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Most @Home Customers Still Connected -- For Now
Mansing writes: "There may be hope after all, according to this update from the Washington Post" In short, a reprieve for many @Home customers, with negotiations ongoing between @Home and the major cable companies with which its service is offered -- watch for updates here. (AT&T broadband customers, though, will be moving to another service -- AT&T dropped out of the negotiations to keep @Home for their customers, and say that switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks.)
As a AT&T @Home subscriber, I thought it was pretty funny last night when they showed a commercial for AT&T broadband bashing DSL for having no guarantees of connectivity. Ha! I hope that'll show up on adcritic.com soon, I wanna send that to my friends.
:)
Thank goodness for Work T-1
I'm with Comcast, in Reston VA, and I did not want to go back to dial up. Comcast has been great. Always high speed, and I've never had any downtime. I downloaded RedHat 7.2 from linuxberg in < 1 hour over Thanksgiving weekend. (I'm not sure exactly how long it took, started download, got lunch, after lunch it was done). And they are fairly linux friendly. They don't "officialy" support it, but they use basic DHCP, so it's easy to connect. Just remember the "-h HOSTNAME" switch.
Best Slashdot Co
Get Excited@home with the drama of if you'll actually get the service you paid for or not. My local Circuit City is still trying to sell people @home...
My internet connection (AT&T@Home Dallas) died on Saturday morning, but it appears that the system is back up and running now, albeit still somewhat shaky. I'm actually fairly surprised at the speed with which AT&T responded to this.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
I have 2 things to say.
First, now that it appears that each cable company will take the responsibility for providing high speed internet over its backbone, perhaps cable internet will grow faster because the ISP side will hopefully have much less of a bankruptcy fear with the TV side helping fund them.
Second, and slightly off topic, someone needs to check Slashdot's clock. It's still stuck in Eastern Daylight Time, not Eastern Standard Time. Seeing stories with a time an hour ahead is kinda confusing, considering that the same times were accurate in early October.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I posted this in reply to the how-to in the other thread, but seems I might be better served to post it here or many people might not see it.
FWICT, the best way to get your service re-established goes like this:
-kill your dhcp client. Wipe your leases.
-re-init your cable modem:
(Unplug it, wait 20-30 seconds and plug it in)
-Wait for it to sync up. If it doesn't, keep trying.
-Once it resyncs, run:
tcpdump -i eth0 -lf dst port 68
This should list the dhcp replies going out
on your subnet. If you don't see them,
something is still not right. Try re-initing
your cable modem again.
-Start your dhcpclient
This should get you setup. Remember, if you're like me and were on a static number and blocking dhcp traffic you'll need to alter your firewall rule(s).
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
how the cable companies can still be selling the @Home service to people. A family friend just had the service installed this past Saturday. We still have service through Cox@Home right now, but talk about an under-handed business practice. They should at least put a temporary hold on new installations. I do see thier point though. You still do installations, blame @Home for any problems, but at the same time lock these people into Cable broadband rather than see them go to DSL. Even if this all means temporarily not being able to bill subscribers for service, just the installs.
It's the new alternative to at home. Not sure where "seventy" is.
Best Slashdot Co
I was an Excite@Home broadband subscriber in Washington state until around 6:00 AM local time on Saturday. (I was using the service at the time it cut out..) On Sunday morning I received an automated phone message from the local cable provider, AT&T, saying they were taking steps to provide a transition to their own service as quickly as possible. Sunday afternoon I received a second call claiming that they had re-established service in my area.
The claim turned out to be semi-true. The first hurdle turned out to be DNS. The nameservers specified by their DHCP servers have been totally bogus. The first two in the list of three are unpingable and the third replies to every request with a lookup failure / unknown host. So I pointed my systems towards an open, known-good nameserver run by one of my former sysadmin colleagues. Now I've got correct nameservice but it turns out that about two out of three addresses I try are unpingable for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Example: I can ping two hosts (call them A & B) across the country, both sitting on the same subnet. Host A answers, host B is unreachable. Traceroute to host B (from my machine) travels all the way to the gateway that's the last hop before either host, but packets going one hop further to host B don't seem to make the round trip while packets to host A do. (I have, of course, verified through a third host that host B is actually up and reachable, just not reachable from my home.)
Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday. Suspecting that I'd have to deal with a bottom-level tech-support script drone trained to reject any request from someone (a) running an "unsupported configuration", and/or (b) refusing to run AT&T's little "Click OK and we'll do a bunch of stuff to your computer's configuration and then we'll all be happy" Windows Configurator utility, which their message insisted I download and run to fix all my problems, I unplugged my lovable little Linksys box, connected the PC directly to the cable modem, rebooted into Windows and ran their damn configurator. It's not like I actually expected it to fix anything, but the only effects I could observe were about 90 seconds (!) of hard-drive activity, a mandatory Windows reboot, and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway. Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
Anyway, that's a summary of my experience with the transition so far. I'll post a follow-up after things settle out if anyone expresses interest.
I was a Charter@Home user for the past 2 years, quite pleased with my 1.5Mb/128k connection (not liking the 128k part too much) but since @Home/whoever shut off that network, I've been connected to what I think is Charter's Pipeline service at a whopping 128k/128k with 700ms response times to a CS server that was 68ms. Added to that, Charter is filtering ports 21, 23, 25, and 80 while leaving open the 139 port that @Home used to filter for MS File shares.
After talking with the billing lady, my bandwidth is supposed to return to 1.5Mb/128k and the filtering "may" return to what @home had within the next few weeks after they convert all the charter@home users to charter pipeline. Unfortunatly, I'm only able to get IDSL where I live, so 128k/128k and a dream of more is still better than 128k/128k and no hope for improvement with DSL.
1) Their support are not answering the phone
:)
Be kind, they're very busy right now. Wait a little.
2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.
Wait a while. Things will settle down. My IP address has changed many times since saturday morning. If you need a static IP to run something against the AUP, maybe you need a new ISP anyways.
3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.
I haven't seen anything like this. Do you have any references?
4) Their DNS service has been very erratic
It was. It's working now. I couldn't get any of the DHCP assigned DNS IP's to work. Now they do. I think they updated the DHCP well before actually turning on the DNS servers. Oh well. Get over it. If you want DSL; you can go ahead and do it. I however, as well as everyone else I know, has found the short service interupption more than acceptable.
This is not the sort of crap I want to be paying for and I am actively shopping for a replacement (I.E. DSL). I expect any other user who wants to do more than play with the latest microsoft browser will be doing the same and dumping AT&T as soon as possible
What the fsck are you talking about? You think maybe throwing in some mention of Microsoft will get you modded up or make you look cool? What do you need to do thats so goddamned important that you need a static IP? And what in the freak does a browser have to do with your ISP? That's not rhetorical.
So, yes they made some big changes. No, that's not fully exculpatory for the service interuptions. However, they've declared that it will be taken care of.
Come to think of it... there was a new AUP a while back that you had to opt-out of in writing. It's been in effect for quite a while. Maybe you should check your mail.
Moderators: If you have to look up any of the terms I've used, don't moderate me. You're probably confused. Read the Moderator Guidlines before doing anything drastic.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I posted this in the last @Home discussion, but that was after about 450 posts so it basically got lost, so here it is again.
.org and .com all seem to be taken, so its hard to say what your email address could end up being.
I actually just had a chat with a Comcast rep at a local technology show and it looks like that if your running Comcast@Home you might be in for a significantly better ride than the other providers have partnered with.
Comcast has been working on their own broadband cable network for a bit of time now, partly anticipating the demise of @Home as well as the issues rising out of the severe limitations that @Home put on commercial deals that Comcast wanted to pursue. Originally planned to launch in April 2002, the Comcast network, currently codenamed 'JumpStart', has been pushed forward to a potential launch January 1st 2002, assuming everything goes well. Due to the accelerated timetable there may be glitches in the initial rollout, but frankly intermittently buggy cable (assuming it will be fixed in the near future) is better than dialup in my opinion.
