Cablevision/OptimumOnline Long Island - massive outage

[Kai Schlichting <kai () pac-rim net>]

Cablevision/OptimumOnline, Long Island, NY has massive roving outages of
their cable Internet service swince Friday evening: calling their
customer service line gets you 30+ min. waits before a drone answers
who will ask if you power-cycled your cable modem and computer, then
puts you on hold for another 30+ (I was too impatient to wait longer)
to wait for a "technician". The list of cities effected by the outage
seems to change (on their on-hold tape) every 2 hours, is somewhere
between 6-10 cities at a time, and in 4 calls, I have heard probably
30 different city names by now :)

What could bring down such a large cable system in parts and repeatedly
for many hours at a time is beyond me: one of my SSH sessions just
resumed from being stuck for 11+ hours: Modifying your TCP kernel
(or registry - your platform pick) settings to not time out for a
few days is a really good idea :)
 
bye,Kai