I've been having problems with my dsl connection -- its Earthlink service, on copper provisioned by Covad about 5 years ago. (This fine service was $50/month, now $40/month).
For the last 3 weekends we have lost our ability to reach the internet at least on Sunday evening, and this past weekend we had poor connectivity from Saturday afternoon to Sunday.
Symptoms were: (using ping, from a machine on my home network) Could not reach the regular DNS server Could always reach the backup DNS server (I eventually changed the server settings on the Netgear 814 router to go directly to the backup) Could occasionally reach the mail system: smtp.mindspring.com At other times could not ping, mail would time-out. Could not ping or reach other sites on the internet (not even google)
On Sunday evening I called mindspring. After 10 minutes, reached a tech, who discovered that I had a home network, and forwarded me to home network help / non-help. After >50 minutes on hold, I gave up.
Tried a 3rd time, got to a reasonably helpful person, though she was fairly insistent that I change my trusted sites setting in Internet explorer. (I do not trust anything to Internet Explorer. We use Firefox on Linux and Mac OS at my home.) We did converse at a reasonable level about pings and DNS settings.
At the same time as I started the 3rd call, I power cycled the netgear router. I had previously power cycled it with no help the previous night. In the course of that call, the connectivity came back. Hurray! (time to change my service to sonic.net?) My question(s):
Is it possible that this was a problem in my gateway/router, not on Earthlinks network? Since I could get outside my firewall to some addresses, it seems unlikely that the problem is local.
Could the Earthlink tech have fixed something?
Could it be a coincidence that connectivity came back while I was speaking to someone at Earthlink?
Does ANYONE else use this covad/earthlink service?
Thanks for your feedback. I lurk in ba.internet primarily, but thought this may be of interest in comp.dcom.xdsl
-- Robert Neff snipped-for-privacy@neffs.net goes into a spam bucket. try robert at that domain.