You will however lose your @Home email account as well as any stored messages or address book so back them up as soon as possible. Comcast will provide email services once their network is up and running. What the final name of the program I can't attest to, jumpstart.net
Obviously this is all from one source, though a Comcast representative, its best to avoid taking all this to heart until there is a final formal announcement as to their plans. I do know that Comcast@Home is up and running as of mid-day today. For how long... who is to say.
forma3
What do you expect for $40.00/month? Bandwidth is expensive and there is no way around that. Might as well get used to it because you won't be getting multiple T-1s for dial-up prices.
Ummm...why do I feel like I am feeding a troll?
Oh, well, here goes:
No shit, sherlock...the point I was making, and if you had read the article and some of the other post in this topic was:
When speeds down/up go from 400K+/200K+, get capped uploads of 400K+/128K+ then to 400K+/12K-.
That quite frankly, sucks the big one.
The 128K cap was understandable...the 12K cap was fraudlent...or at the very least a deceptive practice...that "oh, we meant BITs, not BYTES"...uh, huh. (this is what I got from the home office in California).
But now, the up/down is ~ 12K'ish no matter what.
I'm just pointing it out to see if anyone else has the same/different experience.
You pointing out to me that I'm not going to get a T1's speed for 40 bucks a month is deserving of a resounding "DUH".
I'm saying: Perhaps this is why they went under (amongst other reasons) "YOU/I/WE pay the same or more $$$ for a service and get less and less as time, and now a "switchover" (more like a fuckover, IMO) to different service.
40 bucks a month for Dialup speeds? Please.
Now, please be aware that I *know* there are going to be issues such a these.
Shortly after posting my original message a friend of mine called and asked my opinion...
Well, I repeated the same subject line:
"We are not impressed, we are not amused".
Essentially I am well aware of what the "system" is capable of...and I am not getting even a tenth of a percent of that.
Put another way, sir, if your salary was reduced to 1/100 its current status...I suppose you would not mind if your boss said...well you can't expect us to pay you that well in this economy, can you?
Comprendez?
Salute,
Moose.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Well, look at their 2000 10-k (it's a PDF). I haven't read through most of it, but the financials are pretty disturbing. $1 billion in debt; negative cash flow 2 years running (-$125.9 million in 2000); $9 billion accumulated deficit; $7.4 billion net loss in 2000 ($18.73/share). Even the auditors report mentions a "substantial need for additional funding" and "substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern."
I don't want to see them shut down any more than you do, but given the financials, I don't blame the creditors one bit.
I hear you. About the only thing my @home email address is good for is to test my spam filters. I never gave this address to anyone -- and yet I have about 30 messages a day coming from spammers. 1 look at my mailbox about 3 days without checking mail should be enough for anyone to open up the death penelty on Spam. And for those people that actually pursue these "free vacations and penis enlargment" offers (in turn making it worthwhile to the spammers to keep sending all this garbage) you can all stand in line with them for the chair (if there is any justice in this world).
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
What do you need to do thats so goddamned important that you need a static IP? And what in the freak does a browser have to do with your ISP? That's not rhetorical.
I can't speak for the poster above, but the reason I got always-on internet service was so that I could shell into my home computer and access my files from wherever I like, not to mention forwarding X applications over the Internet when useful/necessary. Static ip is necessary for that.
Lighten up on the attitude a little, k buddy?
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
If cable modem service goes out for my area, I fully intend on switching to DSL. www.dslreports.com shows a dsl connection in my area that is about the same speed as my cable. Of course, if I switch to dsl, then I'll probably get rid of my cable tv as well. I'm curious how many others will do something similar to this?
Don't suppose they pulled the end of the month as the date to shut down out of thin air.
Since it would take a month to get another
service provider I'll probably end up still with AT&T
@ Home and paying for a month of downtime.
Like handheld organizers, service providers are another thing we keep
getting told we need to have yet are left on our own to figure out
why. Service providers are supposed to store CD collections for us,
record TV shows for us, buy groceries for us, connect us to the internet,
yet the amount of
downtime we're caused by centralizing everything
makes me wish we had a good reason for buying them.
