I cannot make this kind of thing up.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Someone, somewhere, told a customer to connect his DSL modem to both the WAN and LAN ports of his router. (Pushed pretty hard when the customer balked, too.) And was then surprised when there was no Internet connection on the LAN side of the router.

I really hope that tech doesn't work for my employer, because if they do, and are in my call center, I'm going to have to walk over there and give said tech a dope slap hard enough to result in a keyboard faceplant. It's bad enough when customers come up with stupid shit like this on their own, but there's no excuse for a support tech giving a customer dumbass instructions like those .. if there is one network topology that WILL NOT WORK, absolutely guaranteed, it's that one ..

Comments

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Someone, somewhere, told a customer to connect his DSL modem to both the WAN and LAN ports of his router. (Pushed pretty hard when the customer balked, too.) And was then surprised when there was no Internet connection on the LAN side of the router.

OMG, kill it! I don't care if they're in your office or not, track it down and kill 'it!

[canray.livejournal.com]

I'ma goin'ta hafta Smack-a-Tech!

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I've once gone LAN to LAN between two routers because I desperately needed the extra ports (and it was a cheap router that couldn't be internally bridged), but that only works if you've patched broken networks together a few times too many.

How is the situation you described possible anyway? Do your DSL modems have two ethernet ports, the router have a USB connection for the WAN, somebody hooked the modem to a hub and then two more cables into both sides of the router (creative, but hey!)? This one seems like it took extra effort. Or is it possible the rep was deliberately trying to screw with the customer?

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Evidently the modem had some sort of switch (and possibly a router) built into it. There were indeed two Ethernet cables connected between the modem and the router.

Haven't ruled out the possibility of a malicious tech. If it was one of ours, he didn't leave any case notes, or at least didn't leave any clues in the notes I saw that suggested any of the ones on the case might have done it.

Confused the hell out of the customer, that's for sure. And if there's one thing that's high on my smackdown-candidate list, it's techs who have no clue what they're doing pushing really hard on incorrect instructions so the customer argues with me when I try to get them to do it right.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

And yeah, he probably had a double NAT, since it was a DSL modem that didn't seem to be providing PPPoE (which is almost always internal NAT/DHCP with a private 192.168/16 IP block on the LAN side), but given the mess I had just cleaned up, I wasn't eager to go through the additional hour or so of trying to lead this guy through turning NAT off on the wireless router on top of the other craziness..

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Yeah, let him hire someone to fix this that can undo his damage in 15 minutes that would take you hours by phone to talk him through it. They might even bring back a story.

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

well... one cable plugged into it is good... shouldn't MORE cables plugged into it be better?

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing about somebody that had a PSU with both Euro and NA power sockets. Convinced he had to have them both plugged in (and the computer coming with both types of power cords) he used a travel adapter to plug them both in at the same time. I'm amazed he didn't start a fire.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that modern consumer equipment isn't set up with stupidity detectors for just this reason. At least they should flash a warning light when something like this happens. At best they should compensate and shut down the lower-bandwidth port, while still indicating that there's an undesirable situation.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

When I had pppoe I used to plug both the wan and lan ports of a router into a network switch. This was to have the ability to have computers with a pppoe client have a direct internet connect and those with out pppoe to have an internet connection and all the computers able to be on the same network with just one network card per machine.