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RBUA
The Residential Broadband Users’ Association
February 27th, 2002
Call Participants:
- Chris Weisdorf, President and Technical Director, RBUA
- Daniel T. Baril, Senior Member, RBUA
- Dermot O’Carroll, Senior Vice President, Network Engineering and Operations, Rogers Cable
- Taanta Gupta, Senior Vice President, Media Relations, Rogers Cable
Agenda Items:
"update on mail service issues"
- web mail is now in testing; deployment within the next week (beginning of Mar.)
- there are concerns about mailboxes running out of storage (10 megabytes)
- Compaq’s front-end architecture didn’t separate internal and external e-mail addresses, due to a known bug in the truth tables
- they are rearchitecting the front-end; truth tables are being reformed; testing performed on the 26th of Feb.; Mar. 11 is the estimated date of the truth table fix by Compaq
- SMTP fixes implemented either in the first week of Mar. or on Mar. 18th, but not after that date
"update on news service issues"
- binary retention is at 60 hours; 30 days on text
- Mar. 1st update should increase retention to 3 days
- bug in software on Compaq platform
- no answer on throughput issues; a followup by Rogers will provide us with information
- old speeds on @Home news service to be possible on Rogers news service
Agenda item 2, point 3: "regardless of its benign intentions, the X-Authentication-Info header represents a violation of subscriber privacy and should be axed"
- X-Auth header can’t be removed because it’s part of the SMTP auth system
- if you want to have an anonymous e-mail address, you can have that by assigning yourself a non-descriptive Rogers address
Item 3, point 5: "apparent broadcast storm problems have been affecting subscribers in January with LANCity cablemodems (i.e. characterized by a solid receive light on the modem and lost connectivity); what information can you offer concerning these problems?"
- broadcast storms were actually a denial of service attack, unknown in nature
- the LANCity filters were adjusted in early Feb. to compensate and block out the attack
Item 4, point 4: "there are DNS entries for pop.broadband.rogers.com and smtp.broadband.rogers.com; why is there no entry for nntp.broadband.rogers.com?"
- the pop and smtp DNS aliases were created for roaming purposes (i.e. Netmail) only; news wasn’t supported
Item 5, point 2: "after the countless past incidents involving a drastic increase in support line hold times and busy signals, why is this situation permitted to continue from time to time?"
- Rogers contracted services to another call center (200-400 seats) to handle the transition; T-1 lines used to transfer calls failed to the other call center, which resulted in overload and busy signals
- Rogers claims 2-15 minute hold times over the past few weeks
Item 5, point 3: "was the increase in busy signals and hold times due to the transition, or the massive influx of nearly 60 thousand subscribers in Q4 - or both?"
- increased hold times mainly due to the transition, not subscriber additions
Item 7, point 1: "the new DNS naming convention for subscriber PC's, which lists subscribers’ hardware addresses, poses a security hazard for subscribers and Rogers, alike; will the naming convention be changed and if so, when and to what?"
- Rogers doesn't believe this is a problem; hardware address security issue will explored in another call
Item 7, point 2: "we are against incorporating the primary e-mail ID’s of subscribers in any succeeding DNS naming convention; this would pose a serious threat to subscriber privacy and would make subscribers a wide open target to spammers"
- primary e-mail IDs will not be incorporated under the naming convention
Item 7, point 3: "the new policy on acceptable packet latency is not fair to subscribers and does not take into account the different packet latencies yielded by the various types of deployed cablemodems"
Item 7, point 5: "LANCity cablemodems and their corresponding DNS and DHCP routers were still under @Home's control for weeks after the start of the transition; why?"
- LANCity provisioning was completely under @Home’s control; transitioned POP router by POP router
- until the individual POPs were transitioned, Rogers couldn’t control DHCP or anything else for LANCity subscribers
- Jan. 11 was the date of the final POP transition
Item 7, point 6: "there were convoluted instructions for LANCity subscribers on the transition website; why weren't simple DNS server names such as pop.broadband.rogers.com and smtp.broadband.rogers.com offered in these instructions, when they worked perfectly well?"
- changes were not made due to future flexibility; Rogers doesn't intend to continue using the expanded aliases, such as pop.broadband.rogers.com, for their load balancers
Item 7, point 8: "cablemodem rental fees are apparently being charged to some new subscribers, which accounts for the general rate hike that was levied against all new subscribers; is this just a billing glitch, or a real rental fee?"
- modem rental fee issue to be addressed on Mar. 1st during a call with Alek Krstajic
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Prepared by Christopher Weisdorf
President and Technical Director,
Residential Broadband Users’ Association
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