Yay! I now have an HD TiVo. Complete with a dual-tuner cable card, so I can finally get back to where I once was with the Driect-TV TiVo I started with so many years ago.
The only problem so far is that it won’t take any random eSATA hard drive. Why? Well, why not? Let’s get you to pay more. Oh well, it’s a one-time purchase I suppose. Still pisses me off.
I’m trying to debug a long-standing (2.5 year!) problem with our Cox Communications service. The symptoms are:
Since the video side has the most problems, each of which was recorded on my TiVo, it became the best option to debug.
However, this means I cannot use my TiVo, as Cox suspects it is at fault. Thus, I am downgraded to live TV. Let me tell you, this sucks. I keep on reaching for the remote, hoping it will skip these commercials. Unfortunately, I’m once again in a very comfortable cage, and stuck watching them – not the last of which is that with 12 minutes of commercials in a one hour show, it’s very likely the video blocking will occur during one of these ads.
Recently a message started appearing that told me my A/C adapter was not recognized by the system. Knowing that the A/C adapter and laptop were covered by a next-day on-side warranty, I called Dell. I carefully explained the problem: the batteries don’t charge any longer, the boot-time error message, and that the green LED on the adapter seems dimmer than it should be.
The technician at Dell decided that, with this set of problems, the motherboard needs to be replaced. I asked if perhaps an adapter should be tried first… No, he assured me, that would not be the problem.
Two days later (which is service contract for “next business day service”) a very friendly and helpful technician arrived, and replaced the motherboard. Same problem. He and I had a good old laugh at Dell for that, and he asked Dell to send a replacement A/C adapter.
Two days later, it arrived. No warning message! Success! But wait… now when I move the laptop it looses power for a brief moment. If there is no battery, it turns off. This was not happening before…
Calling Dell resulted in a mess. The first technician at Dell I spoke with was, to be as kind as possible, a moron. He had me run hardware tests. He had me set the brightness on the laptop LCD to full on and off battery, and since it didn’t flicker anymore was fully prepared to declare the problem resolved. I slowly and carefully explained that this is a physical problem and that moving the computer at all causes it to turn off if the batteries are too low or removed.
True to the incompetence that I have come to expect from nearly every computer company’s tech support, he declared that since no errors show up in the BIOS self-tests, it MUST be software. I asked to speak to his manager.
The manager declared that this was indeed a problem, part of the ongoing issue, but that I needed to ship the computer to Dell. This is because, in the mean time, my service contract has expired. They admit that while this was an on-going problem, and they will fix it, it won’t be done with on-site, and that I have to ship the laptop. I called bullsh*t.
After about 20 minutes of hold-time, two agents, and over 45 minutes of on-the-phone time they finally decided that it was indeed still covered under the same warranty replacement terms as when the problem started, and they will ship another motherboard out and have it replaced again, next-day (in service-contract terms), which means to the rest of us 3 days.
So, so far, to replace a $100 A/C adapter, Dell has wasted five hours of my time and probably two to three times what the laptop is worth in service calls.
Well, ok, perhaps not entirely… yet.
This is actually a rant on something cable modems allow your cable internet provider to do to you.
They restrict access to your own hardware.
Why would they do this? Paranoia. A while back, there was a security hole in a network monitoring tool called Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP. This security issue allowed people to crash other people’s modems, break into their own and change upload/download speeds, and other nasty things.
All of these have been fixed. However, people are still breaking into their modems to “uncap” them – change speed settings. They just don’t use SNMP to do it anymore. They’ve become more advanced and use things like internal serial ports or JTAG ports.
So, why do cable companies still restrict access to SNMP, and worse, to some of your modem’s diagnostic features? I suspect it is because they don’t want to have to answer questions about why they suck. They hide the real details of what your modem is doing from you.
Why is this a big deal?
For one, I own the hardware, but my cable company configures it against my wishes. I can understand rate limiting – I pay for the fastest service already – but I cannot understand restricting diagnostic tools.
For two, I have spent, in the last 6 months, perhaps 40 hours debugging a cable internet issue with techs from Cox Communications. After many, many rounds of techs who report “all signal levels are good” I finally got a real live network engineer on the line, who, in 5 minutes, could look at all the statistics on my modem. And solve problems.