dslreports logo
 
    All Forums Hot Topics Gallery
spc
Search similar:


uniqs
2458
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

[News Groups] 408 Authentication Required error Newsgroup access

Last week my Charter IP changed from a 24.x.x.x to a 75.x.x.x, Charter in upstate SC

After the change, newsgroup access returns error 408 Authentication Required. Never had this problem in 2 years.
Authentication is not required.

email and chat Charter support is not helping.

Any ideas ?

Thanks,

harvey
Zappa2000
join:2001-12-16
Kalamazoo, MI

Zappa2000

Member

Re: [News Groups] 408 Authentication Required error Newsgroup ac

What does support say?

Your best bet is to pull down another IP. If you have another NIC, or a NIC that allows you to change the MAC address, change that, then power cycle modem, and it should pull down a new address. If you have a router, then you can also change the MAC address on that (well, most routers allow that) and then power cycle the modem, and that should also work.

If you keep pulling down 75.x.x.x then not much more you can do on your end.

stivvy
Technonerd
join:2002-05-08

stivvy to hgmoore

Member

to hgmoore
said by hgmoore:

Last week my Charter IP changed from a 24.x.x.x to a 75.x.x.x, Charter in upstate SC

After the change, newsgroup access returns error 408 Authentication Required. Never had this problem in 2 years.
Authentication is not required.

email and chat Charter support is not helping.

Any ideas ?

Thanks,

harvey
Best bet is that the IP that you pulled recently was just added to your area and Charter didn't tell Highwinds that this was a valid Charter IP.

Zappa's idea was a good one. If you run a router then I would suggest changing the MAC ID of the router so that it pulls a different IP. Remember that you have to reboot your modem to allow it to talk to a different MAC ID.

The other option would be that if you run a direct connection to your modem from your PC, some NIC's allow you to change the MAC ID of the NIC through Windows.

If yours supports that click on start and go to the control panel. Open network connections. Find your connection, right-click on it and choose properties. At the top it will say "Connect using:" and there will be a field below it with the name of your network adapter. Click in the configure button next to it. When the next window opens up click on the advanced tab. Under the heading "Property:," see if there is a value for "Network Address." If so, then you can click on it and change the value for it in the field to the right.

The value will be a 12 digit hexadecimal number. I usually just change the last number of the current MAC ID. To find out what your current MAC ID number is, go to a command prompt and type

ipconfig /all

and hit enter. It will be shown after the heading "Physical Address," and will look something like 00-50-8D-EF-3F-B9.

You can keep changing it until you get one of the 24.x.x.x IP's and your newsgroups will probably work again. Remember to reboot your modem every time you change the MAC ID.

That's the easiest way to fix it. The other way is to call Charter's support and explain to them what you typed above and probably also what I stated in the first sentence.

You may also want to PM this to someone that supports your are, like Snavvie, so they can take a look at it for you.
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

Thanks Zappa and stivvy

I have talked with, chatted with, and emailed with charter support and they had no answers, told me I needed to either restore from system restore or reinstall xp pro.

tracert and pings both see the newsgroup newsgroup and return its IP.

Tried the mac idea on my router 3 times, got 3 new IPs, but all in the 75.x.x.x range.

You guys are probably correct in the new IP range not being recognized by the news server.

There is a charter location a few miles from me here in Anderson, I'll take a run over there and see if they can help face to face.

Thanks again

harvey
Zappa2000
join:2001-12-16
Kalamazoo, MI

Zappa2000

Member

said by hgmoore:

Thanks Zappa and stivvy
I have talked with, chatted with, and emailed with charter support and they had no answers, told me I needed to either restore from system restore or reinstall xp pro.
Yeah, system restore will fix the problem right up.
I wonder which call center gave you that great advice?
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

Wish I knew who and where I was connected to, I didn't comment more as I would have definitely not been very pc

It gets frustrating with most tech support these days, I used to be network admin for a mfg facility with 6 plants and 200 or so PCs, so I know a little about this stuff, but I did not think about the newsgroup server not seeing a new IP range.

