Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
Our saga of not having internet continues. After a week of centuryline promising that the outage would be “done tonight”, they finally texted me to say that it was fixed (it turned out that the original outage was a fiber bundle being severed; not, as I originally thought, by BACKHOE JUSTICE, but instead a pole fell, draping the fiber over a railroad track, and getting it cut by a train) I wrote up a script describing the outage and what I did to try and remedy it, got onto chat with centurylink, and cut & pasted the script into the chat, which made the agent throw up their hands in despair and schedule a service call.
This afternoon, a technician arrived with a new router in hand (the one that Dust Mite is gazing skeptically at) and hopeful that swapping out my OpenWRT One with the centurylink one (a C4000BZ) would make the connection work again.
Not surprisingly, it – like the two routers I tried to use in the first place – didn’t.
So their next plan was to have the backend administrative system re-push my profile to the actual backend routers.
This didn’t work either.
So they went into a spasm of walking through internal tech support, bouncing between different technical silos until they discovered that it wasn’t just me, but there was a different outage in the same area but this time the people inside the company (unlike the poor staff at the call center, who are kept in the dark and fed shit) didn’t know what is was.
So the tech apologized, said they’d update my ticket and have another tech out as soon as they figured out what was going on.
sigh So I’m going to leave this monstrosity connected to my network for now (since it’s centurylink, of course it’s got their reskinned crippled OpenWRT-alike software installed) and as soon as traffic starts flowing again it’s gonna be taken out and replaced with the OpenWRT One like I originally planned.
Ugh (I am not particularly pleased with the OpenWRT web interface, but at least I can get to the Unix that’s running the router!)
Note that we are not completely without a broadband connection; last friday I ordered t-mobile broadband, and it’s now patched into our network. It’s pretty awful (200mbit if there’s a following wind) and it comes with an inhospitable Unix that doesn’t let me get in and change anything, so I’m stuck with their wifi (for now), their dnsmasq, and their hardwired (192.168.12) private network. But even with this (I need to call t-mobile customer support and see if there’s any way to configure their routers) it’s a whole shitload better than phone tethering.
Now it’s simply a matter of the sophie’s choice between centurylink and comcast. Yuckko. If Dust Mite had a digestive tract, it would be drinking heavily right now. Me, it’s just another lesson of since I let myself be infected with system administration when I was young and foolish I’m going to be stuck doing system administration until the day they heave my cooling body into the incinerator.
Comments
There is something surreal about having one’s fibre connection run over by a train.
An on-brand value of surreal, but still.