The internet. The final frontier.
This is the quest of the unix box Kite.
Its 2.5 year mission, to explore strange new worlds,
to seek out new life and new civilzations,
to boldly go where no one has gone before,
and maybe, just maybe, get Preferred Internet to fix my connection!
Hello. I'm Joey Hess, and I'm pissed at Preferred Internet, Inc. I have the misfortune to have this company as my ISP. I pay them roughly $300 monthly for a dedicated 128k ISDN connection (roughly 4x a 28.8 modem connection in speed). This hasn't worked very well. I've been having lots of problems, including:
Fired off a nasty-gram to root@preferred.com, complaining about everthing they've never got around to fixing. Threatened to leave them if they don't get it all fixed by the end of the month.
Recived mail from Rick: "Call me at home". Called him, he wants to try to fix the 128k problem and set me up with the second IP address I've been wanting for a month or more.
Spent about 7 hours offline. This started when Rick decided to move an ISDN modem at preferred around in hopes of getting me connected at 128k. Evidently Rick decided to go home or something, 'cause when I came back 2 hours later, my connection was still down. Several calls and a few hours later, I'd gotten them to put the modem back how it was yesterday, so I could connect again, alebit at only 64k.
Dan promises me that next month I will not have to pay for ISDN. That's nice, but does it make up for 5 months of lies, misdirection, and 64k connects? I don't think so..
My internet connection died at 8:45pm. 12 hours later, and it's still down. I guess they don't check their answering machine on weekends..
My internet connection's back up. it was down for 18 hours, and despite 4 phone calls and one email message, I've heard nothing from preferred in that time period.
My internet connection just died again. It won't reconnect. Hey! Major deja-vu, here! It happened at exactly the same time yesterday...
I called Rick (at home, I shouldn't post the number here), and he called someone, and my connection came up a few minutes later.
Guess. Just guess.
The bastards finally got my connection back up. Damn them all.
I reboot my computer, and have to call preferred up to get my modem reset yet again. And I just know it's going to happen again tonight.
Connection resets again. I call preferred, and get a clueless tech-support guy who can't be bothered to help. Turns out that both Dan and Rick are out setting up a demo of some sort for Fun Fest. I really do get the idea that preferred thinks getting new customers is a higher priority than keeping exisitng customers. Connection down for 3 hours or so, during which time I'm cut off from work.
Today is just like yesterday, except I have to call them twice, and the tech-support guy actually resets my modem this time instead of waiting for Dan to get back from his latest fundraiser. Connection down for 2 hours in the morning, and ??? hours in the evening.
Sent this to Dan:
Dan,
In case you're not aware, I need my connection so I can work at home for a
company headquartered in Berkely, California. I've lost over 10 hours of
work this week because my internet connection was down. I'm not amused, my
boss isn't amused, and our clients aren't very happy about this, either.
Do something, damn it! You know what the problem is, fix it!
And please reply to this mail, I can't differentiate between your mailbox
and a black hole, I don't think I've ever seen you reply to an email
message I sent you, ever. I'd like to know you got this.
I will cancel the check I mailed yesterday for my most recent preferred
bill, and cancel my account with you if this connection problem is not
fixed by 6:00pm this Friday (Jun 26).
Joey Hess
5 minutes away from the deadline I set, Dan got everything working. I now connect at 128K! I don't know if the other problems are fixed yet, I'll find out over the next couple of days.
It's really sad that the only way to get preferred to do something is to threaten to leave them. It doesn't bode well for "lesser" customers than I. I pay preferred $300/month. I suspect that a normal modem user who's paying only a tenth or so of that per month won't have enough clout to try what I tried, and so their problems will be ignored forever.
I've been unable to connect to them for the past hour or so. Looks like powerrack is messed up. I phoned them and left a message on the machine. Just when I thought they had everything working for once, this comes up!
Connection's back up.
My connection was down for over an hour. I disconnected to change something, and couldn't reconnect. The same tired story.