AT&T is flexing their virtual monopoly muscle by not coming to some sort of interim agreement with @home to temporarily continue providing service to its customers. Every other cable provider was able to reach some sort of agreement with @home. The New York Times reports that there are 850k AT&T customers without service. It upsets me that AT&T has the audacity to put 850k of its customers out of service. Apparently, AT&T thinks it can afford to lose 850k customers.
I live in AT&T's Chicago market and have been without service since Saturday morning. I got a message on my answering machine from AT&T that said I may be without service for about ten days. I have also heard estimates from other sources ranging from a week to a month. The Chicago Tribune has a related article about the 100k people affected in the Chicagoland area. Every person I know who has a cable modem is affected by this.
I've already been through two DSL bankruptcies (PhoenixDSL and NorthPoint). But, AT&T is forcing me to reconsider DSL once again. I can't get the same maximum speed out of DSL because of my distance from the CO, but I'm fed up with AT&T's handling of the situation. They obviously don't care enough about retaining their customers to have come to some sort of agreement with @home, like every other cable company did, to continue providing service until they were really ready to cut-over users to their new network. Can you imagine if AT&T would have done this with their wireless phone service? Since there is actually healthy competition in place, I'm sure AT&T would have lost a lot of customers...
Actually, it's because Rogers isn't doing it. Rogers gave a lot of money to Compaq's professional services people, the last week of October or so, and said 'make this happen.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I had thought that AT&T made a good switch - I was only out of service for Saturday, and Sunday morning I received a recorded call that told me to "reboot my computer and launch my browser" and the AT&T Broadband Internet page would come up with instructions for the new service.
:)
Not being someone who keeps (or even installs) the standard software suite from the ISP, I set my network to use DHCP and kicked it - and got a new IP from the new DHCP server, and (once I realized I was still using the old DNS servers and reset them) everything has been fine.
There are only two problems:
1) the new service is limited to 1.5mbps (download) rather than 3mbps. This is supposedly "to ensure good quality of service for everyone."
2) my static IP is no longer static, or at least the DHCP lease says it is only good for about 5 days. I don't run public servers, but I like to be able to ssh to my box and get files if I need them.
Beyond these things, everything is back to working as normal. The added benefit is that, after using a modem for 24 hours, I appreciate having a high-bandwidth connection more than ever.
Mr. Sharumpe
-- The above comments are just my opinion. If you are going to flame me, save your time. I am fireproof.
There's a simple solution to keep from ever losing another email address: get your own domain!
How about just getting a free shell account? We all know the best way to stay virus-free is to ssh to a remote host and run pine/mutt. I'm very lucky in that I've had the same email address for over six years, and its on a personal Linux server. The box started out in someone's dorm at college, and now its on a 7Mbit SDSL connection.
Since they only create accounts for friends of friends, there's probably about 50 users at most on it. It's only been down about 3 weeks in six years, and that's when it moved from VA to NJ and subsequently on to San Fran.
Nyx.net (used to?) give out free shell accounts. Maybe some slashdotters can setup small, heavily protected (i.e. LIDS) boxes for free shell accounts with 10MB quotas and qmail configured to dump inbound email into the quota'd space.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Like me, someone who lost his static IP for a dynamic one, I'd like to recommend www.dns2go.com.
.d2g.com to point to your dymamic IP, regardless of what it is. Pretty handy.
The have a client (win32, linux, & more) that basically sends a heartbeat to their servers telling them your IP address. You can then setup a user defined domain within their top level
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
paying for a month of downtime.
Theoretically, they're planning to credit us @ 2 for 1 for unconnected days. So if my acess comes back up today, they'll credit me for either 4 or 6 days depending on wether they think its a 3 day or 2 day downtime.
I'm not holding my breath or anything, but that's what they're currently saying.
Hopefully this will be more accurate than their emails saying that they didn't expect any problems with the transition.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
On Friday, after the judge ruled, I called AT&T Broadband and asked if my service would be affected. I was told no. Sometime early Saturday morning service stopped (I was asleep at the time).
