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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.
So what's the big deal? Us Linux users have been there for quite some time, and we're still alive. :)
AOL, you couldn't have done it to a nicer monopoly!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Road Runner doesn't "Support" Linux either, but that hasn't stopped me.
Frankly, I am tired of hearing what operating systems are supported by Internet service providers. I am going to install DSL on a Linux box tomorrow night -- knowing that others have this working in the area, and was told by technical support with Southwestern Bell that this is impossible. Impossible! They did not say they wouldn't be able to support me -- they simply lied and said it would not work. How many folks with Macs or Windows XP are being told that they will not be able to use services? I am fairly sure if you pop in the CD you got from your ISP with Netscape 4.05 or IE 3.0 everything will work just fine on XP.
Click here or here.
I have no clue why this is news. It took months and months for my ISP (SWBell) to "support" Windows 2000, a long time after it was released. Their client software wouldn't work on Win2k, and even though the maker had released a new version of the software, their staff wasn't trained on it. So oddly, if you could find the newer software by tracking down the manufacturer (who gave it away free), it would work fine.
This is really no big deal. Lots of companies won't support XP yet. Even Symantec's pcAnywhere doesn't support XP yet. It's like this with every new operating system, and the way it will probably always be.
What's your damage, Heather?
...but my local roadrunner said that they'll do their best to help. They say that if you follow NT instruction, it works fine, and they already have a large userbase of XP users without any problems.
Linux, on the other hand, isn't supported, and most of their techies have no idea how to help out. Not that its tough (standard DHCP connetion), but the average user would be better off with XP than Linux right now (sorry if that sounds trollish, but I don't think this article is "news". Anything that can hurt MS in the least is being published now-a-days).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Non-Official support is mainly a way so that if they can't help you, it's not their fault. It dosen't mean they _wont_ help. (save for the time you get the ass-much tech support guy on the other side who keeps insisting that you need to reinstall your TCP/IP stack because thats what his computer tells him you need to do, but thats another rant)
-paul
It amazes me that anyone would connect a home computer to the network without a firewall. RoadRunner works fine talking to a firewall and once behind that, you can put anything you want.
What's surprising is not that RoadRunner staff won't interface to XP, but that they won't do installations with a firewall in place. Every time they want to debug something, they ask me to disconnect my firewall and attach my machine directly to the net. Of course, I don't. Fortunately, in my experience, the main thing that goes wrong with RoadRunner is that it "gets confused" and usually just "unplugging your cable modem for twenty minutes" has fixed me every time. Sigh.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
This journalist spoke with two people at AOL/TW, and he got differing opinions. AOL/TW knows that they will need to support XP in order to keep (and expand) their customer base. I highly doubt that they've sat around for the last 6 months and said, "We're going to publicly say that we won't support XP... That'll stop Microsoft's evil scheme to stay #1 on the Internet!" They just haven't finalized the support docs for their staff yet. Big deal, XP has been out for less than a week. If you go out and upgrade over night, you should expect that some things won't be supported yet.
My opinion is that this journalist just wanted to try and stir up more competition between AOL and MS. This article doesn't say that Roadrunner won't work on XP, it just says that they can't help if an end user has a problem. I've spoken with ISP techs that can't help me out with Windows 2000! Try to get Linux support from 90% of ISPs out there! No chance. This article is not worth the read.
Supported == Known to Work
Not Supported != Does not Work
This is a boring sig
XP? When you say "XP", what are you referring to? Word XP? Excel XP? Office XP
I think he means the "Athlon XP". Road-Runner only supports Intel chips from now on.
:)
Might as well say Windows 2000, its networking is the same. Why put fuel on the fire and tell them your running an unsupported product.
I dont tell the phone monkeys im running linux, I say yup, running windows, whats the IPs/settings.
In fact, I have to lie about what browser im running, what OS im running etc... No monoploy, Uh-huh...
