ravencallscrows

Comcast.

Not me.

Hardware problem.

Tari had cable internet installed at her house in Hellevue on Wednesday. It didn't work. I went over to try to help her out with it today. She's got the weirdest, flakiest connectivity issue i'e ever seen.

For the tech geeks, here's a quick rundown:
System is WinXP (don't tell me this is the problem, smart-ass), on-board 10/100 NIC connected to the cable modem. NIC passes its own diagnostics, loopback ping works fine, either to the IP address provided by DHCP or 127.0.0.1. IPConfig returns full data- IP address, gateway, even the address of the DNS and DHCP servers. Release/Renew appears to work successfully. Sounds copacetic, right? Here's where it gets weird: there's no real internet connectivity. A web browser (IE 6 is the only one on this box) won't fetch any page. Pinging any site times out. Pinging the gateway, DHCP or anything else outside the house times out. Pinging the modem works.

From the outside- the tech at Comcast, who seemed to be less clueless than most (

revseandoe - he'd do fine working for Bob, but wasn't the calibre of most of our old team at the big K, maybe a Caz or Garfield), could successfully ping the IP address assigned to the box once each renewal, after which it failed. He could reliably ping the modem.

Here's my deduction- see if there are any breaks in the logic chain: If this is a real IP address reliably assigned by DHCP to this machine, it should respond to any pings in a timely manner (the ones which did go through seemed to have a response time around 80ms), not just the first. Failure to do so is indicative of a problem between the computer and the cable modem inclusive. The problem persists on a virgin OS install, with either CAT-5 or USB connections between the box and the modem, which seems to rule out the cabling. As previously mentioned, the NIC passes its diagnostics. It follows that the modem is somehow faulting, unless Comcast is really amazingly fucked up and has duplicated whole IP ranges by having some sort of rogue DHCP handing out leases which are completely invalid, and reliably hits this server when pinging the first time after a lease is obtained.

Anyone see anything i'm missing here? I'm otherwise swapping out the modems for Teri; and fighting the urge to deck the machine again and give her a nice, clean SuSE 8.2 Linux install, which will not only be nice and stable, but will keep her kids from downloading all sorts of crap and improperly uninstalling half of it.

Oh, yeah- the Comcast tech definitively can't rule out a hardware issue, has absolutely no idea what to do next, but won't (or lacks the authority, more likely) to send a field tech out to replace the hardware, which is why i'm having to do it. Corporate bastards. Fuck 'em.