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asavage
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Location: Oak Harbor, Wash.
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#16

Post by asavage »

I think we're working now (email functions, that is).

An hour on the phone with WaveBroadband's support got me basically nowhere.

The problem:
WaveBroadband's email help page (click on "Other Mail Programs") says that for outgoing mail (SMTP) when your computer is on wavebroadband's IP (ie connected to their cable network), no SSL should be used, and the port is 25.

However, it doesn't work here.

I spent many hours and could not set any mail client to send mail using those parameters. I was finally able to make Thunderbird & OE work by using most of the "Email while Traveling" settings (SSL: On, port 537 -- that's not a typo).

However, for the forum software, there's no built-in way to change the SMTP port nor use SSL for SMTP :( So, while I could send email from home using the "away" security & port settings, the forum couldn't.

I marshaled my reasoning (that wavebroadband's email config on their end wasn't recognizing that I am sending mail from one of their IPs) and called Support. I spent a hour with a very nice woman who seems to know her stuff. Of course, it wasn't long before she became out of her depth and then we got to the long "Can I put you on hold?" pauses, which I used profitably to load the dishwasher and do a little light vacuuming :)

Eventually, she had to give up. Basically, she's being told to tell me it's my email clients. I asked her to help me configure OE then, since it's supported. She couldn't: we'd already tried.

So I told her that that's a deal-breaker and we'd be calling on Monday to cancel the service.

Meanwhile, I'd spent hours Googling for a work-around (to make phpBB2 (this forum software) send SMTP email using SSL and on a port other than the default 25), and it looks like I've found it. Though it wasn't as easy to find as it should have been (it wasn't actually all that bad to actually implement, though).

[later]

I just tested Topic Notification, and it worked for me.

Please post here if you find new problems.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
plenzen
Posts: 891
Joined: 16 years ago
Location: Cochrane Alberta Canada

#17

Post by plenzen »

Topic Notification worked here as well.
At least for this topic it did.

I still have a couple PM's waiting in my OUTBOX for Andy but that could be he has not gathered them yet.


Thanks again Al

Paul
Retired Pauly
Problem with being retired is that you never get a day off.
1987 D21-J SD25 KC
KJLGD21FN
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asavage
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#18

Post by asavage »

Yeah, Outbox is PMs that haven't been read by the recipient(s) yet. Email problems don't affect that . . .

. . . except when someone has their profile set to send them an email when someone sends them a PM. Which most folks probably do.

So, Andy may not have gotten an email that he needs to log in and check his PMs. But he might get a popup notification next time he logs in (unless he's turned that off).

The options at the top of every page will still say "you have new messages" regardless, once he's logged in.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
Nissan_Ranger
Posts: 270
Joined: 17 years ago
Location: Canada

#19

Post by Nissan_Ranger »

I is here :wink:
And just in time to delete a bunch more spamvertisements. Seem to be the same websites; some kitchen company in the UK and some clothing store in Germany. I've put both those folks on notice that they are being spamvertised as they may not know about it. As such they have a chance and fair warning before I go after their ISPs to clean up their problems.

Andy
The old 'six gun' was as popular as the cell phone in its time and just as annoying when it went off in the Theater.
dn29626
Posts: 249
Joined: 14 years ago
Location: Anderson, SC

#20

Post by dn29626 »

Thanks for your efforts to keep us in-the-loop.
82 King Cab 2wd (nice)
82 Reg Cab (body damage)
Anderson , SC
Since Fall 2009
goglio704
Posts: 726
Joined: 18 years ago
Location: East Tennessee

#21

Post by goglio704 »

I had been deleting the spam in the areas where I had moderator privileges, but I guess I let it get ahead of me over the holidays. Oh well...
Matt B.

83 Maxima Sedan, LD28, 5 speed, white, 130k miles. My original Maxima.
83 Maxima Sedan converted from gasser, LD28, 5 speed, 2 tone blue, 230k miles
82 Maxima Sedan, LD28, 3 speed auto, 2 tone Gray/Silver, 140k miles
81 810 Sedan, LD28, 3 speed auto, rust, rust, and more rust!

2005 Jeep Liberty CRD
Nissan_Ranger
Posts: 270
Joined: 17 years ago
Location: Canada

#22

Post by Nissan_Ranger »

Hey, Matt... No worries. Spammers are scumbags and sometimes we have other things to do...

Andy
The old 'six gun' was as popular as the cell phone in its time and just as annoying when it went off in the Theater.
Nissan_Ranger
Posts: 270
Joined: 17 years ago
Location: Canada

#23

Post by Nissan_Ranger »

And speaking of spammer scumbags, looks like I've put a lil dent in the 'kitchen spammer' series; at least for the time being!

Andy
The old 'six gun' was as popular as the cell phone in its time and just as annoying when it went off in the Theater.
plenzen
Posts: 891
Joined: 16 years ago
Location: Cochrane Alberta Canada

#24

Post by plenzen »

Thanks Andy

Seemed to be a real run on them for a while.
Obviously a new crop of "Make Millions From Your Home Computer" types just finished their course to become wealthy in their pj's from home .

