Service Providers

In a natural progression, let's move to service providers.

My parents are now a week into their enforced Internet silence. Last Tuesday evening they had Internet access via their excellent Netgear DG834 firewall through to a service provider, had changed nothing and there were no problems. Since then, zip.

Mother is sufficiently technical that she can dance around Windows and her firewall. Firewall says "LCP is allowed to come up" but it simply will not connect. IP address is dynamic, username and password have been checked.

Here are some of the things that the ISP have said:
Your firewall is at fault, please contact Netgear
You have to flash the firmware on your firewall
You are running Vista / You need to reload your computer
You need to change your DNS settings to be able to connect to the Internet.
You need to uninstall your anti virus software on your PC.
You need to disable the Windows firewall on your PC.

The line is fine (a BT engineer has tested it).
The ISP is insistent that the problem lies in their house.
They have deleted her email address and recreated it incorrectly so had I not spotted that, all emails would have bounced after 2 days.
The firewall has been changed, so has the RJ11 cable and so has the micro filter.

But the best one is to insist categorically that the Netgear firewall will connect if the drop down box containing the options "PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet)" and "PPPoA (PPP over ATM)" is changed to "PPPoA 2364".

Now correct me if I am wrong, but you can't change a drop down list box for a start and I think that number corresponds to RFC 2364, the request for comments document for PPPoA on the Internet Engineering Task Force site.

Still, I saved the best for last. The ISP in question appears to have a more pressing problem. I'm not going to say which one it is, but click on https://webmail.talktalk.net/ and you'll find that the security certificate is invalid.

Should we have a whip round?