Based on my experience with Road Runner, the best time to call for support is late at night (around 2 or 3am). I don't know if I've just been lucky, but there are no hold times and the techs seem to enjoy what they're doing.
As I stated in another response, I've gotten support for both Linux and OpenBSD by calling late at night. I had a guy walk me through setting up networking on the OpenBSD box... I had never tackled it before.
I called during the previous day to see if they could help. The guy kept asking me which version of Windows I was using.
"OpenBSD."
"No sir, like I said, I don't need to know what applications are installed, I just need to know what version of Windows is on your computer. Is it 98?"
"No, I'm running OpenBSD"
"Sir, click on the start button and tell me what it says to the left of the menu."
Geez.
load "linux",8,1
There's no dialing with RR. It's an always on connection. None of that garbage PPPoE dialup username/password stuff. (anymore) They did have a login screen, but got rid of it mainly to pacify all of the "alternate" OS users who where flocking to broadband.
RR is by far the best broadband I've had. I've had ISDN, DSL from 2 telcos, and @home. The news servers are pretty good, and I average about 15Meg per minute pulling from them. That's a LOT of porn!
load "linux",8,1
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 know that most of the /. types will cringe at this suggestion, but thats why you have a shitty box running win98 sitting around. All that is on it is a base install and the client software given to you by the DSL company (or cable or whatever). Then when you have a problem you plug in this "reference" machine and see what it does. If the problem is with the service the machine won't connect and Tech support will have no choice but to help you. Its what I do and I run all sorts of wierd OS's at home that my DSL company doesn't support and moreover says won't work on thier service.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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 -
They told me it was my problem for choosing an alternative opperating system, not theirs.
The key is to never, ever mention that you're running anything from whatever is the most common, otherwise they'll immediately blame your system. I recently had an incident where my cable modem couldn't connect to the local node (i.e. the cable/block-sync light was out), and upon calling and telling her that my cable light was out (pretty cut and dry issue) she immediately started walking through reversing the TP cable to my computer from the cable modem, Windows 9x steps to renew my DHCP certificate, checking if I could get to websites, etc. (all the time I'm pretending that I'm doing what she asks, hitting keys on my keyboard, etc. I actually have a FreeBSD firewall talking to the cable modem and doing NAT sharing for several XP/2000 machines, but of course I'm not going to mention that, and in any case the situation was brutally simple: My cable modem couldn't communicate with them. The bloody light doesn't lie. Anyways eventually she tells me to get out my Windows Me install disc (for the phantom Windows Me that I don't have installed) to reinstall some drivers at which point I exclaim "Uh, I really don't think this will help: The cable modem block-sync is out. That's the problem there". She replied "No sir, I'm communicating with your cable modem right now. It has an uptime of 5 days, blah blah". Well the funny thing is that since she kept insisting that she was talking to my cable modem, I had disconnected the cable from it about 90 seconds prior. I exclaimed "Well it must be a magic cable modem then because I unplugged the cable". There was silence on the line, and after a long pause she suddenly says "I'm sorry sir, it's my mistake. I must have entered a wrong number." and she setup a service call.
Anyways I found that pretty funny how some techs have that "list of things to do" and they don't listen to the customer. If I hadn't pretended that I was doing her Windows ME steps she'd have informed me that I was running an uncertified setup or whatever and that would have been that.
Since they say the wont help you with a problem if you are running XP, I have to ask...what happens if its THEIR problem.
/renew?"
When I moved into my house last year, I got road runner installed. When the install tech set it up, everything worked fine right off the bat, but he said (since I used the self install option) I would still need to call their tech support and register the serial # and Mac Address of the modem and/or my NIC (cant remember which).
That night I call up their tech support give them the info, they "put it into the computer", and say thank you very much. Everything is fine and dandy.