I'm switching to DSL (already ordered). It will take about the same amount of time to get it as AT&T says it will take to get my service back. I'm cancelling my AT&T service for the simple reason that they lied to me. Had they simply said, "there might be a problem," I would not be so pissed.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I was able to reach AT&T level 2 help on the chat facility at http://www.broadband.att.com Sunday evening. Cool thing is that you can see exactly where in the queue you are, and it will count down until you're next in line. All that time spent, only to learn AT&T is being very adamant about not reissuing static IP addresses unless you have an "unsupported version of MacOS." So, does anybody know which versions of MacOS don't support DHCP?
Here are instructions to fix it, or change it to whatever you want .
This is true. I have two signed agreements: One with AT&T, one with @home. The AT&T agreement does not specifically exclude running servers on the service. In fact, AT&T goes so far as to tell you that you are responsible for any security issues as a result of running servers on the service. Now that @home is out of the picture, I can only assume my (signed) agreement with @home is null and void.
On another note, if you go to the help.broadband.att.com website, one of the questions prominently displayed is "Can I run a server on the network?" It appears AT&T is simply parroting what was in the original @home agreement. So in the regard, I believe the original author is correct: AT&T is playing fast and loose with the AUP.
I've also noticed AT&T doesn't appear to be scanning any ports (@home was keen on scanning port 119 about once an hour). It will be interesting to see what the new "official" AUP says about servers...
>switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks
...it has already moved to its own high-speed Internet network nearly 40 percent of the 850,000 customers who lost service this weekend...
What is the source for this? AT&T has said 7 -10 days fairly consistently. Over 40% of customers are already on attbi. AT&T said they will have 600,000 subs moved over by the end of the day Monday, with the rest back up by Friday.
according to reuters:
About 330,000 subscribers in Oregon, Washington and the Dallas area have been moved to the new AT&T Broadband network, the company said in a statement. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved during the day on Monday, and by day's end it expects to have switched 657,000 subscribers to its network.
The balance of its affected customers will be switched by Friday, it said
and here, from an AT&T press release:
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. - AT&T Broadband moved about 330,000 cable Internet customers to its new high speed Internet network as of Monday morning, Dec. 3, less than 48 hours after the At Home Corporation shut off service for more than 850,000 AT&T customers. The At Home Corporation's action followed a decision in U. S. Bankruptcy Court to cancel cable company distribution agreements with At Home.
The customers moved to the new AT&T network so far reside in Oregon, Washington, and metro Dallas. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved today and tomorrow, bringing the total added to the new network to about 657,000.
There are lots of other details in the AT&T press release, including what will happen to customers still on the MediaOne network in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Atlanta; Jacksonville; Los Angeles; the Stockton and Fresno areas of Central California; New England; Richmond, Va.; and St. Paul, Minn.
Customers formerly served by MediaOne are remaining on a separately operated network
...
For the group of customers in the markets being served by this separately operated network, the service will be re-branded as AT&T Broadband Internet. For the majority of customers in these markets, the network, Internet service connectivity, email domain names, and data transmission speed won't be affected. The only change these customers will see is new content provided by Yahoo! To access this new content, customers can direct their browsers to http://home.attbroadband.com/.
Here is the migration schedule by city for as of this morning. . .
On Now - Oregon, Washington , Dallas
Mon, Tues - San Francisco, Illinois
Wednesday - Denver, Salt Lake
Thursday - Hartford, Conn., Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and the Rocky Mountain region in the mountain West
See the press release here
Considering how difficult it is to correctly set up an email server, your advice is pretty useless.
How about: tired of your car breaking down? Learn how to rebuild your engine. Better yet, build one from scratch.
Is your t.v. acting up? Learn to be a t.v. repairman.
Hungry? Grow your own food.
No one has the time to be an expert in everything. That's why we give money to other people. We're paying for their expertise.
-- Will program for bandwidth
2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.
