So today was the day my DSL modem showed up. Yes, I've been doing the 56K thing until now. Well, at home, anyway. Very fat bit pipe at work.

Anyway, I have two computers. The one that is my primary router is quite old, and runs two obsolete OSs (Redhat 7.2 and very occasionally Win98SE). The modem came with an installation disk for Windows. So I booted Win98 and went through the motions. Easy enough.

But now I wanted to get it working on Linux. I knew it should be fairly simple, but my OS is *really* old. And the dialup configuration is kind of a kludge anyway. So I needed to turn on the ethernet port I would be plugging in to, and then somehow tell the computer that was where it was supposed to look for the internet.

After some fiddling around, I decided to chance calling tech support. After waiting for about 15 minutes on the phone, I was given an answer that I flat out knew was wrong. "It only works with Mac and Windows; it doesn't work with Linux." I tried to explain that I new the automatic setup wouldn't work, but I wanted to know the information I might need to do it manually. "No, I'm sorry, the DSL doesn't work with Linux."

Right. Why couldn't I have gotten a tech support staffer with a clue?

Anyway, a few hours later and it's mostly working fine (on Linux!). The only glitch is that my ISP won't accept my outgoing SMTP messages. Something to work on another day.

 

Real tech support is increasingly being replaced by people that only follow scripts and have ZERO real training. Bottom line for the company is that a script monkey costs 10-15 bucks an hour (or whatever), and someone clueful would cost more like 15-25 dollars an hour and be more likely to demand benefits, etc.

I feel your pain

 

Well at least your CSR said it worked on pcs AND macs. Mine strictly said it didn't work for macs. I promptly discontinued my service right then and there when I figured out it by myself that it did work for macs and dsl was grossly slower the cable.

 

And cheaper. And I dislike Qwest less than I dislike Comcast. But YMMV.

 

I can't believe you even called to begin w/

 

I figured it would be unproductive. But there was always that chance that they would say, "Oh, here's a URL that describes everything you need to know. It's unsupported, but it should work." That's not actually too uncommon in the Linux world. For instance, many of the hardware vendors have exactly that response, and usually those "unsupported" processes work just fine.

 

Maybe I'm a slow learner, but ... I called them back! I wanted to know if my MSN account came with an SMTP server I could use for my outgoing mail.

It was a good-news, bad-news deal. Good news: The tech I talked to knew just what I was talking about and knew the answer. Bad news: No, they don't have one. Oh well. But he also knew that the service would not block SMTP, so I could send out "through" it without a problem.

In fact, I worked on this for much of the day and learned a lot about configuring sendmail, but I was never able to get anybody out in the real world to accept my messages. Damn spammers have to go and ruin it for everybody -- most mail servers assume anybody who is sending from a non-permanent IP address is just sending spam. I actually have a valid domain name, but it's not really associated with my DSL gateway, since that is a dynamically allocated IP address. If I wanted to pay for a static IP address things might be different.

But I seem to have managed to get things working again for now, anyway. We'll see if it holds.

 

Not that any of you really care, of course, but my ISP is running "Pop before SMTP" authentification. If I just use the POP3 connection occasionally, then my SMTP messages are accepted. Kind of a minor inconvenience, now that I know the workaround.

I don't usually use POP3 -- I've been using IMAP for a few years now. Much better system. They did have some sort of hack that allowed using SMTP without POPing when connecting through their own dialup line, but now that I'm not doing that anymore....

 

Most likely they're making $2/hr at a call center in India.

 

Capitalism at its finest!