3 ms·

The strange case of Xfinity login failure

3 points by luu 6y ago

linsomniac 6y ago
TL;DR: Can't access Xfinity support page via Xfinity connection, submitted support request but it is still broken. "Xfinity doesn't care." I had a somewhat similar problem last month. Upgraded Comcast business service, we had it for a few years and just wanted to change some terms and get newer speed levels. They had to replace the modem (I assume newer speeds enabled by newer DOCSIS version). After the update, could no longer resolve the Slack DNS name for our account ("ourcompany.slack.com"). Called support and asked if there was any sort of interception they were doing, like when you have to activate your modem sometimes they do weird things. She said absolutely not, they don't do such things. I pushed back "I know for residential users sometimes you will intercept traffic to put up a over quota message on web pages." "Residential does that, but we never modify traffic." Tech suggested changing DNS server on the modem, which they did. I asked if it was going to knock us offline, and as I was asking I noticed my interactive sessions all locked up. I said "I guess it will." Tech replied that it absolutely wouldn't, guaranteed. "Well all my sessions to the office just went down." Tech said "It must be your server." All my office servers went down for 60 seconds when you pushed your button, sounds plausible... I just got fed up and hung up. I figured that tech probably has great stats because they get people off the phone quickly. Anyway, I did some more thinking, and tried doing DNS lookups of that that name from other IPs in the same range that the AWS DNS server for slack.com used. They all returned NXDOMAIN rather than REFUSED. If I did the queries from my home connection, I would get the ANSWER from the correct server and REFUSED from the other IPs around it. So I called back with this information. The new tech really didn't understand what I was saying, but he did get that I was saying reasonable sounding things. So they escalated to Tier 2. An hour or two later Tier 2 called back. I explained the symptoms again, and they said "That sounds like our security product SecurityEdge. They turned it off and sure enough, everything worked fine. Contrary to what the first tech said, they DO modify traffic sometimes. The "SecurityEdge" was bundled into the new package deal we got, and defaulted to being turned on. But we didn't even know to check it. Worse, I didn't do the order, so I didn't know it was even a thing.

3 points by luu 6y ago

TL;DR: Can't access Xfinity support page via Xfinity connection, submitted support request but it is still broken. "Xfinity doesn't care." I had a somewhat similar problem last month. Upgraded Comcast business service, we had it for a few years and just wanted to change some terms and get newer speed levels. They had to replace the modem (I assume newer speeds enabled by newer DOCSIS version). After the update, could no longer resolve the Slack DNS name for our account ("ourcompany.slack.com"). Called support and asked if there was any sort of interception they were doing, like when you have to activate your modem sometimes they do weird things. She said absolutely not, they don't do such things. I pushed back "I know for residential users sometimes you will intercept traffic to put up a over quota message on web pages." "Residential does that, but we never modify traffic." Tech suggested changing DNS server on the modem, which they did. I asked if it was going to knock us offline, and as I was asking I noticed my interactive sessions all locked up. I said "I guess it will." Tech replied that it absolutely wouldn't, guaranteed. "Well all my sessions to the office just went down." Tech said "It must be your server." All my office servers went down for 60 seconds when you pushed your button, sounds plausible... I just got fed up and hung up. I figured that tech probably has great stats because they get people off the phone quickly. Anyway, I did some more thinking, and tried doing DNS lookups of that that name from other IPs in the same range that the AWS DNS server for slack.com used. They all returned NXDOMAIN rather than REFUSED. If I did the queries from my home connection, I would get the ANSWER from the correct server and REFUSED from the other IPs around it. So I called back with this information. The new tech really didn't understand what I was saying, but he did get that I was saying reasonable sounding things. So they escalated to Tier 2. An hour or two later Tier 2 called back. I explained the symptoms again, and they said "That sounds like our security product SecurityEdge. They turned it off and sure enough, everything worked fine. Contrary to what the first tech said, they DO modify traffic sometimes. The "SecurityEdge" was bundled into the new package deal we got, and defaulted to being turned on. But we didn't even know to check it. Worse, I didn't do the order, so I didn't know it was even a thing.