Contacting Network Admins Of Large Internet Companies?

lisa asks: "I work as a sysadmin for a national DSL ISP. Unfortunately, we've recently found that @Home.com is not allowing connections to port 25 from some of our primary mail servers: this of course means that our customers can't send mail to theirs. I've called and talked to people in their tech support, and only after several calls have we been able to get them to acknowledge there may be a problem. The trouble is, I can't seem to get in contact with any network admins there. Even the tech support person I spoke with expressed less than hopeful sentiments about being able to get this issue escalated. Has anyone had trouble like this with @Home or other simliar Internet companies?"

"What is the best way to get in touch with a Network Admin or someone who actually can do something about a network issue in cases like these? It would be nice to know that just writing root@home.com would get to their systems department, but I was told all of that mail goes through support first."

Comments

NOC contact list

[zztzed]

You might want to look at this. It's a list of NOC contacts for many major providers.

I don't know how up-to-date it is, though.

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I had a problem with @home like this

[Nicodemus]

At the time I was working for a web site, basicly, and the problem we were having is that @home customers in san francisco couldn't get to the site. After talking to a few of these customers, I had a couple do a traceroute to our server, and somewhere in the middle of @home's network a split horizon (i think that's what they are called) happened. It was where the packet just kept getting bounced between 2 of their routers back and forth until one of them finally dropped it. This only happened to traffic destined for our little network. I called @Home and was escalated to the top tech, who finally believed me. Then I was called back by a sysadmin there who required a lot of convincing. So he finally acknowledged the problem and said that they would get to it. Before I left that company I don't think it had been fixed, but it might have by now. It actually seems like it was a problem with their RIP or IGRP config, so maybe when a router was rebooted it would fix it's tables. Who knows. But the short of it is that I got ahold of a sysadmin and nothing was done. So good luck when you get that far. The journey may still not be over.

-Nicodemus

I had similar problems with Netcom

[squiggleslash]

I recall suddenly being unable to email anyone with an ix.netcom.com address, being given a boilerplate message by the SMTP server to the effect that my email system was misconfigured and I should use my ISPs. The MX records for ix.netcom.com clearly pointed at the SMTP servers I was delivering email to, and after a lot of stress, including routing email via my ISP's email server (I normally get sendmail to deliver directly) and finding the same problem, contacted them.

There was a lot of hassle involved. Netcom, then owned by Mindspring, clearly had a massive wall between their system administrators and their support people, with no direct way of contacting the sysadmins. I'd email the support address, and get an email back from someone clearly too clueless to know what an SMTP server or MX address is, insisting the problem must be my end or with my ISP. In the end I basically had to persist, phoning their 1-800 number in the end, getting names of support staff involved, and following up every inch.

I found it tough. The more you point at RFCs and stuff, the more you look like, well, the sort of people you get on TV claiming you don't need a drivers licence because the states aren't constitutionally allowed to forbid you from using the roads or that banks are allowed to create money because of some legal loophole. The person you're talking to has no idea what an RFC is, or an MX record, or anything like that. All they can do is accept that you've tried it all different ways and can't send email.

In the end they put a ticket in with their system administrators, who knew exactly what the problem was and fixed it.

From what I can figure out, the problem was because my ISP's IP address block is smack in the middle of BellSouth's (BS providing the connectivity), and Mindspring had configured the Netcom servers only to accept email sent directly from BellSouth's email servers, not from BellSouth customer IP addresses - my bellsouth.net account continues to this day to have the same problems but I'm buggered if I'm going through the hassle again. This is stupid anyway, but of course as the complaints were coming from people who deliver their own email, or from people with ISPs in similar positions, of which there are probably relatively few, few enough for it to look like most email is being delivered perfectly and therefore it "obviously" being a problem on the deliverer's end.

Why they did this is anyone's guess. I think, given the problems I have being let onto any IRC servers these days, that a lot of the hacking being done at the moment is being done from Bellsouth.net addresses, but I haven't read anything anywhere to back that up. Mind you, the problems emailing ix.netcom.com started a year ago, whereas EFNet's clamp down is at most 4-5 months old.

My advice? To be honest, just keep trying, and keep piling on the pressure until they relent. Send email to the support addresses. If you don't get a response, start calling - preferably calling the @Home customer's 1-800 support line. Keep calling, get names of support people, and don't stop until the situation is resolved.

If Mindspring hadn't finally relented and put in a ticket to their system administrators, I'd probably have used Usenet or something similar to start embaressing them, a little log of an nslookup, telnet to an SMTP port, and then this posted on an appropriate newsgroup. But as it was, it got fixed.
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