@Home used dynamic IPs, but the thing was that they never really were dynamic. In two years my IP never changed. Now, I'm not sure what's up. It looks like AT&T is, in effect, now treating broadband like the "entertainment service" it always claimed it was whenever you bitched to their support people -- truly dynamic IPs to make it tougher to run a full-time server, 1.5M cap to limit file sharing. Maybe they also got a clue and will be policing their users better and flush out some of the script kiddies.
3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.If you want static IP, then get DSL.
They changed the AUP a few months ago; you should have gotten a notice of it. You had a chance to opt out (although it required either a letter to corporate or cancelling). Heck, you're on a new system; demand them to send you the new AUP. Start getting pro-active here.
4) Their DNS service has been very erraticThe network's been up since Saturday morning! Considering that they only had about 60 days to deploy the new provider to 860,000 computers, some DNS goofiness isn't out of the question. This is like expecting someone's last-second hacked together code is not going to have bugs. Get real.
I'm still reserving judgement. I was very dissatisfied with @Home's service, but since I live in a DSL-less area, I had only one choice for broadband (in '99). Satellite waits in the wings, but I'll let attbi settle out before I make my choice. I was back up and running in about 30 hours -- still shorter than two outages under the previous regime.
Two lessons to take away:- This wouldn't have been near as bad if broadband providers had been forced to open their systems to multiple ISPs. AT&T paid dearly for being married to @Home.
- We need to get the Internet stable enough that we can start getting people to treat it like a true "utility" rather than an "entertainment service." Right now, things are still way too wide open. Consumer protection and basic regulation would have prevented this weekend's fiasco from happening. We need to treat the backbone like a communications network, the ISPs like utilities. I'm OK with free and open so long as we have rules (give 30 days notice to system shutdown, provide e-mail forwarding, in a case where you are a true monopoly you can't shut down unless you find a new provider).
I think it's also time for the companies to wake up and realize that unless the government steps in and writes a big honking check for a network upgrade, half this country will be on dialup for 10-15 more years. And I don't see Dubya (or anyone else for that matter) opening up his checkbook. Broadband isn't dead, but it will need to look long and hard at how it chooses to move forward.Here in Atlanta, we were told "1 to 14 days". That sounds like two weeks to me!
Via phone, and email (repeatidly)
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
You wouldn't believe the number of people that couldn't tell you who they got their Internet service from (or even what type of service - DSL? Cable? AOL?). Name recognition is what will keep your customer from switching to another service (I'd switch, but I am already with AT&T and I LIKE AT&T - they are a nice company). A nameless provider has to get by on actual technical merit, which of course would never work for AT&T.
When they switched the service brand from Road Runner to @Home (great decision guys) they even provided a utility that would take the stupid bird out of RR's branded internet explorer.
Well duh, it only took you a day to get your service back on. For some people (like us peons in the Pittsburgh area) it could take closer to ten days. Why? Well, they can't do the whole thing all at once. It's gonna take time to get the whole network up. So while in areas like Washington, Chicago, and wherever else they are working on now, there's gonna be a higher-rate of people who think AT&T did a good job. But in other places, where there are more people pissed cause it's taking them a whole week to get their cable kickin again, you're gonna have a higher-percent of irate people and people who switch to DSL.
And thats another thing, I don't get all these people saying "To heck with AT&T, I'm getting my baby-bell telco out here to get me DSL. Well guess what, it's peoplebably gonna take your Baby Bell (or whoever else does DSL in your area) alot longer to get to your house and install DSL than it will for AT&T to get your cable modem blinking again. If you're switching for "The principal of the matter", why? It isn't AT&T's fault @home went bankrupt cause they built too much network too fast.
~~DanNo man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
I do forward X over ssh, over the internet.
Regarding Dynamic DNS, it's something I didn't undertstand before, and I'm glad I learned about it- wouldn't have if not for this thread.
