Annoyed beyond belief...

[sky-knight]

I just got off the phone with COX for the fourth time today, the second time forcing them to flush the arp cache on the CMTS I'm connected to.

The technician's answer for my arp issues?

Stop using multiple IP addresses on a single MAC address. My ISP is now trying to tell me I must spoof a mac address on each bound IP to keep this issue from happening. I'm not happy.

They better get real by the time I wake up tomorrow morning, because if I go down again during business hours I know a few people that are going to be crapping contracts until their anal cavities disintegrate from paper cuts!

[mdh]

Well, the good news is that if they're crapping contracts, the paperwork is just about done. Hope the pen is accounted for.

[dwasserman]

"Stop using multiple IP addresses on a single MAC address. My ISP is now trying to tell me I must spoof a mac address on each bound IP to keep this issue from happening. I'm not happy."

Tell to the help desk of your isp to recommend what network device that does. No router or firewall work so from my knowledge.

[mozerd]

No router or firewall work so from my knowledge.

IP Addressing Services Proxy ARP

_________________________
David Mozer
IT-Expert on Call
Information Technology for Home and Business
Untangle Gold Partner
Untangle's Business Value

[sky-knight]

Exactly, Mozerd, they are trying to tell me that I must change out my equipment for high end junk just to address a problem with their back end.

EQUIPMENT THAT I WON'T NEED ON THEIR FIBER!

So I just got on the horn with a local rep, and not so politely informed him that telling me I need to spend thousands of dollars on routing equipment to connect to an SMB cable line is moronic. And they can either fix it in the next 24 hours or expect to be transferring me to a disconnect department. And yes I've also confirmed their fiber links don't need this crap. So the "enterprise" connection doesn't need the "enterprise" equipment but their SMB one does.

[dwasserman]

Read the subscription agreement and if they are responsible for providing the CPE demand it.
Its the first time I read the need to publish one MAC address for each IP address you have.

Mozerd: This feature is in the PIX/ASA also? or only in the 2500 (too old) IOS?

[mozerd]

Mozerd: This feature is in the PIX/ASA also? or only in the 2500 (too old) IOS?

proxy ARP is a capability [feature] native to IOS -- all CISCO Router running under IOS have this ability -- it is not turned on by default -- some consider enabling ARP Proxy a security issue + other behaviors that network engineers are not found of.

[sky-knight]

And that was my response to the COX field moron that suggested it.

[mrunkel]

ProxyARP isn't that, proxyARP is one MAC address many IPs.

[sky-knight]

Precisely, ProxyARP is a process to hide multiple public IP's that are assigned to multiple interfaces behind a single interface.

Anyway, I had a long conversation with a tier 2 tech that I've been waking up every night for a week. He, being as sleep deprived as I am over this issue FINALLY saw the connection die, and was able to trace the symptoms back to the source.

Apparently, I was only the most vocal of several complaints, and after an hour this evening of wondering what they were smoking... they finally came to the massive conclusion that the CMTS responsible for the eastern half of town, the very device that malfunctioned last week causing a major outage, and the same very outage that started this last week of nightmares, was faulty.

So after a week of pain, Cox has finally decided to fail this entire CMTS and all 2000 people stuck on it, over to the backup unit located in the same rack. No sooner than the pushed the button did my connections stabilize. I just hope it holds.