Well, the issues with my ADSL line are getting worse: it seems to loose DSL sync randomly and no combination of phone sockets or microfilters appears to help. This means that email may be delayed by two days or more (although I do now have backup MX thanks to GratisDNS), and the web site(s) will not always be available 🙁
Still, the good news is that it’s so nice to have an ISP that isn’t run into the ground by PHB’s: yesterday I called support (for the first time) and was rather worried by the ‘Press 1 if you are using a Mac’ voice menu, but I didn’t need to worry:
Support: Hello. How can I help you ?
Me: I’ve got a problem with my router. It doesn’t pass the ATM loopback test
Support: Which model do you have ?
Me: A Zyxel 650
Support: Ok, I can test the line, but it’ll take two minutes or so
And they did ! The line passed, so they wanted to go through some testing with me that involved a router factory reset, but I said it was going to take a little time as I was set up for static IP’s, so without any discussions he helpfully went though all the steps I needed to take in order for them to be able to raise a fault with BT, including telling me which socket and connector BT would be using to prove/disprove any fault reports so I could do it in my own time.
As it turns out, I couldn’t get it back even after all of the extra steps, but had to go out before I could report anything – on the way back there was a BT Openreach van parked next to my green box, so I tried again when I got back in, and it started working again. About 11pm last night it vanished again, and was brought back this morning by a router power cycle although the software reset option appears to have no effect now. Assuming it’s not an engineer induced fault (boy, do I have a list of those from numerous BT installs over the years at work) then it’s looking likely that the router is dying: if this is the case then I’d expect this random availability to continue for the next week or more.