Fuddland

I’m calm. Despite my home broadband connection not being able to connect since yesterday morning. I’m fine, it’s not a big deal. I have a higher-speed connection here at University; I can still read my email and catch up on everybody’s weblogs. It’s just an annoyance.

The problem is: the modem can’t get passed the “verifying username and password” stage — after about eight attempts it reports “Error 721: remote computer failed to respond”. When this has happened in the past, all it’s taken is a few more attempts to connect, so I just left things alone all day and tried again when I got home last night. Still no joy, so foolishly I did all the things I knew Freeserve Support would ask me to do: unplug modem, reboot, plug in modem, try to connect; create a new connection, try to connect; reinstall modem software, try to connect; swap over the filters on the phone line, try to connect. All of these failed, so it was time to ring the support number, and I got through to a chap called Neil.

He got off to a bad start by saying it was his first day back after the Cup Final and he was feeling a bit rough. The Cup Final that was last Sunday — so he’s been on a bender for four days and I’m now expecting technical advice from him. Great. He then proceeded to talk me through all the things I’d just tried to re-establish the connection. There’s no arguing with them at this stage — they have to go through these things parrot-fashion before they try anything else, so I just resigned myself to repeating the futile exercises. Sure enough, none of them worked, and I now expected him to tell me it must be a fault with the exchange; he’d log a fault with BT and see what happens.

But no! Neil didn’t say that. Instead, he said the only thing it could be was that Dial-Up Networking had become corrupt and I’d have to reinstall it. Okay, fair enough, another thing to try. What do I need to do? Oh, he can’t tell me: they’re not Windows certified and they’ll be liable if I bugger up my computer. I asked what else we could try if he couldn’t help me with that. He had no other options. I looked in XP’s Help and Support for “dial up networking”: nothing about installing/uninstalling it — only information about how to set up a new connection, which we’d just done. I asked the chap if he knew for sure this was possible on XP, which he was. I asked how I could find out how to go about reinstalling it. He said to just do a search on Google.

I counted to 480 million, slowly. He realised I didn’t have an internet connection. We were at an impasse. I said I’d leave it until the morning and hung up.

This morning, reinvigorated and my faith in humanity not completely destroyed, I tried Freeserve Support again, and thankfully got a different chap. He was more sympathetic, although he did make me go through some of the things I’d already tried twice before, “just to make sure”. He had some other tests that Neil didn’t seem to know about, including trying a couple of dummy test-usernames that would show him if my modem connected to them successfully. It didn’t, and hence was the most promising indicator that the problem wasn’t with my computer. He said BT were reporting no faults with my local exchange; I suggested I might be the first person to report a problem, but apparently this was unlikely. I didn’t quite follow the logic — surely someone had to be the first? Anyway, at least he was satisfied enough to ask BT to check out the local exchange. I was almost relieved, until he said that in the meantime I should reinstall DUN.

Gah! Again, I looked in “Add/Remove Programs” and “Add/Remove Windows Components” — nothing about DUN anywhere. And of course he couldn’t help me because they weren’t Windows certified — I pleaded with him to at least point me in the right direction, but he didn’t actually know where to find the option.

So after double-checking he’d logged all the information to date, and was going to contact BT, I hung up and headed off to my office. I had a good google around and could find nothing that explained how to “reinstall ‘Dial Up Networking’” on an XP machine. Windows 95 & 98: no problem, and I knew how to do that anyway. All I found was information on how to create a new connection, which is what I’d done several times already.

Finally, I found out that you can’t actually uninstall DUN in XP — you can only reset the registry keys to the state they were in when it was first installed. I’ve no idea if this is at all wise in my situation, but since the next option beyond this one is “reformat and reinstall everything”, I’ve not got much of a choice.

A fun Friday night in store for me!

The following are entries which follows on from the above:

1. Reconnected [Fuddland]. Excerpt: Look at me, I'm posting from home! I'm sure it will surprise none of you to learn that after convincing Freeserve that it's not my fault, and thumb-twiddling whilst BT's weekday-only staff enjoy their weekend off, my connection is back...

2. You don't know what you've got 'til it's disabled [Fuddland]. Excerpt: I'm not sure what the boffins at Symantec have done whilst patching up the serious security flaws in their firewall software, but whatever it is doesn't play nicely with my PC. Browsing the 'net with my firewall enabled became unbearably...

#1

Gordon | 2004 / 03 / 05 – 12:40

I’m always as patient as possible with Tech Support people - I’ve been on the receiving end of people saying “Yes I’ve done that” when they hadn’t. Very frustrating to find that out after an hour of trying everything else!

Fingers crossed!

#2

Lyle | 2004 / 03 / 05 – 12:40

I’d leave that ‘til BT has checked everything. It’s more likely to be a problem with the modem and its connection to the ADSL. Losing the DUN, or corrupting it, is only really feasible if you’ve had a power-surge or power-cut while connecting, to my knowledge.

From my (admittedly non-comprehensive) experience with BT et al, it’s far more likely to be a shonky ADSL connection, or some cable-monkey yanking out the wrong person’s ADSL connection.

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