I'm a little late in reporting this incident, but I wanted to wait for the dust to settle. Preferred.com was cracked into. They got root access to the system, which means that if you use preferred.com for anything of interest, including email, they could have read it.
Internet connection down all night. My modem was still connected, but no packets were getting through. Preferred say they were flood pinged, and it messed up their system, and they seem a little pissed about that themselves. Can't blame them, but now I have a program set to run evey 15 minutes, and detect this problem and automatically redial so this won't happen to me again.
It's been so long.. but now the problems are starting up again. My connection was dropped yesterday with no explination, and was down all last night. Sigh..
Looks like something at preferred has died again. Isn't it wonderful that things always go wrong on weekends, when they arn't there? This one affects all their customers, not just me; now noone can connect to them. Hope it gets fixed before Monday..
Exactly the same problem as last week.
My connection dies, and I can't reconnect to preferred. I call them, and am given a story about Rick being in a meeting and the phone firewall person is unable to do anything to help me.
Just a week ago, preferred mailed everyone with this:
Increased technical support lines! We will shortly be adding more phone lines at the Mall to handle a greater volume of support calls.
How about adding more people who know how to power-cycle an ISDN modem, preferred? Those tech support lines you're adding won't do much good without someone to man them. And tech support lines at the mall may be all good and handy for clueless windows users who need help to tell the difference between "joeluser@preferred.com" and "99 Park Place Rd." when they're configuring "endora", but they won't do me much good when you need to solve a technical problem at preferred HQ, will they?
Note: Just as I was wrapping up this rant, my connection came back up. Go figure.
My connection died. Looks like their commserver crashed.
Lost carrier twice today.
I just got back from cutting down a christmas tree in the woods. I walk in here and hear the wonderful christmas music of my connenction down siren blaring in my ears. Here's something I composed as I waited for my connection to come back up:
O'er the net we go,
Packet-loss all the way.
Oh what fun it is for me,
this I.S.P. to pay.
Oh!
Sirens blare, sirens blare,
downtime's here to stay.
Oh what fun it is for me,
this shitty I.S.P to pay.
Oh!
Oh the joys of cristmas with a shitty ISP..
I come downstairs and find that my connection is -- you guessed it -- down again. I send 10 minutes chewing the fat with a phone firewall, then got passed on to "someone who knows a little more about lynx (sic)."
According to this guy, preferred has been cracked into. "But I can't help you because I don't have as many root windows open as Rick does". Er. Whatever. Anyhow, connection comes back up as I'm chatting with this moron.
Same old routine -- I come downstairs, connection's down, I call preferred, convince them that I'm not using w95, get passed on to Rick ("he'll call you") and the connection mysteriously comes up again. And 5 minutes later goes down again. And comes up again. And 5 minutes later goes down again. And comes up again. And during all this, their voice line is constantly busy. Hm. Nice to have a bit of a break in the routine here. I left a message for Rick. He never called back.
I find that I'm suddenly unable to login or ftp to preferred. It seems they deleted my login shell. Wonderful.
For the past few days, I've been losing connection sporadically. Turns out it was just a premonition of tonight. Tonight, I find, I can connect to one computer of all the computers on the net: preferred.com. Yes, they've screwed up my routing? And why? Because they're moving offices I wish preferred would move to Alaska.
For once, I'm happy with preferred. Rick called me up, and when I didn't answer the phone, emailed me, to let me know that my connection may be down today.
A few days ago, I got back from a week at the beach. My compters stayed on the whole time unattended, and experienced no problems. But as soon as I got back, my network connection went to hell.
First, I found that my 128k super-duper-fast ISDN connection was operating about as fast as a 300 baud modem. Except unlike a good old 300 baud, it didn't send out a steady stream of data about as fast as you can type, it decided to lock up for 5 minutes, then run at full speed for 2 seconds, lock up for 3 minutes, work for 5 seconds, repeat, repeat. I just love telnetting under those conditions... I had to put up with that for a day until Preferred decided that the modem I was connecting to had died, and it was time to move me to a different one, which fixed the problem.
