Category: IT

If you ever have to call for tech support and the tech asks a specific question, just tell him the truth. He won’t get mad, and who cares if he does. The problem will get resolved a lot quicker.

Here’s an approximate chain of events from a call I had today.

Scenerio: Client is replacing a computer with a brand new unit. Computer is connected to a linksys router which is connected to a cable modem.

Problem: New computer cannot access the internet.

Before calling me: He’s called road runner to make sure the cable modem is working and they claim it is.

Now calls me: First I have him check to see what he has for an IP address. He’s got a 169 number, so I know he’s not communicating with the router which is doing DHCP. Next I have him check is connections and verify lights on the router and NIC. So far so good. I have him check his network properties. He tells me that it shows connected at 10mbps. Now that triggers something. 10? It’s a brand new computer right? Yes he says. There’s no way a new computer nowadays would ship with a 10mbps card, and linksys have been 10/100 for a long time. Then I ask the question, ‘Have you played with any of the cables on the router or cable modem?’ He responds with a quick ‘No, all I did was unplug the old computer and plugged in the new one’.

Now I know something still isn’t right, so I have him unplug the cable that’s going into one of the switch ports on the back of the router. At which point should give him the little computer with the red X in his system tray showing a disconnected LAN state. Nothing, it still shows as connected. How could this be, I ask. Long story short, somehow magically the cable from the NIC card was plugged into the WAN port of the Linksys and the cable modem was plugged into the switch portion. Hmmm, he didn’t touch the cables? Yeah right. I had him swap the cables, and like magic he was on the internet.

What a dragged out call for something that could of been solved much sooner.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been working with some high-end VPN equipment for a rollout for a client of ours. I’ve got one of the remote VPN appliances at home and am connected to the main one at our office. All in all it’s working pretty well, we’re just working out some of the bugs. The main feature needed was the ability to VPN tunnels alive even though all the remote sites are on dynamic IP internet connections.

Are initial setup wasn’t working very good, if the tunnel went down, it would never renegotiate without rebooting the remote appliance, which I’m sure the client would complain about if they had to reboot it multiple times a day.

With the help of tech support, we’ve created the tunnels using a different method, and all seems good for now, just seems a little slow.

Right now I’m working from home, and connected to the office which is pretty cool. Outlook/Exchange seems to run just fine, but one of our applications, Timeslips, takes over 4 minutes to load up over the VPN.

Since we need to roll this out later this week, we don’t have much time to work out the bugs, so my day should be fairly busy, again.