Streamyx: Cable stolen

By Nicky Ang. Categories: Science. January 7, 2009

What would be your BIGGEST joke of the year for 2008? Let me tell you mine.

On Friday (19-Dec), I noticed my Streamyx connection was down. I didn’t took a lot of notice on it, because Streamyx customers got an email on Thursday that says maintenance upgrade was done in Kuala Lumpur and will last till Friday morning. Coincidentally, the international link to Europe was also having problems.

On Saturday (20-Dec) and the connection is still down. The modem DSL Sync light is ON but it wasn’t possible to dial-in and their PPPoE server seems dead. Getting annoyed, I decided to dig a little deeper to see what’s the issue.

Suprise suprise!!

To my suprise, I saw a lot of traffic coming through the WAN port. This is strange because I didn’t dial in at all. I opened up my Network Neighbourhood in Windows and voila! I saw a few computers that doesn’t belong to me. I saw all kinds of funny names: HOW-PC, PUNITHA-18992, USER410A6F124GK … Huh?!?! Suddenly, Streamyx became a local area network?!?!

All computers are under the same IP class (192.168.1.X). So it’s more like we’re all connected via a LAN switch and we can browse each other’s computers.

 

The BIGGEST joke

I call up TMnet Support and the support guy was quite friendly and have lots of patience to listen to my story. He said he’s been using Streamyx for years and didn’t encounter the problem like I’ve described above. So he proceeded to lodge a technical report.

A minute later, he told me he was unable to lodge the report. System keeps rejecting it and he found a stunning reason:

THE NETWORK CABLE was STOLEN!!! The main cable inside Telekom’s HQ that connects my port and also 38 other customers was STOLEN!!! As a result, the entire switch was disconnected from their PPPoE server and from Streamyx network.

Hahaha!!! Both of us had a good laugh and he told me someone is already looking into it and it will probably be fixed in one or two days. Wow!! It takes days to plug a cable back, sure it’s a hell of a monster cable!

 

Some interesting facts

Because we’re connected via “LAN” on Streamyx, it is possible to capture all kinds of broadcasts in promiscuous mode.

Here’s a list of DSL modem brands that are connected to the same switch as me:

• 3com
• Aztech
• BaudTech
• Belkin
• Billion
• Buffalo
• Cisco
• D-Link
• Global
• QnoTech
• Tp-Link
• Zygate

Here are also the types of traffic being exchanged on the local network. I’ve highlighted the line called “PPP-over-Ethernet Discovery (PADI)”. These are customer modems trying to dial-in to Streamyx by sending a PADI broadcast. Because there’s no PPPoE server, their modems keep broadcasting again and again.