whee router fun

[maradydd]

Linksys and DSLExtreme, you guys both lose at having clueful tech support. I picked up a WRT54GL last week for the house, because I'd like to have a router I can hack on, and finally got around to setting it up a couple of days ago. Well, trying to set it up, anyway. My ISP helpfully offers 5 simultaneous DHCP connexions (for those people who are brave enough to trust software firewalls and a plain old switch, I guess), and I had been tempting fate by running edmund (my OS X laptop) directly connected to the DSL modem. I figured it would be trivial to swap in the router and finally get my VoIP box set up and everything.

Try as I might, the router would not pull an IP. "This sounds suspiciously like a MAC locking issue," said enochsmiles, and I concurred, but cloning my laptop's MAC address did nothing. So I called up DSLExtreme and spent probably an hour on the phone with a ditzy tech who seemed to think that OS X was the problem (uh, no, my laptop can talk to the router just fine, the router cannot talk to your service) and that rebooting the machine would help. Uh, no. So I tried Linksys, whose second level tech went so far as to insist that it was an operating system issue and that he wouldn't be able to help me unless I did the troubleshooting from a Windows box. WTF? Way to fail to understand the issue, you fuckwits.

At this point enochsmiles asked if any other boxes were working, so I tried alfred (my Debian laptop) and aeryn (his PowerBook) -- both no. Suddenly this looks a lot more like a MAC address issue than anything else. Call up DSLExtreme, ask them "hi, are you guys using MAC authentication, and if so can you reset mine so that my router will work?" The tech flat-out insisted that they were doing nothing of the sort, and I said "fine, give me a second-level tech who knows what he's doing." No second-level techs available; he said someone would call me within an hour.

Meanwhile, I hooked edmund back up to the modem and glanced at my account page with DSLExtreme, intending to double-check their terms of service and see if there was anything hinting at what they were actually doing. Suddenly, for the first time I noticed a helpful little box labelled "My Connections". Apparently you have to manually enable simultaneous DHCP leases past the first. Again, WTF? I can see no good reason for this, and even less good reason for (1) their knowledgebase not to mention it or (2) their first level techs not to know how their goddamn system is set up.

Now I'm wondering if that second-level tech will call back, so I can tell him to let me talk to management and bitch them out for not giving their first-line techs the info they need to do their jobs. But, hey, I have net in the house and my VoIP box works again. Yay.

Comments

[vatine]

Yep, anyone taht shows clue in first-line support tends to be moved away from there, because they're, like, valuable and tech material and stuff. So, essentially, you face a script-reading monkey with (hopefully) decent grasp of English.