What not to do when on the phone with tech supportFollow

Hehe. Learn something new every day.

First off. Apparently TWC decided to change all their DNS servers. More correctly, they removed ones they'd been using for years. No problem I thought, I'm using dhcp. Shouldn't be a problem.

Whups! It was a problem. Unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to some hairy smelly engineer at Sun, the OS I'm running on my unix box, while technically using dhcp, doesn't *really* do everything quite right. One of the things it doesn't do right is automatically update DNS based on info from the dhcp server. Go figure!

To make a long story short, I eventually figured it out myself (turns out you don't query the server directly, but the local client agent, and it only asks for a specific set of data based on codes specified in your configuration when it initializes dhcp on any given interface. In case anyone cares, you really do need codes 6 and 15. Apparently, no one at Sun thought they were important...).

In any case, I figured this out, but not before doing one of my funnier "doh!" actions in quite a while (and probably leaving the tech support guy at TWC scratching his head). See. I have a VOIP phone in my room, which I use to do team chat for games. It's conveniently right next to my computer, and my buddy who runs the server set me up to be able to dial out to most area codes. Sometimes, I forget that it's not a "real" phone...

So. When the clueless tech support guy, probably following his checklist, asks me to try resetting my cable modem by unplugging it, even though I *knew* that wasn't the problem (I just needed a DNS server number to put into a config file), I figured I'd just humor him and do it anyway. What could it hurt? I don't even want to know what the tech support guy thought when he heard: "sure. Let me just unplug this... click!".

Oops. VOIP does need a network connection to run. Sigh. Yeah. I'm a dork. But I'm wondering if this guy had a clue what happened? I never called him back, so he's probably right now thinking I unplugged my phone instead of the modem. Wonder if this'll be added to the "list" of things this guys had customers do that were "stupid"...?

Eh. Don't really care. But it was a funny moment, right after I did it and realized what I'd done. Dorky thing is that once I did it, the phone needed to reboot, and needed dhcp to do it (and needed to get a valid DNS server as well!). Hence me having to figure out how to fix this on my own...

well as you are posting, i take it you figured it all out.

yeah VoIP and unplugging dat cable was a big DUH *grins*

You mean he didn't see the forest for the trees? Impossible!

See? Succint=funny.

I see.



Seriously though, even if it is gbaji, why even bother including those first three paragraphs? Just, why?