Bell South (DSL?) network changes South Florida

Mon Oct 13 07:36:06 UTC 2003

Does anyone know anything about Bellsouth network changes, possibly 
South Florida (or more areas involved?) affecting DSL? I remember they 
sent out an email recently that they were making service enhancing 
changes and that everyone had to add @bellsouth.net to their log-on 
id's, but I haven't seen or heard anything about something going on tonight.

Around 11:30pm last night (Oct. 12th - EDT Florida/New York Time) my 
connection stopped handling data. I tried to reset it and it would not 
come back online. FastAccess support told me it was an outage (she 
answered way too fast) in the 954 area and it would be about an hour. 
Over 3-hours later it still will not come back online. I rebooted to 
Linux and ran "ethereal" and checked the packet traffic. I have a link 
back to the DSLAM (I believe a Mini-Ram in the DLC box right down the 
street) ... and it is getting this far:

1.) PADI, PADO, PADR, PADS (Session confirmation)
2.) LCP - PPP Request, Request, Ack, Ack (One for each side, this all 
looks good!)
3. ) PPP Chap Challenge, then my system does like 6-7 PPP Challenge 
Responses. It repeats this 3 times and then
3.) LCP and PADT terminated requests originating from Bellsouth.net's 
end (Nortel Equipment).

Then my end tries again and repeats the whole process and fails again. 
So what is screwed up so that I can't authenticate????

I just called support again and described this ... and he says some 
upgrade is being done to a different link method other than PPPoE or 
PPPoATM, but when I asked if I had to change something since I _AM_ 
using PPPoE and he said no. This should all be fixed by 7am.

Does anyone know what they are doing? I don't recall receiving any 
notification about this. And when I brought that up the guy started to 
say ... "...This no planned maintenance...". So what's that mean they 
screwed up something? Or are they doing surprise unplanned maintenance?

* Is anyone else affected by this?

---
Alan Spicer (a_spicer at bellsouth.net)
Systems and Network Administration
http://aspicer.homelinux.net