Tired of Being Screwed By Cox (no pun intended)

[der.hans]

Am 17. Jun, 2003 schw=E4tzte Craig White so:

> On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 18:32, Thomas Cameron wrote:

> > I mean no offense by this at all, but be realistic:  What if your mail
> > server smokes a power supply while you are at work/in the dentist's
> > chair/whatever...  You're screwed.  If the Cox SMTP server tanks, they =
have
> > a dedicated group to getting it back up, and I'd bet a donut (maybe two=
)
> > that they have a failover system that works reasonably well.

> ----
> A whole 2 donuts? Doesn't sound very confident to me.

They're still free :).

> I would imagine that cox could just change dns to point
> smtp.west.cox.net to a different server to handle the load - perhaps a
> round robin dns type setup.

Well, it would make sense for them to have failover stuff in place.
Unfortunately that hasn't been my experience with ISPs.

ASU used to go down all the time. Granted, ASU has quite the complicated
setup.

SpeedChoice/Sprint couldn't build a decent mail server if their collective
lives depended on it. I used them as a smarthost, then discovered how dumb
it was to rely on them and went to direct delivery. The service in general
sucks, but loses all semblance of working for days at a time when it goes
down.

When Cox network stuff was run by @HOME it was horrible. They had mail
problems all the time, often lasting several days. Cox did nothing for year=
s
to get this fixed. It was a non-concern of theirs, apparently.

Currently Cox business services thinks it's OK to change things on static
accounts with a generic "we'll be doing service in your area" notification
shortly before the changes happen. @HOME used to cache DNS stuff for a
couple of weeks and I'm told AOL still does. Cox, who as noted above used t=
o
use @HOME, thinks 5 days is enough time for that 2 week cache to expire.
They musta hired enron and worldcom accountants to do their networking.

I have only talked to one support engineer at Cox. He seemed to be
knowledgeable and was able to accurately answer my questions, so there is a
glimmer of hope :).

> I can tell you for sure that when I moved in March, I got the cox
> residential service and port 25 and port 80 were already blocked. So
> were NetBIOS and ping - I can't ping jack from here. I don't know how
> many other ports are blocked but considering bandwidth that I am getting
> versus the price I am paying, I am just keeping my yap shut and learning
> to love the beast.

Complete blocking of ping is bad, IMO. I've not heard of a problem pinging
from Cox connections. Are you sure you're not remembering a FastQ
connection? I've talked to Dan about that. He won't budge. I still disagree
with him and won't recommend FastQ until he changes that policy.

ciao,

der.hans
--=20
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