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.

Re:I'm back online

[BrookHarty]

I hate when people say goto the web when your service isnt working. Same logic at work, you call in, my network access isnt working, they say please goto the intranet website and fill out a support request form.

Poor guys

[NightRain]

I clicked on the link in the main article, and what are the words I see? "Overwhelming traffic to DotcomScoop.com has created technical problems leading to data loss. Recent news stories published on the site are lost for the time being. We will continue to provide updates as news warrants."

And this is before the /. effect hits them. I feel their pain :)

Real Slashdotters

[soulsteal]

A bonafide /.'er would add two lines to their HOSTS file:

• 64.28.67.150 slashdot.org
• 209.242.124.241 www.goatse.cx

Just to be fair to the trolls...

Excite@[home]

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidently (?) their building sign only has "Excite@" illuminated (the "home" portion is dark)... or maybe it's irony... sarcasm ? ^_^

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.

Somewhat working

[brocktune]

I changed DNS to the old Mediaone servers and I'm working again. My DHCP-generated IP address changed. Mail and news are not up yet.

Details on how to change are here. I assume other folks can replace the "ga" in the URL with their state or city name. There was an email sent out last week with more details.

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.

more dns #'s

[loraksus]

4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
provided to you by verizon and painfully easy to remember.

I'm still shocked about how this is happening in the USA. I mean, if it happened in some eastern bloc country, or some nation in Africa that is very corrupt / piss poor, I could understand, but here?
No offense to people in those countries, btw, it seems that the telecommunications infrastructure in most countries is beter than that of the usa.
I honestly don't understand why the service costs so much in the usa - In BC, Canada, 1.5mb down / 768 up, 2 static ip's for $40 a month CANADIAN! Here, I pay $55ish for a whole 768dn / 100k up, a dynamic ip and shitty ping. WTF. The Canadian dollar is worth less, so it stands to reason that the equipment costs more for the Canadian providers (because they take in canadian $, not us $) . . .

bah, at least my dsl provider looks like they will be in service for the next month or so....

Re:more dns #'s

[Spy Hunter]

Let's do a little reverse-DNSing, shall we?

4.2.2.1: vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net
4.2.2.2: vnsc-bak.sys.gtei.net
4.2.2.3: vsnc-lc.sys.gtei.net
4.2.2.4: i-will-not-steal-service.gtei.net

I guess that's the curse of having a memorable IP address...

Re:more dns #'s

[jallen02]

This gets said quite a bit. "Why does america xyz telecommunications service suck SOOOOO bad compared to abc countries xyz service?"

Most other countries in the world are smaller. In some cases you can service an entire country with a stupidly small amount of infrastructure. Here in the states we are a huge sprawling country and rolling out a service to the ENTIRE country at once is plain damn tough. It is huge. Infrastructure takes time. It costs MONEY a lot more money to deploy that much infrastructure. Then you have to look at the demand for such services. Even at 40 a pop.

I always get annoyed when people say "Why does'nt america have cool cellular networks like europe etc."

because america is a big place and it costs money!

... Just my .02.

Jeremy

Re:more dns #'s

[seanadams.com]

4.2.2.4: i-will-not-steal-service.gtei.net

Kinda stupid, actually. "Hey, we've left our DNS servers accessible to the public with no access control, but please don't use them unless you're paying us"

Most people configure their DNS servers to allow anyone to do a recursive lookup, because usually there's no point in using someone else's DNS as opposed to running your own or using your ISPs.

If they wanted to prevent the public from using their DNS servers, they would have one set of servers only accessible to their own customers, and another set accessible to the world, but which only served domains they were hosting. It's very easy to do, so it's silly of them to insinuate that we're "stealing" by using name servers which have been deliberately left open.

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!

Re:AT&T@Home getting re-connected HOWTO

[linzeal]

Oh man you idiot giving out your ip address like that I just hax0red you so . . .

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...

Bad, stupid move by Excite@home...

[kcbrown]

By turning off all their subscribers, Excite@home has effectively made an enemy of AT&T. Now that they've done this, I see one of two outcomes:

1. Excite@home will turn the services back on and take the offer they were given (if that's even possible!)

   or

2. AT&T will finish transitioning their customers to their own internal network and tell Excite@home to go fsck themselves.

So if Excite doesn't turn their network back on VERY soon, like in the next day or so, they're toast: AT&T has the cash and resources to manage their cablemodem subscribers themselves. Once Excite@home no longer has anyone hooked up to their network, their value will drop through the floor.

In short, even though the offer they were given probably wasn't very good (it was probably really bad, actually), now that they've shut down their customers they're dead. And if I were AT&T, I'd see to it that the floor was wiped with Excite@home in retaliation for screwing over my customers.

The only variable I know of here that can affect the outcome is the rate at which cablemodem subscribers bail out and go with some other service, for those that can. Since it takes at least a couple of weeks for most DSL connections to be provisioned and configured, the only immediate competition that AT&T will lose customers to is dialup, which isn't terribly comparable. So I think AT&T is pretty safe when it comes to keeping their customers for the next couple of weeks. As long as they can transition the vast majority of their customers in that amount of time, they're safe, and that means that Excite@home has managed to fsck themselves good with this idiotic move.

Re:Bad, stupid move by Excite@home...

[trenton]

Excite@Home actually didn't make the decision to turn off the modems. The bondholders that financed Excite@Home did. AT&T's offer was so low, they stood to loose tons of money if the deal went through. So, they filed a law suit and had a judge COMPEL Excite@Home to turn off the service. Their reason for this was that keeping the modems on was costing 6 million per week, thus causing the company to lose even more money.

It still remains to be seen if the bondholders will come out ahead. They claim that the assets of Excite@Home alone are worth much more than AT&T's buyout offer of $307 million. I guess they're waiting for a better offer.

But, to be sure, pissing off 850,000 people is sure going to lower the value of Excite@Home.

Photos

[seanadams.com]

Coincidently (?) their building sign only has "Excite@" illuminated (the "home" portion is dark)... or maybe it's irony... sarcasm ? ^_^

OK, I'll bite. I just drove up there.

Here are some hilarious images of this classic f**cked company.