Ever get the feeling that maybe you spoke too soon?
Yeah, me too.
So remember the Fairpoint tech, who showed up unannounced, and told me our lines were crossed with someone else’s? He told me that they were getting our calls, and we were getting theirs. I gave him a list of other problems we were having.
Note that the problem of us getting their calls and them getting ours was not something that I had personally experienced…
Until he left.
After saying the problem had been fixed.
So, after everything was all set, every call placed to our business went to some family across town. Wonderful.
Now I know how my clients feel when I tell them they have had a RAID failure, and they are going to lose data, and they say “but we haven’t had any problems,” and then their server dies for real. *sigh*
Thank you, Fairpoint (FKA Verizon)
Today, unprompted by me, a technician from Fairpoint Communications (formerly known in these parts as Verizon) showed up, saying we had a “crossed pair” on our line.
I asked him if this could have anything to do with some issues we’ve been having on our line for quite some time, including
- Incoming calls not being answered (because we never heard them ring)
- Dropped calls
- Outgoing calls hanging up after one ring
- Noise on the line
- Incoming calls not rolling over to our second line on busy/no answer
He looked, nodded sagely, and said that all of those things could be caused by the crossed pair, which did not surprise me.
I’m glad to know that this was a) not our fault, b) not a problem with my Asterisk box, and c) something that he was able to fix. As he was leaving, he commented that he hadn’t worked in Bethel in many years, and that everything is “all messed up.” Again, this did not surprise me.
Now, the only remaining question I have is what have the other parties who’ve been getting my calls been doing with them? Thank goodness it wasn’t a competitor. 🙂
So Long, Wild Blue
Several months ago, Wild Blue, my satellite Internet provider, stopped working at my house. After repeated, 1 hour or longer phone calls to technical support and customer service, it was revealed that they had the wrong credit card information on file. However, despite repeated 1 hour or longer calls to resolve this, they didn’t re-enable our account. The effect was, we were without service for approximately a month from March to April. Continue reading “So Long, Wild Blue”
Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju
Actual phone conversation I just had:
MS: “Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju, may I have the first six numbers in the activation window?” Continue reading “Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju”
Fake JetBlue Tickets Too
As reported this morning, apparently I wasn’t the only one who got malware delivered by a fake email from an airline.
SANSFire 2008, Audit 507, Day 6 – Unix
Day 6, auditing Unix. By this time, most of the class was pretty wiped. With a few exceptions, (myself included) the bulk of the class had little or no Unix experience, so having to do stuff on the Unix command line was… well, eye-opening. Continue reading “SANSFire 2008, Audit 507, Day 6 – Unix”
How I Fixed Firefox 3's Annoying Crashing Problem on Windows
It took a while, but I finally decided to read the error reports. When I did so, I found that nearly every one of Firefox’s crashes that I experienced was related to a specific extension. I dug around in the registry and the extensions folder, and found that it was none other than the Java plugin.
Living on the edge, I decided to just remove it. I uninstalled Java, then deleted references to the plugin in the registry and filesystem. Voila. Everything works and Firefox hasn’t crashed on me in over a week.
I Almost Got Phished!
Actually, I might have gotten phished, scammed, or trojaned – I really can’t tell. Anyway, I just returned from SANSFire 2008, and had the following email waiting for me in my inbox: Continue reading “I Almost Got Phished!”
SANSFire 2008 – Audit 507, Day 5 – Windows
Day 5: Auditing Windows systems. Not really a lot of earth-shattering news here today. Having been exposed to Windows tools like MMC, Security Policies and Group Policies, and the Event Viewer for years now, I was in pretty familiar territory. There were some reminders (why LM hashes are bad, what to do about them if you still have them) and some new ideas (methods for baselining a system and taking periodic diffs to compare, moving forward), but no real “aha moments” for me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’ve had enough new stuff for now. At least today my brain did not feel like it was completely overflowing.
I also took a sneak peek at tomorrow’s book on auditing Unix. Familiar stuff there too. (*phew!*)
Congratulations!! *You Have Won 500,000.00 GBP*
Yes, I got an email with this subject in my inbox this morning. I thought I’d share, in case anyone else wanted to claim their prize as well. Continue reading “Congratulations!! *You Have Won 500,000.00 GBP*”