A day and a half later, suddendly my connection stops working. The modem has a block synch light (so its not the physical cabling), but I cant get any DHCP info (so I have no IP...not quite gonna work very well on the net). After playing around with my system I was sure it wasnt me, so I called them up. I got some tech support idiot who insists its my machine. I tell him everything has been fine and I double checked and I'm positive its their problem, but he doesnt believe me.
him: "Can you do an ipconfig
me: "I already did that, but sure...nope dont work"
him: "can you unplug the modem fo 60 seconds?"
me: "Already did that for 5 minutes, but Ill do it again....nope dont work?
After going through a bunch of this type of crap, changing settings, disabling internet connection sharing (which he ASSURED me was the reason I wasnt getting a connection, even though it had worked for more than a day), he finally wants me to uninstall and reinstall my TCPIP driver/NIC drivers.
him: "You are gonna need your windows CD for this. do you have it handy?"
me: "Well, I have it, but I just moved into my house 2 weeks ago and its buried somewhere in a box."
him: "Well can you go look for it?"
me: "Look, Im really pretty sure this problem is on your end"
him: "can you please look for it...Ill wait"
so off I go looking. 5 minutes later I have the CD, go through a bunch of crap with him. finally
me: "nope, dont work"
him: "well, now Im gonna need you to..."
at this point, Ive been talking to this idiot for 45 minutes, continually telling him the problem is on their end. Finally, I reach my limit and YELL at the guy that its their problem.
him: "please hold......(2 minutes later)....ok, Im gonna transfer you to another tech now and he will be able to help you:
When I get this new tech, I tell him the problem and why I think its on their end. So he pulls up my info
tech2: "I dont have any info on your NIC or modem"
me: "I called it in 2 days ago and they entered it"
tech2: "well its not there. Can I have it again please?"
me: "ok here it is....."
tech2: "hmmm, thats funny. your modem is still registered at the previous address."
I basicly spend an hour on the phone trying to convince them its their problem, and I was right. When their tech said he took/entered my info a few days back, he lied. After getting tech 2, I had service restored and was off the phone in 5 minutes. However, what if I had an unsupported OS. What would have happened? It was their fault, but they would have been unable to diagnose the problem and assumed it was my fault.
Yes, this is not a new thing on ISP.
My ISP, Bellsouth , did the same when Windows2000 was born. So it was funny to see the rp-pppoe.tar.gz on the "drivers CD" and the note on their site about not supporting Windows 2000.
Actualy, it makes the most sense for a serious company: Do not support a new product unless you have people trained in that product.
It should't be so "unusual". Actualy, the article would have been more shocking like this:
"YouNameIt ISP supports Windows XP even before October, 1st."
"We do not need no stinkin trainin', said Joe Sixpack, CEO of YouNameIt ISP. "
"Any bozo with a hand able to point-and-click should do fine with any Windows version. And if anything happens, well, the Client Agreement made the user to surrender any right to protest against us. Heck, in the Alient Agreement even states that we take no responsability even if the user cannot never connect to internet!"
I've done ISP support, so I can understand where they are comming from. For the ISP to support it they need at least one copy of the OS and for each person in their tech support center to spend time on it. It's hard to support at first, though most techs will at least try (at least the better ones will.)
I also see a lot of people saying how ISPs don't support *nix. There's good reason for that. There's a lot more involved in getting a *nix box set up to do dial-up than there is with other OS's. Time is money. The tech needs to get the call over as quickly as possible, and preferably in one call. That's incredibly difficult with *nix. You also have the problem of different kernel versions and modules that need to be in place, different software packages and versions, and a user (and tech) who actually can find all the files and know what needs to go in them. Mac and Win* are fairly simple, there is at least a similar interface between the various versions. That is nowhere near true with *nix. We handled *nix calls by saying "I can't help you, but here's the information you need. If you don't know where the info goes, check the HOWTO's."
Not only is configuration a problem with *nix, but so is troubleshooting. Having a user run around their system, checking files (in different places for different distro's and configuration setups) for things, having them go root for some things, that's beyond what most tech support people are able or willing to do. Do you want to lead someone on a chase through their system as root, changing various files, checking their kernel config, software config, and various other options, all over the phone?
