(no subject)
Dec. 14th, 2006 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI have DSL at my house, now. It's my xmas present. I was supposed to meet the guy between 1 and 5 and he wasn't here then. He'd been and gone by 1, left me a package of stuff on my front steps.
I opened the stuff and put everything out and started the CD of instructional goodness. Everything went pretty well until it failed all the damn ping tests. I rebooted everything, read the help (about ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew) and got an error message on the command line about the RPC server not being available. So, what the hell, I called tech support. (For newer readers, note that I spent about nine years of my life BEING tech support. I was the person who got called, not the person on the other end of the phone not-having-internet. My, how things change.)
I'd like to point out for the record here that I was in front of my computer with it turned on and the error message in question displayed on the screen when I called. The tech support guy was kind and walked me through assorted steps and screens. I typed what I was told to type and I did things the way I was told to do them even though I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between Start-Run-cmd and hitting the shortcut to the command line that I have on the desktop. We got nothing. We looked in AdministrativeTools-Services and the RPC thing was started automagically. We rebooted. We pointed and clicked. Finally the tech told me I would have to get a local tech or contact Microsoft because he could not solve my problem. If this is the experience most people have with tech support, no wonder they don't like to call.
*sigh* I was not very amused, but whatever. He did try and he was very pleasant about the whole thing, just out of ideas for fix0ring.
I hung up and went back to the internets on my shitty-ass 26.4 kbps line of dialup. I googled. Six clicks later, I had Check to see if your DHCP client is started. I checked. It wasn't. Oops. I turned it on in the aforementioned AdministrativeTools-Services thing (and set it to automatic from here on out) and there was light.
Why wasn't DHCP running in the first place? I don't know. The laptop is some four years old. Probably at one time or another, I went through and shut off all kinds of crap that I was never going to use and I betcha it got killed in the crossfire.
I opened the stuff and put everything out and started the CD of instructional goodness. Everything went pretty well until it failed all the damn ping tests. I rebooted everything, read the help (about ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew) and got an error message on the command line about the RPC server not being available. So, what the hell, I called tech support. (For newer readers, note that I spent about nine years of my life BEING tech support. I was the person who got called, not the person on the other end of the phone not-having-internet. My, how things change.)
I'd like to point out for the record here that I was in front of my computer with it turned on and the error message in question displayed on the screen when I called. The tech support guy was kind and walked me through assorted steps and screens. I typed what I was told to type and I did things the way I was told to do them even though I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between Start-Run-cmd and hitting the shortcut to the command line that I have on the desktop. We got nothing. We looked in AdministrativeTools-Services and the RPC thing was started automagically. We rebooted. We pointed and clicked. Finally the tech told me I would have to get a local tech or contact Microsoft because he could not solve my problem. If this is the experience most people have with tech support, no wonder they don't like to call.
*sigh* I was not very amused, but whatever. He did try and he was very pleasant about the whole thing, just out of ideas for fix0ring.
I hung up and went back to the internets on my shitty-ass 26.4 kbps line of dialup. I googled. Six clicks later, I had Check to see if your DHCP client is started. I checked. It wasn't. Oops. I turned it on in the aforementioned AdministrativeTools-Services thing (and set it to automatic from here on out) and there was light.
Why wasn't DHCP running in the first place? I don't know. The laptop is some four years old. Probably at one time or another, I went through and shut off all kinds of crap that I was never going to use and I betcha it got killed in the crossfire.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-14 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-14 10:32 pm (UTC)But anyway, huzzah for broadband! BRING ON THE PR0N!
no subject
Date: 2006-12-14 10:59 pm (UTC)avoid running their CD. these installation CDs tend to install things you don't necessarily particularly want.
i usually just tell such tech support folks "the CD doesn't run on my mac" (unless it actually does, in which case i say "the CD doesn't run on my linux box"), please give me the Short List of Settings for People Who Know Computers, or pass me on to the next level of support.