While I was on vacation, it also turned out that Preferred totally messed up my DNS. I have asked them many times to delegate the kite.preferred.com domain to me, and I'll handle the DNS myself. Strangly, I've never gotten a reply to any of my emails talking about this. /dev/null? I dunno. I guess Preferred feels they have to remain in control. I just wish those clueless morons understood the things they are in control of! The only bright point here is that I have an account on their dns machine, so every time they mess up my DNS, I can look at how it's configured, and send them a cut-n-paste note telling them exactly what to change to fix it. I'm thinking of writing a cron job to automate that. But they still have a failure rate of about 25% following the instructions in these notes.
So after these two problems got worked out, I had one blessed day of no problems, then exactly 24 hours later, I found that I was receiving no data from the internet. Conversations with some tech-support droid who was clueless of ISDN and computers in general (but I didn't have to tell you that) followed, as did a few hundred tries at reconnection to their modem. At present, I seem to be connected, but since this is just by luck, I expect I'll be tearing my hair out again in a few hours.
Now I know the cause of the problem in the last entry. Preferred set up a comm server that allocates my IP address to some other person. Mass havoc results. I've left preferred a number of nastygrams, I hope they have a pleasant morning listening to me rave at them about their gross incompetance.
I came downstairs this morning (err... afternoon. Whatever.) to find that my computer had ben off the net for 4 hours. I called preferred, spoke with the phone firewall, and was referred to Rick. But, after half an hour of calling his number, I discover that Rick isn't there. I finally spoke to Dan, who said that their isdn line was messed up, and put me on another isdn modem.
Well, that's fine, except this is the Isdn Modem From Hell, the one that drops exactly 10% of all packets on the floor. Anyhow, I lived with that for an hour and though I'd try connection to the good modem again (If it was back up). No dice, so it's back to the IMFH. Except -- what?! -- my login and password are no longer correct.
So, I try dialing up with a plain analog modem. Seems preferred's system still doesn't know I exist. And I'll bet this is affecting all of their customers, too. I eventually got through to another phone firewall. This one was amazingly clueful -- he knew Rick wasn't there. He didn't know where Dan was. He knew that the RADIUS server was messed up and noone could get one. In short, he knew everything he needed to know, except for how to fix the problem, or how to get in touch with anyone who knows how. I pity the guy -- 'cause I'm in the exact same position, dammit!With my modem still crawling along at 300 baud, I'm preparing to leave preferred. At 2 this afternoon, I gave them the ultimatum: fix it by the end of today, or lost me as a customer. I still haven't heard from them. I've called up a few more times and gotten a runaroud by anonther phone firewall, who said he'd try to get in toch with Rick. At this point, I hope Rick doesn't call - I'm looking forward to ending this saga.
Finally fixed my connection - I'm still leaving the bastards.
I've left preferred, and gone to xtn.net. The saga is complete, and what a relief. It's early in the game to tell, but indications are that Xtn doesn't suck. They have at least 2 techs with more experience than me, a receptionist, of all things (what an idea!), and they even seem to be there during working hours. Service has been fast and considerate, and they seem like all around nice guys.
Months later, I've relucantly left xtn, not for any problem on their part, but becuase I've moved. Xtn has been my best ISP ever, although my new ISP (idiom.com) isn't half bad.
In one of those strange twists of fate, preferred was bought out by xtn recently. Xtn's sysadmins have moved on, though, and in the end it's the sysadmins who really matter in a good or a bad isp.
I understand Dan has passed on. Luckily, I have a strong alibi..
Interested in what others have to say? Wakko's pissed at ISP's.
I welcome your comments on this webpage, and on your run-ins with Preferred Internet, Inc. Use the form below. Anything you send me is fair game for being added to this page, but I will keep you anonymous if you desire.