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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"
- there is no policy on acceptable latency; Rogers didn’t know anything about this, but will followup on it shortly in light of the notice at http://rogers.home.com/help/content/trouble/faq/WebHelp/Service-Policy/ISTLALSP14.htm
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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