Afrihost unresponsive PPPOE connection issue

[Wyzak]

To make a long story short. Our companies lines are connected permanently and are only reset when an issue occurs which requires such a reset. We frequently have uptime longer than a month.

In the recent past it has been necessary to reset the Afrihost PPPOE connection thrice because the connection simply becomes unresponsive. We are still transmitting packets over the connection, but never receive anything back.

We have multiple ADSL lines and multiple ISP accounts on each line. It is only the Afrihost connections that have been giving issues recently.

This morning it happened again and I decided to contact Afrihost and ask for some assistance.

Email sent to them:

We use Afrihost as one of our ISP accounts and we have recently noticed an increase in the number of dead connections from Afrihost. Essentially the PPPOE connection remains active, and we are still transmitting packets over the connection but we receive nothing in return. This situation also does not resolve itself until such time as we reset the PPPOE connection.

This does not happen with our other ISP accounts and never use to happen with Afrihost in the past. Could you please provide some assistance? The last occurrence was this morning just before the reset at about 7:50AM.

Account username: xxx

First response:

Please be advised that we have checked the account and all seems fine, there currently is a connection and we do ask that you reset
your router and restart your machines and test once more.
Please do advise if the problem still persist.

Not helpful, doesn't address the issue at all. I know the line is working because I reset it, but why did it stop working?

So I sent it back to them asking for more info as to why it was necessary to perform a reset:

please note that the reason why we request router reboot or reset is that there will be an IP conflict which is mostly caused by the modem when it connects it picks up to connections with different IPs on one line so to eliminate such a problem the modem need to be reset to clear any cached connections.

Erm what? Sounds like somebody who has no idea what he is talking about and tries to convince the person on the other side that he knows what he is talking about by using all of the right terms.

If you read between the lines it sounds to me like they gave my active connection's IP address to a different client and that is why my connection has stopped working.

 

[AfriMan]

Hi there

It definitely looks like the support agent that handled your query did not adequately address it, or take into account that you have knowledge of your own systems. I don't know the full history, but it certainly seems like the responses were not helpful.

Please PM me your username, so that I can look into this issue, and if possible also the support Ticket Reference number, so that we can see the history of the query and how to avoid this kind of confusion (and frustration) in the future.

Again, we're really sorry we weren't more helpful, and hope that we can do better this time around

 

[Wyzak]

Thanks AfriMan,

I PMed the username and support ticket reference number to you.

 

[AfriMan]

Thanks AfriMan,

I PMed the username and support ticket reference number to you.

Thanks so much! We are looking into this from the technical and service side.

 

[Wyzak]

Thank you for the quick response, Suvesh was extremely helpful!

 

[AfriMan]

Thank you for the quick response, Suvesh was extremely helpful!

Glad you got some support and we finally listened to your problem. I'll let Suvesh's team leader know he helped you (cos it would have been a shame to have him killed)

 

[InTheCube]

OK, so please explain to us what the root problem and resolution was? I've experienced something similar with Afrihost a while back, and would like to understand the problem better.

 

[AfriMan]

OK, so please explain to us what the root problem and resolution was? I've experienced something similar with Afrihost a while back, and would like to understand the problem better.

I think it's up to Wyzak if he feels comfortable to divulge the specifics of his issue.

 

[Wyzak]

Sure thing. We have three ADSL lines at the office and the one that the Afrihost connection was in the grey area between a good line and a broken line. Even though the line was still active and the connection remained there is obviously something wrong with the line. Unfortunately because the line isn't completely broken it will be very difficult to get Telkom to come out, test it and fix it.

Last night after speaking with Afrihost I moved the PPPOE connections around a bit between the lines. The Afrihost connection that was on the 'grey' line quickly showed the same symptom again, but the Afrihost connection on the other line was functioning perfectly. Our Openweb connection on the 'grey' line still appeared to be functioning, but if you ping from that line I get 18s ping reply times so something is obviously not right.

I will continue to monitor the situation but it definitely looks like the issue is on our side between the line itself and possibly the router.