the corner office

For the past few days I've had intermittent hassles connecting to various web sites. Read errors, 'document not found' errors and the like. At first I thought it might be traffic hassles with MSBlaster, or even a result of the NY power failures, or sun spots or something. But things just kept getting worse, until I could browse virtually nothing. Local connections seemed OK.

Frustrating and annoying. Is it my ISDN card finally going titsup? My gateway unhealthy (Red Hat 8.0 not what I'd call a confidence-inspiring version of Linux). A wider connectivity issue in South Africa? Of course, calling MWEB support is an option, but in my experience, you'll first speak to someone who knows less about networking than you do, but who'll keep you trying to explain the problem for 10 minutes before they realise they're out of their depth, and put you through to someone who has a clue, and might be able to help you, but as soon as they ask what you're connecting with and you say 'Linux', they say 'sorry, we don't support it' and end the call before you can try to reason with them. So I generally avoid them.

Nonetheless, in frustration, I dug up an old text document with a list of alternative dialup numbers to MWEB (no longer supported, if you believe their spam mails and support staff), and tried dialling up with one of those. And wooo, I'm back online.

I'm upgrading to ADSL soon, and then bye-bye MWEB and the mass-market crap ISP that it is.