Morons !

P
Retired Pauly
Problem with being retired is that you never get a day off.
1987 D21-J SD25 KC
KJLGD21FN
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asavage
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Posts: 5431
Joined: 18 years ago
Location: Oak Harbor, Wash.
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Outage 15-16Feb2013

#25

Post by asavage »

Wave Broadband had some kind of failure of the cable broadband system that affected us from about 14:00 15Feb to just now (14:45 PST 16Feb). Its *appears* to be cleared up now..
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
User avatar
asavage
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Posts: 5431
Joined: 18 years ago
Location: Oak Harbor, Wash.
Contact:

#26

Post by asavage »

Another Wave Broadband outage. It died sometime last night, & I called them at 9am this morning. They scheduled a tech to come visit sometime today, though I was gone all day. My partner stayed home to meet the tech. I'm riding a ferry on my way home, & I notice that we seem to be back up now, though I don't yet know what the issue was.

If we get one or two more outages, I'll move back to Frontier DSL. They're slower & more expensive, but I had little trouble with them. I can live with slow, but not with dead.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
User avatar
asavage
Site Admin
Posts: 5431
Joined: 18 years ago
Location: Oak Harbor, Wash.
Contact:

#27

Post by asavage »

We continue to have outbound DNS query lookup errors (symptom: "Server not found" errors from Firefox), but I don't know, and I doubt, that this affects inbound requests, so I imagine that from "your end", things look and work fine.

Wave Broadband sent a tech last week. I didn't talk to him, but the feedback I received is that the signal is low at our house. He has a 60' piece of coax stretched from an access box at the curb to the side of our house, across the flower bed and lawn. The word I got was that he would be back the next day to resolve the low signal issue, and presumably remove the coax on the lawn. That was four days ago. Hmph.

I've implemented a "ping script" that runs constantly and logs errors to a file. It pings http://www.apple.com every five seconds. I have only seen three errors logged in five days, though we do continue to get those "Server not found" errors. The nature of the internet being what it is, those could be caused by a lot of things. Since I am not getting lots of failed pings to Apple's server, I am just blaming Wave Broadband's DNS. If it gets bad enough, I may switch DNS servers -- ie, I change the server that each Firefox looks at for DNS lookups. This would be a lot easier if I ran my own house DNS server. I used to do that years ago, but at some point the service broke in a way that nobody could help me fix, and I decided it was more trouble that it was worth once I got up to a dozen hours trying to troubleshoot it.

This is life behind the smoke-n-mirrors, I'm afraid.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
Nissan_Ranger
Posts: 270
Joined: 17 years ago
Location: Canada

#28

Post by Nissan_Ranger »

That was all greek to me, but I hope it isn't bad....?

Andy
The old 'six gun' was as popular as the cell phone in its time and just as annoying when it went off in the Theater.
plenzen
Posts: 891
Joined: 16 years ago
Location: Cochrane Alberta Canada

#29

Post by plenzen »

Andy
To you it was Greek

To me GEEK !

But
I have faith he will solve it.

:wink:
Retired Pauly
Problem with being retired is that you never get a day off.
1987 D21-J SD25 KC
KJLGD21FN
User avatar
asavage
Site Admin
Posts: 5431
Joined: 18 years ago
Location: Oak Harbor, Wash.
Contact:

#30

Post by asavage »

Wave Broadband CSRs have been much less than helpful. Seems to be par these days.

After numerous phone calls, I finally got someone to admit that they really wanted to bury a new coax cable, and their contractor is running three weeks out to do it. I blew my top. I'm not having the front lawn ripped up for a year for a new cable. We traded messages back & forth, and basically I told them that they're fired. Then they got all nice again, with a higher-up calling and asking if there's anything they can do to make it right, promising to not hurt our lawn too much, etc. We said forget it: the bad CSR experience killed them for us.

We ordered a Frontier DSL reconnect -- the outfit we'd had for years prior to dumping landline & DSL in January. We're supposed to be able to get 25/3 ADSL service up here (according to the banner at the remote DSLAM building at the bottom of the hill), but during ordering they said 15/2 was the best tier they could do. OK, the price is nowhere near competitive with Wave for similar service, but we're done with Wave, so -- go ahead, I said.

The fun begins.

In retrospect, and with a lot of reading online, I find that we apparently can't get / don't have VDSL here. In order to get 15Mbs service, Frontier's using "bonded DSL", which uses two phone lines (four wires) to send two separate DSL circuits to my home, and a special DSL modem that aggregates those to a single ethernet port.

So my existing DSL equipment is obsolete for this. OK . . . I let them rent me a DSL modem that does this magic. What's another $8/mo. for that, when I just blew $100 on the cable modem that I've only used for two months (a very nice Motorola Surfboard SB6121, DOCSIS 3.0) that I won't be using.

This bonded DSL service requires a tech come out. Understandable, since they don't know if out house phone lines are (still) wired for two lines. But the techs that know how to do bonded DSL are rare, so the soonest I could get an appt for a service call was ten days out. Sigh.

