WebAfrica down time, technical explanation required

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sweetlilmre

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Hi,

I have a WebAfrica Titan Data account (and a pre-paid). Recently my access went down partially, and has after three days, been mysteriously restored.

Let me explain the situation and see if any network techies out there could provide a rationale as to what happened.

Order of events:

  1. Saturday afternoon 10/07/2010 I realise that I cannot seem to browse anywhere
  2. After a LOT of checking I discover I can browse to Google and Gmail, WebAfica, SAFM and that is about it
  3. I switch to my prepaid account, same issue.
  4. I try support, no joy, they say everything is fine their side.
  5. I try an Axxess account it works 100% no issue
  6. I try my WebAfrica account on another line and IT works 100%, no issue.
  7. Time passes, I try support again, they tell me to get Telkom to recreate my port. I do this and it makes no difference. I try the telkom guest account and can get to telkomsa.net but not to www.do.co.za. This seems to make the Telkom guy think there is something wrong with the guest account and he logs a call against it.
  8. I phone support again, they say they will escalate to dev. on Monday.
  9. Monday comes, and no word, so I phone again. I speak to one of the support guys who basically tells me I am talking B$ as there is no way this could happen. He gives me some fnbconnect account. With this I can get to fnb.co.za but nowhere else, its seems capped.
  10. I phone back and get another guy who was much more friendly (big up Anton) ask if he can get hold of the manager, I get hold of "Stanford", he says he will escalate to dev. and get back to me in 45 minutes. Long story short, about 6pm I get a call from a staffer who tells me they got asked to call me. Still no joy. I PLEAD with the guy to help me out.
  11. I get home and my wife tells me the "internet is back on", and telkom phoned (I got an sms saying they were attending to the fault as far as the guest account issue went and had resolved it, so I assume this call was related).

So they I write to them to tell them that whatever they did, they fixed it. They tell me that they have changed nothing and this might have been a "routing issue on the port to which your line is connected to and it looked like the telkom engineers have fixed the issue.". (afaik they have no idea about the telkom guy logging the call against the guest account).

Now I am a software guy, not a network or hardware guy, but this seems really odd/implausable. I can't get over how it was that the Axxess account worked, but BOTH the WebAfrica accounts didn't from my line and that they DID from another line.

However if there is a rational explanation that can factor into and account for these variables, or supposing that possibly I had some port related issue that caused a routing issue with WebAfrica accounts and that somehow when I got my port recreated and the call got logged this resorted in Telkom fixing an issue proactively (look it _could_ be possible :D), then I am happy to accept that. Colour me skeptical, but I'd just like a straight answer from someone.

Does anyone have any clue? I really hate Heisenbugs :confused:

Thanks
-(e)
 
No problem on my webafrica account, it was available 100% of the time even with Seacom being down.
 
maybe a DNS issue on your pc or router WA = SAIX DNS, Axxess = IS DNS bit late now but if it happens again set your pc to use Open DNS also try ipconfig /flushdns
 
Sounds more like his line was blacklisted for some reason on Telkom's side, most probably by mistake, and that whenever he dials up an account it would somehow end up as a capped account of some sort. I have seen this happen on another line but could never figure out why. So all of this is an assumption but I doubt the fault lies with either FNB/WA.
 
I just had a problem where I could only connect to www.telkom.co.za despite me having a WA and not a Telkom account. Disconnected and reconnected and it's fine now but I can't help thinking that Telkom is messing with things on their side.
 
Hi,

Tried OpenDNS and everything else suggested. The blacklisting point seems like a possibility, though again why would the Axxess account still work on the line?

Came in this morning and access was down again, shat myself :) but a disconnect / reconnect sorted it out.

So still an unsolved mystery then?
-(e)
 
Look it is not impossible that both WA and FNB had a problem on your accounts specifically, but wow that would be coincidence of note, especially since they both got fixed at the same time. Wait you did test both FNB and WA to make sure they both work at the same time?
 
Hi guys

@sweetlilmre - the problem you experienced is somewhat strange and very difficult to pin point at this stage.

The fact that your account worked on another line and not your line adds another dimension to this puzzle. :wtf:

Could you please monitor your connection and notify me or support if the problem persist.

If anyone is still unable to to connect, please pm me your contact details and client code so that I can investigate the matter.


Thank you.
 
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