
A Practical Guide to Correctly Troubleshooting with Traceroute (2009) [pdf] - kercker
https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Sunday/RAS_traceroute_N45.pdf
======
lbenes
Reminds me of back when I was a kid in NYC around 2001, and first learned
about traceroute and routing playing around with Linux. Late one night my
Comcast Internet went down. So I called support, only to be given some message
that it consumer support was closed. Did some basic ping and traceroute
troubleshooting and discovered that the first hop out of Comcast to Cogent was
down.

So being a foolish and persistent 18yo, I called directory assistance and sure
enough Cogent NOC was listed. So I called them pretending to be a Comcast
support employee. No questions asked. I told them the router IP that was down
and they said they'd look into it. 20 min later, my connection to the outside
was up. Probably fixed the Internet for several million people in NYC. The
foolishness of youth has its perks.

~~~
throwaway613834
> So being a foolish 18yo I called directly assistance and sure enough Cogent
> NOC was listed. So I called them pretending to be a Comcast support
> employee. No questions asked.

How in the world did you find the correct phone number? And how did you
pretend to be an employee? (Did you say "this is [random name, or maybe your
own name] calling from Comcast?" or something?)

~~~
Spooky23
It was easier in those days to find NOC phone numbers and network engineers
generally like to fix problems.

I did network event correlation in those days (using prolog and Perl to
convert hundreds of thousands of log entries and events to actionable alerts),
and would call various NOCs all of the time, usually to let them know that
their device was spewing alerts or doing something dumb. There was very little
in the way of authentication. Once you crossed the line to ask for things vs
fix things you’d get more questions.

~~~
samplonius
> It was easier in those days to find NOC phone numbers and network engineers
> generally like to fix problems.

Yes, it is super hard now. It took over 5 seconds to find the Cogent support
numbers:

[http://www.cogentco.com/en/customer-service/support-
desk](http://www.cogentco.com/en/customer-service/support-desk)

It if hadn't found anything after 10 seconds, I would have given up and gone
back to watching Youtube.

~~~
detaro
And if I call those numbers I get the people in charge of running the network
(which the conversation was about), or a helpdesk that can't do anything
directly?

------
kayfox
Presentation video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dUqVlZ6trU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dUqVlZ6trU)

