comcast

[belovedcrown.livejournal.com]

As a fellow techie, i beg the question, are any of you that frequent this group workers of comcast? if so, could you email me?

I've got a business grade account with them, sla and everything and almost every month for the past year since the account was setup they've had to give me extensive credits for outages. i really want to find out whether this is some sort of temporary problem because they overbuilt the nodes or something and it will improve or whether i should use the full weight of the office that is paying for this account [its a high level federal entity] to cancel the long term contract and go to verizon dsl [the only other option in this area]. Unfortunately its comcast company policy to not reveal internal details of the outage to any customers.

in other news, one of my end users lost ALL of her important work yesterday. She called me to advise her outlook exchange account was over quota and when i popped in to help her, she was on the phone. So the first thing i did as a courtesy to her was empty her deleted items folder- it was more than half her space! She got off the phone i gave her the tip about emptying it out regularly or even setting it to empty on close, and she flipped out. Turns out she was DELIBERATELY creating subfolders there and putting all her highly important work there. She thought it was a great idea, because should a hacker break into her pc, they'd never think to look in her deleted items. i was speechless.

(no subject)

[the-paco.livejournal.com]

Ok techies, need a fellow pro opinion.

I'm contracting (kind of) in my spare cube time for a small companies LAN and trying to solve some internet connection issues with their 1mb and 768k frac T1 lines through Xspedius at their two locations in D/FW. I'm reasonably certain this issue is on the ISP side, but can't prove it. Unfortunately the dinky company has no network monitoring tools (Netgear FVS318 routers with only the grossest traffic monitoring), no test software, and no tools save what I can pull off of the net or basic dos commands. I need two or three things which I'm researching for which someone may be able to point me towards. I've been out of that game for about 6 years now, and have forgotten most of what little I knew. Hopefully you trench runners can help a bit.

One: A hopefully free or reasonably cheap network monitoring software which can run on XP. I can't throw a rock on majorgeek.com or the like without hitting one but I'd like to know if you have experience with any, what to try, what to avoid, what's spyware, and what works these days. I won't earn myself some on the books gainful employment by putting porn popups on their boxes, and I don't yet have a 'test' laptop I can throw under the bus.

Two: Anyone in the D/FW area who can recommend a good ISP for business T1 or a site that specializes in them similar to DSLreports? DSLreports (blocked at the 'real' job, long live proxies) is mostly residential, but I'm grinding through it.

Three: "Hey Paco, you asstard, we love you, but take this crap to a community that's meant for it!" Ok, I can do that. Got one that you recommend?

Thanks guys.