Well Well…. BT Broadband and Fasthosts… and a fool.
So i have a customer who hosts her website with fasthosts and was trying to view her own page and the fasthosts website. Unfortunately the browser kept telling her that the page had timed out waiting for the server to respond. When she called me i told her to do the normal stuff like turn everything off start again, clear temp Internet files and the likes, even got her to change the micro filters on the off chance of anything weird happening. I was then asked to attend the site and check things over. Where to start, i checked everything i could think of at the customers end, i even reset the router in case the ip tables in the router were corrupt but this felt highly unlikely as it wasn’t all websites only fasthosts and the company website. Anyway so none of this worked….
My little brain gets ticking away and i think it must be a fasthosts issue so i get on the phone to the companies web guy and he gets me all the account details so i can call support for some help with the problem. Anyway it seems all the sites are up and that everyone else in the world can see these sites but just not at the customers premises. So i did a tracert and get a few errors and it seems that in fact the tracert is fine and dandy and everything on it is as it should have been. Anyway fasthosts said that everything appears in order and that there is nothing that could been done at there end to make things better. So that was that.
I was left with BT the customers service provider. So i called Bangladesh central and asked for residential support. My customer has a BT business telephone and a BT residential broadband account. When you call BT for support the first thing that they ask you is your telephone number so that they can look up your account details. So i give them our account details and were promptly told to call Business support. So i call a business support line and am told that they cannot help us because the customer has a residential account and that i must call back the residential support number and explain that i have a bt business telephone number and a residential account for broadband. I do this and get we cannot deal with you. So i ask for a manager and get told no under no circumstances can we deal with you…… anyway three days of arguing and finally loosing my temper on the telephone with an English business support technician. He recommends that i speak with the complaints department. So i call the complaints department and get through to a very very helpful complaints manager. He then routed me through to a technician in Newcastle who understood me word for word. Although his Gordie was a bit strong. Anyway the techie from BT did all the necessary checks on the line and said everything seemed fine up to the router. I asked about the router and he said it was very unlikely that it was the router that caused the problem. So he concluded that it must have been a fasthosts problem as i suspected in the first place.
So the BT Techie suggests he call them on my behalf and explain the problem i agree to this and the next day i get a call to say that he couldn’t get to the right person and that he was brick walled when ever he asked any questions. So he proposed that i call Fasthosts and ask for a three way conference call where we could all talk and through about some ideas. This to me sounded perfect because BT denied the problem and so did Fasthosts. I call fasthosts up and i am told that there would be no way in this world that BT could have a conversation over the telephone with fasthosts. Not a chance in hell. So there i am up the swanny with out any paddles. No idea how to fix this….
Light bulb moment….. the other evening i was working on the customers computer remotely and had to look at something on the Adobe.com website. It timed out like the two other websites. This then eliminated Fasthosts from the equation. I was screwed i tried everything apart from trying a new router so i bit the bullet and went out and grabbed a router from a local PC shop, I didn’t have any in stock and my spare was eaten by another customers dogs.
Eureka Moment…. i plugged it in and set everything up and tentatively typed the address into the address bar and it worked just like that.
I kicked myself and swore out loud!!
This means that the IP Tables within the router must have been failing to some extent. I have seen it fail completely but never break down in stages. I thought that the hard reset would have solved the issue but that never worked.
Anyway the customer is happy and everything is working thats the main thing. But i just wanted to share the experience with you out there. Hope it helps someone out.
Moral of the story – Change The Router!!! and dont have a business telephone line and a residential broadband account with BT its against the terms and conditions dont you know! (If that was the case how did we manage that then!!)