My second support call with Veracity

So, come to find out, the internet connection here at the house still is not quite up to snuff. It's ok, in pieces and chunks, slow the rest of the time. I started poking around tonight, and found that one of the two DNS servers I am getting from my ISP is not responding. It's consistently like that, I've been watching for a while now. One works, one doesn't. I can bypass the dead one on my laptop just fine, which makes things work great. I don't have that option on the wireless router, so things like my phone and the Roku box are out of luck there.

What did I do? I ran a trace of the DNS traffic on my laptop, captured it and bundled it into an email to the people, explaining what I was seeing and asking what can be done to fix it. I got the email address from their website. The result? The email bounces back undeliverable. Who do they think they are, the people that support the Nexus One phone?

Not expecting much out of the call, I picked up the phone and called the support people. (After hours support, you have to understand here...) The call pretty much completely lived up to expectations. I wanted to get an email address from his to mail in my support issue. (Looking to bypass level 1 tech support.) Turns out they won't claim to have an email address for support, only a billing email address.

The guy did a pretty good job trying to figure out what to tell me, based on what seemed like his experience level and whatever quick fix scripts he was using. I talked about how the DNS timeouts were causing response issues, he talked about me going to a speed test site, they would do something for me if my QoS is below the standard. I sort of patiently explained that I didn't have an internet connection speed problem, but a DNS lookup problem. This makes browsing places seem slow, but only because I am waiting for DNS timeouts to finish before a lookup can complete.

He wanted to talk about bypassing the wireless, which I was not interested in talking about. I again explained that I was not able to resolve DNS through one of the two DNS servers they have, and he wanted to talk about manually entering DNS. He asked if I knew how to do that in Windows. I told him I did, and I am sure bypassing DNS to point at the DNS server that was working would get my laptop to function as expected, but would do nothing for any of the other devices at the house, and besides which, I am running Linux on my laptop. His response? "Oh, we don't support Linux."

I thanked him for his time and hung up. No sense trying to go any further. 10 minutes on the phone with him was plenty. What I really need is to get to talk to level 2 support, but I think that will need to wait for morning.

Maybe I need to pull out that Netgear Dave gave me and see if it will let me set the DNS lookups manually or not...