You're Gonna Do What?

The primary connection for our Green Bay lab was down this morning - for no apparent reason. So after power cycling the router and proving to myself that it wasn't a problem on our end, I called our provider. We traveled through the basic "what color is this light" game and of course all is well. Then the Tier 1 technician tells me with a straight face that he's going to "discharge the static on the line" and that it can take up to 5 minutes.

He's going to discharge the static on the line... by pushing a button on his screen. Yeah... and next he's going to blame solar flares for the outage.

Someone's been reading too much BOFH me thinks.

Finally I was given a ticket. Woo hoo! It's like winning the lottery. I have a ticket! An hour later a Tier 2 technician calls me.

So I walk through the basics with him and he wants me to read off the configuration from the router. I don't have the login/password so he gives me both of the default administrative logins for the router.

::grin::

No, I didn't write them down. They were at least not dictionary based and I'm not that evil. I did find it disconcerting that it was so easy to get them, however.

All is correct - except DNS entries - so I changed them and restarted the router.

Now I've already used our secondary connection (provided by someone else, of course) to trace traffic all the way to .. Milwaukee. The last hop between Milwaukee and Green Bay is the problem. All our equipment is functioning within normal parameters, but either some router in Milwaukee has decided to take the day off or their default router has gone bye-bye. Either way, it isn't our configuration, which hasn't change in a year or more and was working just fine yesterday. But he wants me to try to ping Google from the router.

By name.

Now I have no connection. I cannot ping the default gateway on their network and simple IP routing basics says if I can't route traffic through the gateway I sure as hell can't resolve Google's IP address.

But he insists I try. Because obviously the fact that packets are not getting from our router to the default gateway is all a DNS configuration issue. Yeah, I've seen that a million times. So I do and gee, golly, look at that - I can't resolve the address.

::sigh::

Eventually he tells me he'll do some more digging and get back to me and finally, about 1pm this afternoon, the connection is restored. I'm still floored by the "discharging static on the line" line. I keep thinking maybe there's something here I'm missing, but I keep hearing Simon's voice in the background snickering because he's got my luser name now ....