DSL down 18 days and counting

[MTL]

Hi All

The post I made a few hours ago may have been removed by a moderator.  Too bad, this community should be aware of the fact the Verizon has a DSL outage that has lasted 18 days, affects at least six households and shows no sign of being resolved any time soon.  Perhaps other community members have had similar experiences.  If so, I'd like to hear about it. 

Here's our story:

About 18 days ago our Internet went down.  This is not uncommon.  We're (very) rural and it's gone down before.  Verizon usually does a good job of getting it back within a day or two.  After three days, we called tech support.  Our neighbors had already been calling...  In the last 18 days, my wife and I have spent roughly 12 hours on the phone with tech support.  We have had no less that five scheduled technician visits.  No techs have yet made it, though.  They simply don't show - no call to say they'll be late, or have to reschedule - just no-shows.  I even took 1/2 day off work to meet a tech who never showed.  I called in three times and was told each time that the tech would be there within a hour or two.  The voice support folks apparently don't have a direct line to the dispatchers...   

I don't work with WANs, but I do know enough about networks to tell my router to post its SysLog to a remote server.  You can do this too, but you'll need a syslog program to receive and record that log data.  Check out WinSyslog (www.winsyslog.com) it has a 30 day free trial (which may not be long enough for my situation) and is fairly easy to install and configure.  Be sure to look at the docs - you need to set up an 'Action' to record the log to a file.

Then access your router (http://192.168.1.1 usually, default is adman and password, but yours may be different.  Click System Monitoring... Advanced... Remote Logging and set the IP address to that of the machine on which WinSysLog is running.

Here are some of the more interesting syslog entries from my router:

2010-06-07,23:25:24,2010-06-07,23:25:24,192.168.1.1,3,5,pppd[3243]: Wan link is up and PPPoE Terminator on DSL:nas1 is done working
2010-06-07,23:25:24,2010-06-07,23:25:24,192.168.1.1,3,5,pppd[3243]: Westell phase_hook PHASE=PHASE_SERIALCONN(2)
2010-06-07,23:25:24,2010-06-07,23:25:24,192.168.1.1,3,5,pppd[3243]: PPPD Exit Status changed EXIT_USER_REQUEST->EXIT_OK during phase PHASE_DORMANT->PHASE_SERIALCONN
2010-06-07,23:25:24,2010-06-07,23:25:24,192.168.1.1,3,5,pppd[3243]: Westell PPP Environment: device:nas1 linkname:config0 ppplogname:root orig_uid:0
2010-06-07,23:25:29,2010-06-07,23:25:29,192.168.1.1,3,4,pppd[3243]: waitForPADO: timed out
2010-06-07,23:25:29,2010-06-07,23:25:29,192.168.1.1,3,3,pppoe-relay[2575]: PADO packet from 00:08:e3:b9:45:05 on interface nas1 does not have Relay-Session-Id tag
2010-06-07,23:25:49,2010-06-07,23:25:49,192.168.1.1,3,4,pppd[3243]: Timeout waiting for PADS packets
2010-06-07,23:25:49,2010-06-07,23:25:49,192.168.1.1,3,3,pppd[3243]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
2010-06-07,23:25:49,2010-06-07,23:25:49,192.168.1.1,3,4,pppd[3243]: Enter destroy_pppoesessionfile

The stuff at the front is the date and time.  The interesting part is the line where PADO packet from 00:08:e3:b9:45:05 does not have a Relay-Session-Id tag.  The numer part is a 'MAC' address, it uniquely identifies a single machine.  It appears to me that that machine is not responding with what my router is expecting.  Perhaps there is a community member out there who knows more aout PPP and PADO/PADS than I.  If so, your thoughts are most welcome.

-MTL

[MTL]

UPDATE:  Elizabeth has informed me that my previous post on this topic was not removed, it was:

Your post was not removed. It was placed on a special board for the attention of Verizon staff. Your issue has been escalated to customer service.

ElizabethS

Thx to ElizabethS for her assistance.