Mac is easy, once you know how to do it. But, again, the techs need access to a Mac. In our call center we had one that we could use. Most of the tech's, though, couldn't answer Mac questions. When all they know and use is Windows, it's hard to teach them all the troubleshooting for another OS. There were a few of us who knew Mac's networking inside and out, and we were the ones who always took the calls.
Also, look at training costs involved. It's quick and easy to train someone to troubleshoot/config Windows. But teaching people *nix so that they can troubleshoot those problems is expensive and time consuming. Because of this, it becomes policy within a company not to support certain things. Mac, Win3.1 (yes, it is still in use), *nix, etc. are just too much for a company to try to handle. They stick with what is easy and is on a majority of the desktops. That's simply good business sense. Train other people to do more when you can, but you can never support everything and shouldn't try, either.
As I saw pointed out by someone else, it will be supported, but in a few months. We didn't support Win2k at first, but eventually we did. That involved me making a troubleshooting manual for it and distributing it. That kind of thing takes time, so it will happen, but it could be a few months.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Yup. I do the same... works for all kinds of other things, too... it can be a doorstop, a small table, a step stool, a footrest, a bookend, a replacement for a broken couch leg, hot plate, chair...
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
In the world of cable modems there are generally 3 types of "techs"
...big companies trying to save $$ often hire out some of the Telephone support to call centers, these callcenters don't always send their personnell for training, but just give them scripts to follow "if problem=a try b..."
1. the Customer Service/Tech Support person
2. the Cable T.V./Internet installer tech
3. the Computer/Network tech
If you get one of the first 2 you are most likely to have trouble getting beyond a script or simple proceedures that they have learned. These techs do not understand how computer systems and networks work, they only know how to do certain tasks that solve most problems. #3 is the guy who will be able to solve almost any problem.... the drawback is in order to get to #3 you usually have to go through one or both of the first 2, and there is good reason for that, techs of type 3 are in short supply and VERY busy.
...this is why as a cable company grows the tech support, if not taken care of properly goes to shit. in the early days the computer tech takes care of or oversees everything to do with computers, but eventually parts of that job get doled out to the installers and CSRs.
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
SO what's the big deal?
"Our staff is not trained on XP yet, so we can't offer support yet".
Fair enough
*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!")
in order to make sure that your connection is working they must be able to ping your computer. They make you take it down so that they can make sure that there is a connection to your modem and then to your computer (there are two seperate IPs, a local for the modem and a general one for the computer).
It's just part of the system. If you don't take it down that's fine for the most part but it isn't going to make a big difference if you do for just a moment while they run the test.
If you call up the call centre with Windows XP you don't really know if your going to get support or not.
...to best of my ability...
There are different levels of ability in the call centre, you might even get someone who might just flat out and say "We don't support XP, good bye."
Perhaps because they are not technically inclined, or perhaps because they don;'t want to waist the time.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
On Windows XP you don't even need this. Windows XP comes with PPPoE support out of the box, and it interfaces properly with your other ethernet cards and doesn't set up one of those annoying virtual ethernet adaptors that break everything.
PPPoE support under Windows XP is quite cool. It's just like dialing up on a modem, only of course much quicker. And it works out of the box with NAT and all. Most of the PPPoE applications cringe with NAT software (mostly because they want to make it as difficult as possible to do NAT).
And Qwest (being sued) has known about xp for a long time too. 260,000 customers of theirs have the "intel series" of modems, which also do not work with WIN XP as of yet. Intel, being the lazy fucks that they are, haven't written the drivers for the 2200 / 3200 yet. I don't blame them, a 2100 goes on ebay for a whopping five bucks, but manufacturers that dont write drivers for old hardware really, really piss me off.
Ironically, the intel 3200 does not work (period, it's not unsupported, it simply doesn't work) with VIA chipsets, but thats a conspiracy theory for another day.
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