[Leaplist] Brighthouse or Embarq?

[John Simpson]

On 2007-12-12, at 1403, John Simpson wrote:
>
> i'm using brighthouse right now- they do offer higher bandwidth than  
> DSL, and you can call for customer or technical support 24/7. my  
> only complaint with them is that they don't announce maintenance  
> activities to their customers. they just cut the service off for ten  
> minutes to four hours in the middle of the night with no warning,  
> and for somebody like me who works from home at night, that's a  
> major interruption (it literally shuts me down for the night.) i  
> think if they were to set up a mailing list to announce maintenance  
> activities, it would help a lot- at least if i KNEW that the service  
> would be down on a certain night, i wouldn't promise to do mail  
> server upgrades for clients in other parts of the world and then not  
> be able to do them.

time to add to this. the brighthouse connection was "down" from about  
3.15am until 10am this morning. i have the word "down" in quotes  
because while it was happening, i was able to ping and traceroute  
anything on the internet by IP address, but i was not able to resolve  
DNS names (talking directly to the thirteen root servers, not  
brighthouse's DNS servers) and i was not able to connect to any TCP  
ports on any servers at all- even the ones i had just pinged.

when i filled out their contact form to ask what had happened, their  
answer was "We apologize, but we are unable to provide the information  
that you have requested regarding the outage that occurred this  
morning. We are sorry that we can not provide this information."

to me, this sounds like a filtering system which allowed ICMP but  
blocked UDP and TCP for some reason... like maybe they're recording  
the traffic, or logging the endpoints (i.e. keeping lists of what web  
pages you look at, who you exchange email with, who you talk to via IM  
programs, and so forth) and that server ran out of hard drive space.  
or that server was in the process of being installed and was mis- 
configured for a while...

i've emailed them back, explaining that this is the only conclusion i  
can thing of which fits the facts (ICMP worked but UDP and TCP didn't,  
and their outright refusal to provide ANY details) and offering them a  
choice to either explain what really happened, or to be added to the  
list of "suspicious" ISPs, who monitor and log their users' traffic.

i guess we'll see what happens, but as of this morning i wouldn't  
recommend brighthouse to anybody who values their privacy.

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| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
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