Meanwhile, the Wave modem is retraining several times a day, giving service dropouts. It's not the modem, it's the line signal.

The DSL install day comes. The tech does his thing at the TNI box, making certain we've got decent signal at the house interface, then he comes inside. I am prepared: I know where my telephone wiring meets the house's wiring.

Sidebar: modern houses aren't very wired: they're designed assuming that most things will be wireless (I hate wireless). This place was built in '96 and has exactly two phone jacks: one in the kitchen, one in the master bedroom. Any other phone is deemed to be wireless. Some previous owner had somehow grafted at least two other extension lines in, neither to my "server room". We're using very good older AT&T wireless phones, so the lack of house wiring didn't really apply until I moved in and had to get a hard line to the server room. I put two more jacks in the walls: one in the dining room (which we use as a home office, for the fax machine) and one in the server room. All wiring in-wall or in the crawl-space, very nicely done.

So, I know where to check for the second line, and I point to the places that I know about.

Tech's tone gizmo doesn't find signal anywhere. Sigh. He removes all three jacks from the walls (my two, and the original in the kitchen), makes a lot of "hmmm, ah" sounds, and after putting it all back together, realizes it's his tester that's bad. Sigh.

He plugs in the modem, looks at my table of servers, switchgear, and about a hundred LEDs blinking, and asks where to patch in the ethernet. I point to the lone laptop (old Sony VAIO) sitting at the end of the bench, and tell him to plug into that ONLY, and we'll run speedtest.net to verify line speed.

Meanwhile, a Wave Broadband tech arrives. He removes the cable from across the flower bed & lawn. Now, we haven't officially cancelled service yet, so I'm curious what's going on, but I'm fully occupied supervising the Frontier tech in my server room (no, I'm not leaving him alone in there!), so I send my partner out to the curb to find out what's going out out there.

Back in the server room, lots of trouble with the new modem, but he does eventually get it up and speedtest tells me that I'm getting almost 10/1. I complain, tech says that's what we're gonna get, as we're 7000' from the DSLAM.

Now, we were paying $20 less per month for 8/1 service and getting around 6/0.5. $240 more per year for about 20% better throughput is not a bargain. I send him away, vowing to think about this more when some emotion has drained off.

Everyone packs up & leaves, and I get some info about Wave from my partner. It seems (the tech says) that we don't need a new, buried cable after all, and tech doesn't know why we were told that. He ascribes all our problems on their team working in the area to fix up deferred Verizon maintenace (Frontier bought all of Verizon's landline business three years ago; we were Verizon before that). "All your problems with cable should be solved now." Uh huh.

I test the cable speeds, and -- loaded -- they're still crap. At least it's working, though.

Over the next week, I ignored the DSL line, because
a) it's slow,
b) The DSL modem is a POS, and
c) The cable service did actually improve.

Speedtest showed ping times under 10ms and speeds actually a bit over what was provisioned, which is odd because DOCSIS 3.0 doesn't allow that. But, it was working and I had other fires to put out, so I left it alone.

Until two days ago, when we had yet another 30 minute outage. And again yesterday. I called for that one, since it was during business hours. "Yes," the CSR said, "we do have an outage in your area. No ETA to fix."

It came back in 10 minutes, but last night the logs show more outages that lasted more than a few minutes, so today was officially "move back to DSL" day. Oh, goody.

I re-investigated the POS DSL modem. What is is, is an Frontier-branded Actiontec FV2200. Go Google "Actiontec FV2200". You won't find any info on it that's useful. No manual. No service guide. No "Quick Start". Nothing. It gets better.

This thing, like most appliances these days, has a built-in web server that you use to configure it. And, it took me two hours to discover: that web server doesn't work with Firefox. Can you imagine? Not using standards-compliant web code in an appliance? It wasn't obvious that the browser was the problem, but this thing just would not configure -- and it would not fail to configure in a repeatable way -- until I switched to IE. Eventually, I came up with a set of port forwards that would work.

Switching from cable broadband to DSL broadband: For consumer users of broadband, this ain't so hard. On my house router, I literally unplugged one cable (to the cable modem) and plugged it to the DSL modem. The house router is smart -- very smart -- and it discovers all the stuff it needs all by itself in about 45 seconds, and suddenly the house is now on DSL instead of cable internet.

But.

I have lots and lots of outbound services, and these have to be reconfigured now that they're on a different network (ISP). The worst one is this forum. It has to send email every time someone has subscribed to a thread (Send Email when a thread is updated), or one user emails another. And, as I don't run my own mail server (not in the cards: this is one area where not being completely up-to-date can kill your network and make your ISP and the feds very angry with you), I have to tell this forum software to use my new ISP's mail server. And the things that this forum software wants to know are not always things that your ISP wants to tell you (or that its CSRs even know exist).

That was about three more hours this morning/afternoon, and four phone calls to Frontier to get sorted.

As I like to say, "It seems to be working now."

It's definitely time for lunch. TTFN.
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
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