Working on the clue. Thanks for the attitude.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I have Comcast@Home in the DC area, no interruptions yet (knock wood). Guess they're afraid of cutting off any bigwigs that may be on @home
This entire thing is being caused because AT&T wants to buy out @Home. Even though @home is reporting a net loss, most of the loss comes from the purchasing of equipment. Once cable internet service stops growing so rapidly, @Home will be able to start paying of all their debt because they'll be making money and not paying for so much new equipment. @Home is valued at billions of dollars, yet AT&T (who bought 23% of @Home for over a billion dollars) now wants to buy out @Home for a measly $375 million. AT&T saw that since @Home is reporting a lose (in equipment, as was already stated) they could try to force @Home into bankruptcy court and then buy the entire company for less than 10% of it's value. AT&T knows that the telephone infrastructure that they own is aging and needs to be upgraded. So, rather than upgrade what they own and pay billions of dollars, they see that @Home has already built a large part of the infrastructure and is reporting a net loss. If they can manage to buy it cheap, they don't have to spend as much money. If @Home fails, the only party that profits from it is AT&T. Do we really want Ma Bell in charge again? There was a reason the telephone industry was deregulated.
They have released a detailed description of who's up and down.. They've also said they will give two days for every one that the subscribers are down. Here's the release http://198.178.8.101/faq.jsp?content_id=1081&lobid =1
I remember some people were wondering how @Home could fail when they took in so much $$ from their customers...
Well... Here's a hint. I closed my @Home account 1 year ago. I had 3 email addresses on that account.
Guess what! I still use ALL 3 of those email addresses, and they all still work beautifully.
Considering the amount of SPAM I get, and how much bandwidth costs, no wonder they are going out of business.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Does anyone know if @home billed for service ahead of or after the month of service provided? If ahead of then I paid for 30 days of service and only got 10 days. I plan on calling my credit card company and asking them to reverse the charge.
I don't want to kick them while they're down but its bullshit that I paid for a service I am not getting, I am sure many others feel the same way. It's too bad there had to be a pissing contest with ATT.
My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address. Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes. My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely. So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago. Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)
I've been stuck with a dynamic IP on comcast@home for a while now, but easy external access is possible, even if you're using a router for NAT on your internal network. Get a hostname from somebody like dyndns.org(myhostname.dyndns.org) and point it to whatever your IP is today. Then get a client to monitor your IP and notify dyndns.org when your IP changes. They have a nice interface set up for poor dynamic ip folks like us to programatically update our address. Set it up to run frequently with cron. I use ipcheck (ipcheck.sourceforge.net) with a Linksys router and it has been working flawlessly for nearly 8 months now. When you want to get to your box, you just use your hostname instead of your IP, or if your app really really needs an IP, just do an nslookup on your hostname.
Yeah, nice idea until their DNS servers stop working. Luckily I found someone in my city who was in a subnet with a working DNS server, so he gave me some real server names (real long ones, which contain about 10 dots). So I've been online and getting email all weekend (I'm on Rogers@home in Toronto).
looks like AT&T ran their contractual negotiations down to the wire and made no preparations for their customers. I'm an AT&T @Home customer and my email account was shut down without warning. When the service comes back up (they will not even give a time estimate) they tell me my old email address will not be valid.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
Oh quit whining.
They sent you an email two weeks ago warning you that something like this could happen.
They sent you a snail-mail letter a week ago.
In it, they explicitly tell you that something like this could happen, and that you should backup your email at least once a day onto your own system to minimize the potential loss of data.
Quit your whining and stop acting like a cry baby.
Oh dear. I've done it now. I insulted you. Now you're going to want to sue me too, you fat wanker.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
This doesn't make sense, do you have 2 cable modems? In any case, you should add a second ethernet card to each PC and buy a hub, then route all local traffic through your LAN instead of the internet.
I did, just to see what happened, and found out that instead of my previous 24.x.x.x address, I now had a 12.x.x.x address, and everything worked quite well, and the nameservers are responding as expected. Now that I know my new address, which has nothing to do with my old address, I could probably use it as a static address. I've already let Public DNS know of my new IP address; hopefully I won't have to change it anytime soon.
Before that I was able to ping some machines but not others, just as you described, from my location here in Seattle.
Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to determine your new address without using DHCP. I doubt it, since indications from AT&T are that they aren't supporting static addresses.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I live in Washington state and after my connection being down the weekend things appear to be working again. Of course, the first thing I did was to check download speed. Unfortunately it's about three times slower than before. I was regularly getting nearly 4 megabit download speeds (450kb/second) but now it's limited to 1.5 megabit (177kb). Thanks AT&T! Do I get a 60% refund every month?
Oh you poor thing.
On Cap Hill, you could typically only get 174kb/s, and that was without the cap.
So it sucks that you have to go down to the speed you'd get in a populated area. You poor, poor thing. My heart f*ckin' bleeds.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I think AT&T has screwed up. But that is typical. They have capped the downstream to "enhance" your digital online experience. Bullshit. They couldn't handle the load.
1) I can't get DSL, so I am fucked. I have to stick with AT&T and it isn't something I like to do. There are many more like me and AT&T knows that. So switching yourself and a few thousand more customers to DSL won't make a difference in AT&T policy. To AT&T you and I are entries in a spreadsheet.
2) The DHCP thing pisses me off beyond imagination. This is totally lame. But again, it shouldn't be hard to write some kind of utility that requests dhcp leases to be renewed, so that you can use a static IP on your ethernet. I remember somebody doing this for RoadRunner.
To answer your last statement, I was under the impression that AT&T was paying $8 initially, then negotiated $12. The $20 figure was requested from @Home during negotiations and AT&T said it wasn't worth it. Yes, less for more, just as you said.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
No one has the time to be an expert in everything. That's why we give money to other people. We're paying for their expertise.
Anyone can buy a domain name and setup email forwarding to their ISP account. My grandmother can do it. My 5 year old could do it with little instruction. If someone else can't figure it out, I have zero sympathy.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
(yall might want to mod this up.)
ATT just posted their schedule for switching over people who are not switched yet. (e.g., your cable light is out- like for those of us in illinois).
Here it is, not bad for the Illinois ones:
Please review the following AT&T Broadband Internet migration schedule to find out when your high-speed cable Internet service will be available on the AT&T network.
Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to move this Monday and Tuesday
Customers in Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah are scheduled for Wednesday
Customers in Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California and the Majority of the Rocky Mountain region are scheduled to move on Thursday
Customers in Michigan will be moved on Friday
You will be contacted by AT&T Broadband with further instructions when the transition of your high-speed cable Internet service is complete.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with the best high-speed cable Internet service possible.
Actually, I think it is a good idea .. I'm just pissed off at the whole situation (the botched conversion)... I couldn't get thruogh to the support line, I had to get the new server addresses from a friend, I keep seeing TV/radio/print commercials for @home which pisses me off more, not to mention we have a few problems with our cell phones and digital TV (all the same company -- Rogers@home).. But getting back to the mail dns lookups, it really simplifies it for users (all users have the same server name: "mail", but load balancing is still going on behind the scenes due to the different mail servers and different DNS servers) .. Anyway, good luck with the conversion.
i was apparently the 68 or 69th person in the nation to make the transition to the attbi network from excite's (i'm in oregon). aside from the obvious question why we were the first to make the transition, i'm quite miffed at att's tech support. i understand that they were most likely busy, but no one with whom i spoke knew a damn thing about what was going on.
overall, i'm neutral about the switch. i do like my new, lower ip, but i fear that it isn't going to be quite as static as my old one. either way, attbi looks "cleaner" than @home, imo.
And yes, you can use STMP and POP if you like
if you don't mind all the crap that they toss into your inbox. and if you get back into pop3 and outlook, you get back into virus city as I posted earlier.
Intelligent Life on Earth
MacOS 7.5.3 on a non-powerpc mac. I'm positive that you need OpenTransport for DHCP to work, and I think the oldest versions that OT worked with was like 7.5.5 or 7.6.
I don't know if this is the newest version that won't work, but I know it won't work. AT&T might not support non-powerpc macs at all, so you might want to go to ftp://ftp.info.apple.com and get the OpenTransport standalone installer and see what it says its required system is.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.