"Hi so to save us some time I've restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one..."

"Ok sir could you restart your computer"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I spent months trying to tell my ISP that their side of a DHCP transaction wasn't giving me my IPv6 address, being so specific as to send them the exact offending packets but it wasn't until I took my entire network apart, unboxed their shitbox router and plugged that in that they would believe me.

I've worked IT man, I get it, but jesus christ!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

One day my MIL's Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.

They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said "Let's connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works."

Dude looked at me like I had two heads. "It doesn't work like that."

I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac's public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.

Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How is this the real world experience?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (2 children)

IT can have scripts and flowcharts they are required to follow, even if it is redundant to tech savvy people.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It helps too. I lost internet, did two full reboots of the modem and router. Nothing. Called support. He walked me through the process of rebooting the modem and router. It worked that time.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples' Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.

The number of times I've had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I'm on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn't really save anything. I've had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

They don't need to, they already use overprovisioning for bandwidth.

It's only in rare cases where the backend is so old and limited that it only supports a specific maximum number of active clients that they do that, and I've only heard about it in rural areas and similar places

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

And as always, there's an XKCD comic about it https://xkcd.com/806/