[CLUE-Tech] newsfeed

[Jeremiah Stanley]

> Erm, they *don't* block those ports, AFAIK. At least not yet.  :/

They block the ports one or two routers upstream in my case. I found that 
out when I was testing my firewall externally (from other networks). nmap 
is a very powerful tool when used to it's full capacity.

> Yep, I've never used AOL before, but I think @Home is the absolute
> worst customer service I've ever experienced for any kind of service,
> not just an ISP...and I've had three ISPs prior to @Home, and like
> three or four different telcos and a few cable providers over the
> years, so that is saying a lot.  :)

I think that 'bad' tech support comes in the fashion of not having
educated people on the phone. I know that @Home saves large green piles of
cash by having HS dropouts read 3x5 cards on how to fix common problems
and routing real problems upstream to a more technical person. I know this 
for a fact b/c I used to be the person upstream and the HS dropout.

> A dial-up ISP I had back in PA was great; they actually had directions
> for Windows (of all flavors at the time, not just 95), and Linux, and,
> I think, FreeBSD. When you called for any support, you usually got a
> guy who actually used Solaris(that's what they ran at the time)  more
> during his day than Windoze.

This I think would be a breath of fresh air. I had to call my last ISP 
once to get them to bump their router for me and I was told flat out they 
didn't support *NIX in any flavor. Which the problem was an upstream 
router that had crashed (yes, Cisco routers can crash) and I had the 
traceroutes to prove it.

A policy more like "We don't support that OS, but you are more than 
welcome to use it. We cannot guarantee it's working 100% but we are OS 
agnostic in the sense that we will never limit you to one". That I would 
like. :)

J
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by
reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"