Connection came back up around 2am this morning and remains up so far.

Regular readers are probably getting just as tired of seeing these updates as I am posting them. I can post these only to the Customer Service -> Rogers Cable Internet category and not have them appear on the main page. Let me know via comments. If I get any sort of response the rest of these posts will not appear on the main page.

As one could guess the connection last night was up till about 1:30am today and remained very spotty overnight until 8am this morning when it went completely dead again. It has remained dead every since.

Original ticket is still open and apparently they are working on this problem. I certainly believe they are working day and night for the past week and a bit on this don't you!!!!

Even though they know this is a wide area problem they want to send a technician over tomorrow. The technician that was supposed to come last week never arrived so we'll see if one shows up tomorrow. Then again, maybe I won't bother waiting around as like the last 20 or so times it has always been a problem out on the street.

The Rogers Internet connection came back up at 8:55pm tonight after being down way, way too long.

As a followup to this the connection was up for only 30 minutes and has been down ever since and still down. Called in again to see what is happening on the open ticket. This time the rep (Walter) said he doesn't really see any updates on the ticket whatsoever but he isn't sure he can see all the items on it. Either the last rep was lying about work being underway (most likely) or this guy really can't view what he should be able to view. He said he would put a note on the ticket for someone to call me back. I've had this done about 5 times before and have never received a callback so I've demanded that they find out right now by contacting whoever they need to, to find out what is going on.

I was still able to get to the first router that entire time but now that I've reset the modem (still connects and comes online) I can't get an IP address.

The rep came back after speaking to his supervisor and said that he found out it is a wiring problem and that Futureway (the great morons) are working on it. I was also given the old line that I can call Futureway (1-877-722-2537) to see what is going on. I've been down that road about 10 times before and it usually doesn't lead anywhere. I don't see why, as a Rogers customer, I have to do their work for them and get their subcontractors (who they own 50% of) to work on a problem.

Was down all day yesterday pretty much from the last post and all day today until I decided to reset the modem. Now back up again. During that whole period I was pretty much able to ping the first router outside of my network.

We'll see how long this lasts.

From SpamBlogging:

There is a feature in Exchange 2003 that is "new" (meaning that it wasn't in Exchange prior to this release). Under the "connection filtering" you can set it up to check messages against RBL servers and then toss them if they don't pass ...

I'll post this here because I'll hear from a number of people contemplating using SimpleFilter in place of spam filtering in Microsoft Exchange. They'll say something like "look, Microsoft is doing this so I don't need SimpleFilter".

The short answer to this goes as follows. This is a new feature of Microsoft Exchange. We've been using it for well over a year. RBL's are changing regularly and results from them change over time as well. Unless one is monitoring them continuously like we do for SimpleFilter you're asking for trouble. Also, a hit from an RBL should never be considered black or white. It seems that is your only choice with Microsoft. We have great flexibilty with the results we get from an RBL and those are honed in real-time.

I should mention that people typically use RBL when they really mean DNS Block Lists which is what is talked about above. We've moved well beyond DNS Block Lists and various other types of block lists as well. It probably won't be till late 2005 that Microsoft discovers some of the other block lists that we've already moved on from.

I should also mention that DNS Block Lists and other Block Lists that we use are a very small piece of the overall methods we use for SimpleFilter that in total help to determine the likelihood that an email is spam.

Internet connection was completely down from 1:30am to 3:10am today and has been toast since 7am till now (10:30am). Actually within those outages I can reach the first router with about 50% packet loss but nothing beyond that.

I called in to try to get an update on the open ticket. At first I couldn't get nowhere until I pressed to find out what was going on with the ticket. Initially she said they were working on it until I press some more then she came back saying they made a note on the ticket at 8am this morning that it is a noise issue on the line. Really, I could have told you that 2 years ago.

You would think they could look at the history of this area and see that over the past two years there has been a noise issue affecting the area at least 40 times since they wired this area. I'm not exaggerating with that number either. In fact it is probably on the low side. Every single time there has been an issue with connectivity here it has been a noise issue out on the street or in their shack. I'll take a drive out there later and see if someone is actually working on this. I somehow doubt it.

Well, its time to update the Linksys thread here. Last week I called Sam back to report that the new router exhibits the same behavior and wanted to give him some feedback on what I tried etc. Never heard back from him.

This week I'm having troubles with a different Linksys product (a wireless router / AP). The wireless component to it just seems to have stopped working. The actual WLAN Link light does not light up which indicates the wireless component is disabled. It seemed to start doing this a few days ago after running fine for at least 6 months. I'd unplug the unit and it would work wirelessly for about 2 minutes. The longer I unplugged the longer it would work but today the light won't come on at all and no wireless whatsoever.

I've tried a ton of different things including firmware changes, different channels, different WEP settings, different SSIDs. You name it. Also tried resetting the router to factory default and no go.

At least this time I was able to get a tech on the online chat and he pretty much said I tried everything I could and to go through the RMA process. I have to check my records but I'm pretty sure this unit has already been replaced once. I've had so many different replacement units for different Linksys products I have around here that I'm starting to loose track and faith.

Received another automated call this morning around 11am that my problem is still being worked on. Great, what can possibly take this long?

Service has been spotty up to about 2pm but usuable. Seems a little more solid since 2pm but I suspect by about 5pm like yesterday it will go wonky again.

According to a report by Nucleus Research the cost of spam on average is $1934 / year / employee.

They don't provide proper links to their news releases or the report so I've just stored a copy here

If you don't want spam to be an issue in your life any longer checkout SimpleFilter (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).