Some guy

SO there is this dude who calls in for tech support saying he is unable to ping his ip address. He has a dynamic ip (a residential account) so all I want to know is whether or not he can browse the web. He can browse, he can check email- why is he bothering me. He thinks he should be able to ping but he has no idea how pinging works.

Firstly- is his modem going to allow an incoming ping request? No answer.

Secondly, is the machine behind the modem (al-be-it masked by a NAT Firewall) going to respond to the request? No.

So I try to give him some knowledge and let him know he needs to reconceptualize things. Punk.

I called the Internet Admin and asked them if we block things- nope we don't . What makes matters worse is that residential customers aren't supposed to be able to ping- he was surprised when I told him that I could. I think if he knew the little things I was up to it would blow his mind. I do worse than ping, I vpn, remote desktop, ftp etc. The only thing I haven't really tried yet is a web server. That was simply because I couldn't get Win 2003 server to deal with my wifi on a radius properly (a task I will one day pick up under Nix.)

All the guy needs to do is flash his Speedtouch 536 to a recent firmware version. After he does that he can verify some settings related to incoming requests. The new speedtouch firmware allows for integration with Dynamic DNS. He should get himself an auto-updated account so that he doesn't have to remember the ip- like a lame person.

Geez, tired of these NOobs.