things manually. I decided for a mixed approach. I copied all the info from my old machine (via Gigabit Ethernet) and installed everything by hand. I didn’t copy the preferences over as they sometimes contain cruft. After about 5 hours, everything was working! Yeah. I just have to get backups going again and then I’ll have an even bigger smile on my face.

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Bit by 32 bits

The other day, I went to install a program on one of my clients systems. I’ve installed the software before on Linux without a problem; the problem started out that this was an Xserve running OS X Server (Leopard). I started by trying to install the PHP extensions needed for this program. I found information on the web to help me and things seemed to work fine, except when it came time to test the extensions; they all failed.

Turns out I missed a very important step; the instructions mentioned “does this for 32 bit machines and do this for 64 bit machines”. Up until this time, I had never used a 64 bit machine (my MacBook Pro is a Core Duo based machine which is 32 bit). So I had followed the 32 bit instructions not remembering that the G5 processor in the Xserves was 64 bit. Once I realized my mistake (hours later), the install process went quite smoothly.

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ComputerGate

UPS now tells me that my computer left Anchorage yesterday.

ANCHORAGE,
AK,  US	 10/18/2008	 2:17 P.M.	 DEPARTURE SCAN
10/18/2008	 11:54 A.M.	 ARRIVAL SCAN

However, UPS hasn’t updated where it is and I can’t think that they’d drive it out of Alaska so it must have arrived somewhere else. Maybe the governor of Alaska or her husband liked my computer so much, that they decided to keep it and say that since it passed through their state, they were entitled to keep it! If that didn’t happen, maybe the TSA wanted it.

The wait is killing me!

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Geek vs. non-geek

Today we went to the Apple store so my wife could look at the new MacBooks and compare them to the white MacBook as I told her I was going to get her one to replace his more than 3.5 year old iBook G4 (yes, I know it is ancient). She liked the new one and we checked Amazon, but Amazon has them on pre-order, so I went ahead and bought it in the store; that was like 10 hours ago. She still hasn’t opened the box! What is wrong with her? If it was me, I would have ripped (OK, gently opened) into it and taken time off from work to set it up.

Oh well, I still love her even though she isn’t a geek and as excited about a computer as I am 🙂