Thought this may be of interest to some of you out there.
Last Thursday, Eircon finally connected the DSL line for our new offices in Ranelagh.
I plugged the modem in, configured ppp, and much to my surprise, given their track history, it worked!
Up until 10am Friday morning that is. The DSL light went off on our modem, and we couldn't connect. Finally speaking to the engineer who set it up, he explained that while performing some tests, he noticed he "couldn't sync to our line [so] he connected us to a different port [and] everything was working now." Note the 'different port' explanation, I'll some back to it. Now the DSL light had come back on on the modem, but I still couldn't connect. Surprisingly, the engineer volunteered to come on-site, and arrived within half an hour.
He took one look at the setup, and stated that there can't be any problems on Eircon's side, or the DSL light wouldn't be on on the modem. He suggested the problem lay with our server, and suggested we use a windows machine to connect. He scorned when I told him it must be an Eircon problem, as the hardware and config were all known good, having been working the day before. He insisted there was nothing he could do, that it's not Eircon's fault (Look! The DSL light is on!), and that he could *prove* it. I called his bluff and he stormed out to his car to retrieve his laptop and modem.
Of course, he couldn't connect either, and after spending twenty minutes power-cycling his modem and hitting the reload button in IE, he eventually accepted that there was a problem, and started making calls of his own. He finally explained that the 'SMC' had changed some 'ports' and hadn't told his team. It was finally fixed that afternoon with the explanation that some 'ports' had been set up incorrectly.
Now I'm not exactly sure what a 'port' is in this context, but speaking with a client who had a similar experience, apparently Eircon bought a consignment of 'ports', and a lot of them have turned out to be faulty. However, they don't know which are good, and which are bad, so their testing procedure is to connect a customer, and if they report a problem, try another, ad infinitum.
However, as the DSL light will show up as active on the modem, Eircon support will deny the problem, and blame the customers software/hardware.
Moral of the story, if you can't connect, don't believe them when they say that if the light is on, it's working. Tell them the light goes off intermittently and get an engineer on-site.
Or don't move to an area where Eircon ends up being your only option...
-fr.
--
Feargal Reilly,
http://www.helgrim.com/
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