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Chris Siebenmann

It has been '0' days since Bell Canada broke my DSL Internet, apparently by moving wires around. Bonus points: massive static on my voice line (which uses the same wires). Extra bonus points: Bell Canada is apparently now claiming to my ISP that it absolutely must be my DSL modem and they won't move a finger until it's replaced.

Do you know how hard it is to get new VDSL2 modems in a hurry? They are entirely unfashionable these days. (New, because a used one might provoke Bell again.)

It is decidedly inconvenient that Toronto weather for the next two days is "rain and more rain", because otherwise there are any number of people flogging off old DSL modems that I might pick up as spares. But that would require biking. In said rain.

Petty irritations, I know.

It's sort of convenient that earlier this year I worked out how to play FLACs that are contained inside a ZIP archive under Linux without unpacking the archive[1]. Translation: playing Bandcamp downloads directly, without streaming them over the Internet. But on the other hand, streaming music uses hardly any bandwidth these days by comparison to other things. Still, I get immunity from network blips or the other end downgrading things.

1: mastodon.social/@cks/112837654 ('mpv' and/or 'celluloid')

My DSL signal and voice phone line static problem(s) would be less irritating if they were consistent instead of intermittent. On the other hand, the DSL signal problem going away is pretty convenient for actually being on the Internet.

I am not impressed with Bell's problem tracking systems, though.

On the one hand, my DSL signal problems continue to be both irritating and intermittent. On the other hand, the whole thing has caused me to wire up syslog and SNMP for my DSL modem (so I have records of what it's doing), and also figure out how to (temporarily) set its time, so syslog logs have vaguely useful timestamps.

(Yes, the cure for that is to force syslog timestamps for it to be in received local time. But meh.)

@cks Many tech's don't care so they might have broken something trying to wire up a new customer. I've even seen tech's break an existing customers connection to get a usable pair for new customer so they can close the job and go home, even though some other person has a broken line now. (That's someone else's problem.)

@purpleidea I've seen fun variations of that. Once, years ago, I wound up beinged connected to someone else's line, which I initially didn't notice because they had DSL service too and my third-party DSL provider was happy to take my connection from the wrong phone number/line/etc. (That was educational about the difference between 'DSL signal' and 'a PPPoE DSL connection', although it might not work in all DSL environments.)

@cks There's more than one reason I bought a spare VDSL2 modem, configured it, and put it on the shelf. Though I had in mind more helping debug things for the ISP than convincing Bell to do their damn job.

@cks As Pooh once said to Christopher Robin, we might go in your umbrella.