Busy couple of weeks

It has been a busy two weeks. New software deployments at clients. 15 hours troubleshooting a problem on a Verizon FiOS circuit. Now there was a fiasco, my client moved from out in Seffner to a new location in Plant City, this should have been a simple morning.

Go to the clients old location, back up, shut down the phone server. Take the phone server and the Ingate to the new location. Reprogram the Ingate, set the new public IP on the Altigen MAX1000 and every one should be happy.

Nope.

After reprogramming everything we found that the Ingate would not talk to the Verizon gateway. It could not be pinged from outside the building as well.

I immediately suspected a problem with provisioning on Verizons Gateway.

Many hours on the phone with Verizon tech support to no avail, even had one of their customer service people on site, he was unable to get more than one public IP at a time to work. At 5 PM as the Verizon tech was going out the door he made the comment that he suspected an issue on Verizon's end, but he was done for the day.

Verizon of course insisted it was the clients VPN router, but after a couple of minutes, reprogramming a laptop to test with I proved that in fact there was an issue with the Verizon ciruit. Verizon insisted on having their Westell router put back in place before they would trouble shoot any further, ok, reprogrammed and reinstalled, still the same problem.

You could only get one public IP at a time on the circuit. It did not matter if it was a Verizon router, laptop, VPN router or my spare test router. Once a single public IP was on the circuit you could not get any other device to talk to the gateway. Turn off the existing working device, and suddenly one of the other two non working would start to work.

Hello Verizon, this is a gateway issue on your part.

Finally, after 12 man hours of troubleshooting time both with and without Verizon tech support I got ahold of a Verizon employee who listened to what I was saying, Joel Zxxx278 you are a lifesaver, along with Bill Vxxx305 they determined that in fact it was a provisioning problem on Verizon's gateway 96.xxx.xx.1, the sad part of this is the bill that I had to present to the client because Verizon's tech support could not / would not solve the issue. 12 man hours were wasted due to the incompetence or lack of concern of most of Verizon's FiOS tech support. (In reality I guess it would be 11.5 hours wasted, it did take me 30 minutes to determine that it was a Verizon Gateway issue to start with)

Once again, if it had not been for Joel and Bill I would still probably be fighting a problem on Verizon's circuits.

Tomorrow should be an easier day, another 50+ seat Vipre deployment, then a little more work on the VoIP domain for our failover system, and time to do a little more research on Altigen's new 6.5 release with its built in failover capabilities.