heh ..

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Customer had been flailing around trying to fix his email client for several hours when he finally gave up and called his ISP, who referred him to us, who referred him to his ISP, etc. for a while. Every single one of his mail account settings had been checked by both us and the ISP, and confirmed down to the last character, but sending and receiving were still hit or miss.

Well, as it so happens, I happen to know a trick for opening a random TCP port on a random server directly, which in this case was his incoming mail server and port 110.

"no address associated with nodename"

Trying the outgoing mail server address and port 25.

"no address associated with nodename"

"Have you been able to open web pages?" "Well, no, actually, that was the *other* thing I wanted you to talk about.."

Getting the IP config of the Ethernet port.

192.168.1.xx, valid looking subnet mask and router, **blank DNS address field** (which in this case defaults to the router). At which point I know his DSL modem has a router in it, that's giving him a private NAT IP, and obviously isn't passing DNS the way it should. Which nobody else along the line has thought to try. And more importantly, the problem is now isolated completely out of my scope, and it's somebody else's problem. :D

Some days it's good to be a geek. (I'd insert an Apocalypse Now reference but I can't think of a geek equivalent to "the smell of napalm in the morning" .. lol)

Comments

Apocalypse Now reference

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

...I love the smell of packets in the morning...
... they smell like...

g33k34y.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

If you have a electronics background along with that I used to love the smell of soder in the morning.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

*golf clap*

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

The smell of burning ozone?

I've been using that one alot around here, because people keep plugging 110V devices into the frigging 220V wall outlets...