I wonder if network reliability means what comcast thinks it means?
After my last experience with what Comcast, amusingly, calls "support", I started keeping track of just how reliable the network was by the simple expedient of pinging pell 200 times every 15 minutes. I figured that since there was no way I'd get the PFYs at Comcast to actually do something radical like running tcpdump on their network segments (tcpdump is one of those narsty UN*X programs that you need to use a command line to run. And, as everyone knows, only nasty hackers use a command line, while REAL system administrators use point and drool windows programs to debug the network) I could at least keep my own records so I could crosscheck my annoyance level with what my automated logging programs say.
It's been interesting to watch; aside from the eight-hour chunk where a denial-of-service attack (or something) knocked the integris telecom network segment pell lives on off the net, the ping losses have exactly followed the times where the network has hopped into a handbasket and gone off to visit Satan at the old sysadmins rest home. And, you know, having a network outage a week (sometimes the outages last for hours) gets really old really fast.
So, after many years of service (I think I got the cablemodem around the time Russell was born, so that would make it around seven years of service) I've finally snapped. I'm going running back to DSL Northwest and crossing my fingers that they've finally got DSL connectivity out to my neck of the woods. DSL might be slower, but it won't have 200 'bot-infested PCs flooding the network with arp requests for every host in every netblock that C*mc*st owns.
Assuming, of course,that the network works well enough for me to order the new line.
UPDATE: After a hour of trying to wedge this damned article into the weblog in the traditional way, I finally gave up and hand-posted it by telnetting into pell (which didn't fail, which gave me a clue about how this horrible network was failing...), setting the mtu to 256 bytes, and cutting and pasting it into the message database (``date +%s'' is a useful construct to know when hand-generating messages in my weblog program.) Ugh. I officially hate comcast now.