Servicing the Public

I copied most of the useful tax forms in pdf format (with instructions): www.digitaldiscipline.com/images/2002_taxforms

(in case you don't want to surf the Infernal Revenue Service's site)

Form 2106 is your friend. . . remember, kids - all travel is ostensibly looking for a new job. (Thanks to axissilverhand for that tip last tax season).

Earthlink Eats My Balls

short test post.

Smurflink

this is a longer post, from a non-earthlink net connection, just to prove to myself that i'm not insane. it also covers most of the background.

The office had been on DireTV Internet, which went the way of the Dodo on 1/28 (at least in our office - this was probably the day Smurflink turned on -their- DSL circuit for our line). The initial order had been placed 1/13, but the modem didn't arrive until 2/4, after much gnashing of teeth (and some less-than-cordial inquiries).

DSL modem goes in, achieves network synch five minutes later, and after rebooting the router (D-Link DI-704) and blowing out the ARP tables of the four machines in the office, everyone is happily online. the hellish 56k modem that had been cannibalizing the fax line is relegated once again to a life of ignominious lassitude in the storage closet.

surfing is just fine. retrieval of email from the company's server in connecticut (we're in N'awlins) goes without a hitch. okay, let's let all our clients and contractors know we're back up to full speed.

waitaminute, why can't we send email through our mail server (colo'd with the web server offsite). get on the "online support chat" queue and eventually discover that they ever-so-helpfully block all traffic on port 25 (smtp) at their border routers to prevent spamming (likewise, port 119 - nntp - is also locked in).

what this means is that those of us with intelligently-maintained, authentication-required SMTP servers hosted on other networks CAN'T FRIGGING USE THEM. unless, of course, we were to map SMTP to a different port and configure our mail clients accordingly (trivial under Mozilla, probably hellish under IE). The upshot of this is that ALL outbound correspondence MUST go through smurflink's mail server. . . i dunno about the rest of y'all, but i'd rather keep my own mail logs, rather than have them reside on the systems of a large and easily-strongarmed company. but that's just me.

so that was yesterday's joy.

today, it was the matter of, "okay, let's do some work and put it up on a discussion board. why is it taking so long to post? what do you mean, server timeout? everyone else is posting just fine. my SHORT messages are going up (albeit a little slowly). what gives?"

back on the live support chat queue, with a clueful guy who, unfortunately, was a little quick to parrot the "we don't support third party hardware" copy-and-paste text when i mentioned our router, and jumped to the "make sure you've got the latest firmware" line.

sorry, mate, it worked fine MONDAY on a POS dial-up, and just fine for months before that on DirecTV's dsl. . . Smurflink's service is the only new piece in this chain. thus, deduction would lead the logical user to believe that it's Smurflink that is at fault, given no other changes in system or network configuration.

Sending data is just fine - 130KB worth of .doc attachments went out and came back at the rated speed (which, incidentally, tested out just fine from the diagnostic - we're getting the full 128k up/1.5mbit down that we signed up for).

it's JUST this posting of formdata. Here, LiveJournal, Ars Technica, the sites that pertain to business. . . none of them will go through the post process with more than ~768 characters. I tested this while i was online with the tech guy, trying a 1100 character one, followed by half of it, and the half-size one posted promptly, the 1100 char one hung and died. . . "server not responding."

allllllllll-righty then!

to further obfuscate matters, i can log into my yahoo mail account, but clicking on any of the mailboxes, it hangs at the status bar (in both IE6 and Mozilla 1.3), and will not open the mailbox. Works just fine from home (Cox cable internet). . . where I'm sitting as I post this.

What. The. Fuck.

At least the tech dude was decent and relatively clueful. his manager got an "attaboy" letter for him, with the comment "it's too bad he couldn't actually fix my problem. maybe you can."