Re: buggy broadband (?)
At 999618786s since epoch (09/04/01 10:53:06 -0400 UTC), John Doe wrote:
>
> The tech had a largish lcd meter. It was very impressive, but I've no
> idea just what it was. He wouldn't let me get near it. His final test
> was to plug in his own cablemodem: he saw it sync, and that seemed to be
> good enough for him. I have a dandy VOM -- is there any way I can test
> signal strength, and what would the appropriate threshold be?
You might call the cable company up and see if they can do anything from
their office. I had a misbehaving cable modem, and the cable company was
able to connect to it and determine that it was running way out of spec
(7.27 volts, when it should be between -1V and 1V. Whoops...) They sent
someone over to look at the wiring.
Now, my cable provider gave me the modem, so it's their problem to make sure
it works. Since you bought yours, I don't know if they can just connect to
it and start performing diagnostics or not.
Check your kernel messages and look for errors that you can report. I often
got an "eth0: network unreachable" when my cable modem crapped out on me.
I also had a problem with a faulty cable modem that mis-recognized my MAC
address. I could send packets out, but the responses came back with the
wrong MAC address attached to them; my box ignored the packets as "bad", so
I lost connectivity. Check your log messages carefully and see if you can
find the failure. When connectivity dies, try to ping things. Can you ping
the modem? Can you ping the router (one hop after the modem)? Can you ping
your nameserver? Finding out exactly where the failure is will help you get
some leverage with the cable company.
Good luck,
Jason
--
Jason Healy | jhealy@logn.net
LogN Systems | http://www.logn.net/
Reply to: