Some People @Home, Some Not @Home

11thangel writes: "Dotcomscoop is reporting that Excite@home has released a statement saying that they have discontinued service to AT&T, as it's certain negotiations will be fruitless. All others are still at the bargaining table. Earlier statements indicated that an example would be made out of one provider, AT&T being the obvious target. Everyone else keep your fingers crossed." There's a Reuters story about AT&T being unplugged. Various submissions have noted that some people who still have connectivity have lost their DNS servers. Just add "64.28.67.150 slashdot.org" to your hosts file and you should be good to go. :)

Comments

I'm back online

[XBL]

I'm here in Iowa (under AT&T @Home), and my DNS has been down all day. It came back up an hour ago.

My mail server reports that my account doesn't exist :-(

Overall, I am impressed how AT&T has moved all its customers off Excite and onto their own network... I dunno how they did it.

Re:I'm back online

[trenton]

Not all customers have been moved. I'm in Berkeley, CA on AT&T@Home and I'm totally down. Can't ping from inside or outside the network. It was working when I went to bed at 5:30a but stopped working by noon when I woke up. (Civ 3 sleep pattern.)

I called their 800 number. Their recording said I'd be back up in 7 days. In the meantime, I'll receive 2 days of credit for every day I'm down.

Re:I'm back online

[aka-ed]

Overall, I am impressed how AT&T has moved all its customers off Excite and onto their own network... I dunno how they did it.

Not all their customers...yet. Here's the latest on the migration plan.

I think I'll be OK

[SumDeusExMachina]

I'm posting from a Comcast connection right now, and I've heard various unconfirmed reports that Comcast has been frantically preparing their own backbone network over the past few weeks in preparation for exactly this kind of scenario.

The only thing I'm really worried about right now is losing my e-mail account and having friends get their messages bounced before I can tell them my new address (whatever that may be). It's almost as bad as going through a change of area code with the phone company, only here, the grace period is a matter of days.

dns isn't a crisis

[Restil]

Guys.. you can use ANY dns server on the internet pretty much. Might be that tinsy bit extra resolving latency, but the crisis is minimal.

-Restil

Re:dns isn't a crisis

[Pathwalker]

Pick a large university near you, and do a whois on them to see what their nameservers are.
They'll probably be a good choice.

@Home stay online HOWTO

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are one of the many disconnected today, here's something you can try to get back online:

If your modem still has sync (cable modem is showing online, or solid cable light - depending on what modem you have) but have you no connectivity, set your IP and host information in statically, but specify non-@Home DNS numbers.

This got me back online, so it might be worth your while to try it youself.

Comcast@HOME

[omega9]

I've got access through Comcast@Home here in Richmond, VA. We're still up but I keep the green lights in the corner of my eye.

Mail, News, and DNS servers are all still active on their original IPs. We have not received any official email from Comcast concerning the status of their network. They're either solid with their own network and backbone, or they're just waiting to die. Either way, I wish we would get informed.

Insight@Home is still up

[ryanvm]

Insight Communications has released the following statement today to their customers:

Insight, along with other cable operators, is currently in the tail end of positive negotiations with @Home. At this time, we fully expect to maintain connectivity for our Insight@Home customer base.

We recognize that certain communities in our Central Illinois service areas have seen an interruption in service this morning due to an @Home error. We are working diligently to correct this issue and expect full service to be restored today. We apologize to these customers for any inconvenience this has caused.

Thank you for your continued patience as we work through this issue.

dns problems? use another dns server then :)

[Indy1]

use this if your dns is not working.......

4.2.2.1 (vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net)

yes, thats a real dns server :) and a wonderfully easy address to remember as well. I use it as my secondary dns on the rare occasions when my isp's dns (san.rr.com) is choking.

Old Skewl MediaOne customers are fine

[Fnkmaster]

In fact the entire state of Massachusetts is probably fine. Strangely enough, I expected a rollover to new DNS servers and a new IP address when @home cut us off, but I think the network here in Massachusetts must largely be old MediaOne stuff that AT&T bought along with MediaOne, since my DNS servers (all 3 of them) and routes outward and inward appear completely intact. Email is probably out, but I've never used their email service so I wouldn't know. In fact, I wouldn't even know there was a problem at all if I didn't read /. (and CNN.com).

I wish we still had the old RoadRunner service - dunno why the hell AT&T BB dropped them for Excite@Home a few months ago - I guess because the rest of the AT&T BB customers are on @home, but I would gladly pay an extra 5 bucks a month if RR had jacked our rates up as I think they did with lots of their customers, if they had given us a good, solid reliable network. When will people get it through their thick skulls - I don't WANT content from my ISP, the excite part of Excite@Home was therefore useless to me and anyone who is halfway clueful, and the @home part had the worst service ever. What a moronic move on AT&T's part.

AT&T@Home getting re-connected HOWTO

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure it will help a lot of people, but this is what I just did to get reconnected. (Gotta feed the /. habit.) I'm in Fort Collins, CO if that's relevant to anyone. I haven't got a phone call from AT&T yet. But that may well be on account of the phone number they have listed for me is disconnected right now.

I did try sending out DHCP requests before doing this, but never got any replies. I wouldn't call this course of action exceptionally friendly behaviour. But the web sites AT&T listed in some email this past week are either unreachable or have nothing helpful.

• Listen for IP traffic coming over the modem. I did tcpdump -n -i eth0 and figured that the not-10.x.x.x router doing all the ARP requests was the neighborhood router.
• Make note of several of the IP addresses that the router continues to ask for and stop tcpdump. Also note the suspected router address.
• Set your IP address to one of the addresses from the previous step (see ifconfig(8) for help on that.) Add a default route through the router you found in the last step. route add -net default x.x.x.x )
• Hope someone follows up with a suggestion on getting DHCP working again or that you get a phone call from AT&T.

Gotchas:

• You may well be hijacking someone else's legitimate IP address. And quite possibly violating your AUP in the process.
• Your cable modem does need to think it has a good connection to the network. Look for a set of lights glowing steadily. Or if it has a web interface, look at that. My RCA cable modem has a status page at http://192.168.100.1/

Good Luck!

AT&T @Home reconnecting (CORRECTED)

[PureFiction]

First: Oregon and Washington are the only states that AT&T is able to connect on their new network at this time. See http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/011201/n01282093_5.html

If you are in one of those two states, you will notice that your cable modem is still synch'ed up, and that any site you try and reach will take you to this AT&T page:

http://transition-aid.attbi.com/attbi_welcome_page .html

This is because you are using the OLD @home nameservers, which AT&T has replaced to resolve ALL DNS lookups to their migration help site.

The fix is as simple as it reads in the Manually Configuring Unsupported Operating Systems page

1. Fire up a dhcp client. In my case, all I needed to issue was the command:

• $ dhcpcd eth1

2. Check your DNS servers (/etc/resolv.conf) and remove any of the old @home servers. The new IPs I got were:

• 204.127.198.4
  63.240.76.4
  

3. If you have any machines inside a NAT network, you need to update their DNS server lists as well (unless your gateway is set as the DNS)

4. Change your outgoing SMTP server to mail.attbi.com instead of the *.home.com host.

And that should do it! I was actually surprised how easy it was to get back online after they made the changes. I was dreading bringing out the old 56k modem again.

Lets home the remaining states get their access back soon as well...