comcast business blows donkeys, leaves no donkey unsatisifed

[twitter, October 30th - and note there'll be a followup, next post]

Oh good, @comcastbusiness turned SecurityEdge back on again this weekend which means half our lower-profile DNS lookups fail and things like work VPNs are broken.

Is this going to be a weekly Saturday call-in-and-disable-it-again game now? Happened the same time as last week.

Last week, once we finally got it sorted (the following MONDAY) the escalation agent told us any support agent would be able to disable it if reactivated.

That seems to have been a lie; tier 1 agent says they can't do it and now we get to wait for callback.

So this is going to be a recurring adventure, @comcastbusiness? Do we lose a big chunk of network functionality every weekend and have to deal with tech support callbacks?

Also, this is fun - Tier 1 agent tells us they can remove it from our account - for $20 a month every month forever.

Is this true?

Do you want to add a $20/month surcharge not to _break our network every week_, @comcastbusiness?

Because that's sure as hell what it looks like.

I mean, I am wondering at the moment if there's some new IT policy inside Comcast of making sure SecurityEdge is active every week, or maybe of just pushing updates to the modem every week, which amounts to the same thing: breaking us every week unless we pay an extra $20/month.

AND breaking our weekends.

Anna wanted to go grab some groceries. She's contact and her phone is the callback number. When do we get the callback? Who knows?! Last weekend, it was MONDAY.

Is this our new Saturdays now? Because I'm not having it.

Oh, and this also breaks Akismet on our webserver, because it breaks DNS to api dot freemius dot com.

What's that mean for us? It means we get to deal with the eternal flood of comment spam _manually_ until this is fixed.

comcast business blows donkeys, leaves no donkey unsatisifed, part 2

[twitter, today. see also previous post]

Remember this bullshit, where @ComcastBusiness broke us for the second weekend in a row by turning back on the software they run that breaks fixed-IP/self-hosting customers?

It's Monday. We're still broken.

See that reply saying to DM? I did. It was ignored.

We're being told now that the _earliest_ we can get a callback from @ComcastBusiness - you know, so we can tell them to turn off _their software_ that _they turned on_ that _they know_ breaks fixed-IP/self-hosted customers - is 2pm.

That's even worse than last weekend!

What I'm very much afraid is that there has been some IT change inside @ComcastBusiness that means updating modems weekly, or even worse, _turning SecurityEdge back on automatically every week_.

Either of these will break us _every weekend_, apparently for _days_.

And @ComcastBusiness tell us that we can have this software removed so this doesn't happen on modem updates or SecurityEdge restarts...

...if we pay them an extra $20 a month forever.

We're _already_ paying almost $180/month and now they want 10% more to _stop breaking us_.

In case you don't know, @ComcastBusiness, this is called a protection racket.

"Nice network you got here. Shame if somethin' were t'happen to it. Say, every so often. Or every week."

I don't _know_ this is a weekly thing now. But same day, same time, a week later? I smell cron.

And even if it's not, if we just got unlucky, this still means every modem update means apparently three days with damaged @ComcastBusiness internet.

This breaks work VPNs, by the way. Did I mention that? Well, now I have.

So this means in the last two weeks, we've had _six days_ with our network operationally damaged thanks to @ComcastBusiness reactivating software on _their end_ that _they know_ breaks customers like _us_.

And they set it disabled when we signed up, which means they knew _then_.

Or at least strongly implies it. I can't be sure.

I _can_ be sure that they're aware this happens _now_, because _their tier 2 support people told us_ the previous time this happened.

You know, the weekend _before_ this one just passed.

And that's bad, I mean, like, _really_ bad.

But the fact that they know this, and _can_ fix it - for real, not temporarily - but _won't_ unless we _pay more_?

_That's_ infuriating.

[a bit later]

ETA: Ooooo, _now_ they've responded to DMs.

Saying that since there's already an open ticket so they can't really do anything.

Yeah. That's _much_ better.

(The open ticket is "the best way" to deal with this. And okay, fair enough, but... not actually better.)