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Road Runner Doesn't Do XP
PerlStalker writes: "Internet News has an article up that mentions, among other things, that Road Runner (owned primarily by AOL/TW) will not support XP. From the article: 'Road Runner, the second-largest cable Internet service provider (ISP) in the nation with more than 1.4 million subscribers, does not support the controversial new operating system (OS) for its customers and will not support its use on the cable network.'" Note that this doesn't stop customers from connecting to Road Runner from XP systems, but until their staff is trained specifically, Road Runner won't help them with technical problems arising from that combination.
I called Rogers in Canada (Ontario) for help with a connection problem from a machine with Windows XP on it, and even though the problem had nothing to do with Windows XP, they refused to help me because I was using an unsupported operating system.
Funny thing is, I called back a few days later, and the guy helped me. I mentioned the earlier call and he told me that they weren't going to support XP, but then Future Shop (a big PC retail chain in Canada) started shipping PCs bundled with the Rogers service and Windows XP.. and they had to start supporting it.
He said they got a few sheets of paper with some screenshots and that was it - limited support, but still, better than being told to go away.
Funny thing is, XP's TCP/IP support is fairly well set up to help the tech support guys - if you go into the properties for the network connection there's a tab that's got a summary of all the connection's settings and a "Repair" button that resets the interface and renews the DHCP lease..
- Steve
I happen to work for Time Warner doing Road Runner tech support. Right now, we've only had preliminary training on XP, so the people who don't have experience with 2000 and/or XP wouldn't be of much help to you. Others (like me) will give you as much support as possible.
Another factor affecting our users is the USB driver situation. As of yet, Toshiba still hasn't finalized their XP drivers for their cable modems, so our users are having problems getting their USB connections setup (the Win2K drivers are for the most part compatible with XP, so it's not a huge issue). With 3COM, they don't even produce their cable modems anymore, so I'm not to optimistic about an XP driver being released. Basically, if a customer calls me wanting to get Road Runner installed and has XP, I tell them to get a network card (which is a good idea anyway).
I mean, technically we don't "support" networking. That doesn't mean you can't network your computers. All it means is that we don't do it for you and we can't help you troubleshoot them. However, if somebody calls in with a networking problem, I'm more than happy to help them to best of my ability (that's just me, other coworkers of mine will end the conversation with, "We don't support networks"). I'm the same way when it comes to older computers that don't meet the requirements to run the automated installation, Linux, etc. If I can help you, I will.
All in all, we support XP, it's just that you won't get the same level of support that you do with Windows 9x.
- chuckx | Charles K. Lee II -
- chuckx at cold-sun.com -
- http://www.cold-sun.com -
By this time I'd already debugged the problem, both from inside and outside and knew exactly which of their routers was misconfigured
Eventually I bit my lip and borrowed a windows box - went thru voicemail hell, then had to be handheld through "are you sure you typed in you IP address correctly" "but I tell you your router needs it's tables fixed" proccess at least 3-4 times before we got to "I'll refer you to my 2nd tier support - they'll call you on monday" (they didn't - in the end I was down 6 days, up a day down 4 more days before they fixed the problem - I did the telephone hell thing 7 times before stuff came back)
Anyway one thing I realised - the people you call at the phone company when your line goes down know NOTHING about networking
It's pretty sad when your only usefull options for net connection consist of "the phone company" and "the cable company" - remember when you used to have a local ISP - and you could talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing
*sigh*. I love it when people write conspiracy theories when it's really just a standard Dynamic DNS client that is poking around on the network.
Once again, this is a cool idea that Microsoft has implemented if your corporation uses nothing but Microsoft servers. (Note: this is the same dynamic DNS that is used by many websites to give you your own domain name, so you don't have to have a Microsoft server to support it. However, most regular DNS servers do not have this option enabled.) The dynamic DNS option is enabled by default, however, in Windows 2000, and it causes a waste of network services (to the point of becoming a DOS attack on a company's DNS servers) when those DNS servers do not support it. Here is more information (that I wrote when researching it for my company):
Windows 2000 supports something called Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which lets clients automatically update their own A records. This means that a DNS server supporting Dynamic DNS would be almost completely self-maintained, as whenever the computer connects or disconnects from the network, it adds/removes its own records. It basically completely eliminates the need for static IPs (except for things like web servers and such that touch the outside world.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft, in its blind Microsoft-only world, made Dynamic DNS registration turned on by default on all Windows 2000 clients, even in companies without a dynamic DNS server. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic on the network as every time the computer connects or disconnects, it sends a little message to the DNS server. I've even been told (without proof) that it sends a request to every DNS server on its list, possibly upgrading the request all the way to the root server if it doesn't get its way with the first server on its list.
This had a lot of UNIX admins frightened about job security (my take: if you're sitting there all day updating DNS records, you better find some new job skills anyway) and it has evolved into a fascinating topic of research for me. Some pretty good takes on it can be found here:
(Yale: Making UNIX DNS servers and Windows 2000 play nice)
(eWeek article from 1999 discussing Windows 2000 DDNS and the impact it has on UNIX DNS servers)
This is really interesting because it's one small facet of the many ways Microsoft is subtly pushing UNIX around. ("Hey! We have this cool thing implemented in Windows now! Fire your UNIX sysadmins and throw away your UNIX servers, because our servers are so much easier to maintain!")