The group that hangs around here has a very large knowledge base, I have learned a lot just by lurking.


psafux
Premium Member
join:2005-11-10

psafux to Zappa2000

Premium Member

to Zappa2000
said by Zappa2000:
said by hgmoore:

Thanks Zappa and stivvy
I have talked with, chatted with, and emailed with charter support and they had no answers, told me I needed to either restore from system restore or reinstall xp pro.
Yeah, system restore will fix the problem right up.
I wonder which call center gave you that great advice?
yeah.. esp since tech support is not there to make that determination........ at the most, they should be telling ya to contact a PC technician, and cant even offer recommendations... i can tell ya which call center did NOT handle that call

Rampage522
join:2001-10-18
Birmingham, AL

Rampage522

Member

I agree they shouldn't be telling you how to maintain your PC, but it's not just Charter. Comcast told my parents one time they needed to reinstall Windows...when the root problem was Comcast's DNS servers were hosed.
psych0tron
join:2006-04-10
Madison, WI

1 edit

psych0tron to hgmoore

Member

to hgmoore
You're dead on RE the IP range issue. We saw the same thing effect Madison a year or so ago when there was a new block of IPs added to a residential interface. Since the news servers are outsourced and not actually maintained by Charter, they are not immediatly updated with new IP blocks that are added.

The best advice I can give to ensure its being addressed would be to call tech support back and ask for a supervisor. Make sure it is crystal clear to them that you can access the news server fine when you have a 24.* IP, but get an authentication error when you have a 75.* IP. Aside from constantly changing your mac address, which may not even work if your modem's interface no longer has its former 24.* block of IPs assigned to it, there is no other fix except to use a different usenet server. There are so few residential customers that actually use newsgroups that it often goes unnoticed.
mbkowns
Got Bandwidth?
join:2003-07-01
Valley Center, CA

mbkowns to hgmoore

Member

to hgmoore
or use another news service like giganews.com...
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

Update...now connecting

Update

NG connectivity resumed yesterday (12/13) about 1:00pm

This situation reminds me of the need for effective communications. Had support contacts advised me that the problem is being worked on instead of blaming my setup, I would have understood.

stivvy
Technonerd
join:2002-05-08

stivvy

Member

One of a couple things happened there with that lack of communication.

1. The "technician" that you spoke with didn't have any idea of how the Charter newsgroup system works, who hosts is, and /or how it is authenticated.

2. Someone, either the person that added the IP range or the person that supervises them, dropped the ball when it came to notifying Highwinds of the new IP range.

3. The NOC knew what was going on but decided to address it when they were good and ready.

4. Highwinds didn't get it added until Tuesday.

5. All of the above.

Any one of those can slow down resolution of an issue like that.

From my time at Charter I found that its more like Charter "lack of" Communications. On the rare occasion that the NOC, TAC, or admins actually communicate what they did during maintenance, the supervisors don't pass that info along to the techs. UNfortunately, a lot of the time even if the information gets passed along to the techs they don't know what to do with it once they get it.

I'm glad they got it working for you, though. It really shouldn't have been as hard as they made it out to be, and the knee-jerk "its your computer" reaction to anything they don't understand needs to stop.
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

Well said stivvy

I should have been more clear, I felt that the communication did not come down from a level higher than than the levels of those who answer the user trouble calls.

This is sometimes a very real critical problem in industrial mfg plants and systems.

My last job before retiring was network admin for six manufacturing plants in a 6 mile radius. US headquarters was six states away and IT there controlled many aspects of the wan. Company was purchased by a European mega corp that had the real control.

During a virus outbreak, Europe IT blocked all the ports used by exchange server, blacking out email to all US facilities. Problem was, they did NOT advise anyone in IT stateside here, did it in active directory with scripts not available to us.

After a week of 16 hour days trouble shooting the problem, we were advised, and ports were reopened.

Took me a year to regain confidence of the users I worked with.

stivvy
Technonerd
join:2002-05-08

stivvy

Member

Hehe must have been the Blaster worm. I was on the phones at CHarter when that outbreak took place. We had to block the same ports temporarily to allow our users a chance to get the necessary patches.

Charter is set up much the same way. For the Great Lakes area, the TAC is in Madison, WI, the last I heard. The NOC I believe is in St Louis, and the call centers are in Fon du Lac, WI and Walker, MI. Of course there are also local net admins that work directly on the equipment.

The phone reps can see a list of maintenance that is going on, but no details are provided as to what exactly is being done and what kind of troubles it can cause if something goes awry. You have been a witness to what can happen when they do something as simple as adding a scope of IPs to the CMTS.

As Charter began to move away from hiring people with technical know-how and moved towards hiring people with sales experience we began to notice that things like what you ran into suddenly started taking a much longer time to fix. Hopefully, for the users sake, I hope they can reverse that trend. Unfortunately, now that more and more of the support roles are being taken outside of Charter, I feel that this may just be a symptom of a problem that will get progressively worse.
hgmoore
join:2001-12-24
Anderson, SC

hgmoore

Member

"Hehe must have been the Blaster worm."

That was the virus.

I'd like to have a nickle for each hour of overtime that bugger caused in IT staff around the world.