andersonfam.org

I had a rather humorous email interchange with an ISP sales guy I’ve been working with for a new branch office. Along with business-class cable internet service, I requested 1 static IP address for the new office. The install date for the service is tomorrow, so I emailed our sales guy this morning to ask if they had allocated the IP address yet:

(IP addresses changed for security purposes)

Hi Ric -

Do you have our static IP address yet? If so, could you please forward it to me?

Thank you
-Erik

Simple enough, right?

Here’s his response:

Spoke to tech support 555-555-1212. They gave me 2541.243.124. Your dns is 52.93.15.211 and 52.93.15.212

Look odd to you? It should…2541.243.124 is not a valid IP address. I replied:

Ric – I think you missed a “.” in that IP address. Could you please clarify?

Thanks-
Erik

It’s easy enough to miss a “.” – I’ve certainly done it plenty of times.

Ric replies:

Spoke to tech support 555-555-1212. They gave me 2541.243.124 is your address. 2541.243.124 is your Static IP Address. Your sub net is 255.255.255.252.

Okay – *now* it’s ON:

Ric -

2541.243.124 is not a vaild IP address. Like the DNS server addresses you gave me, valid IP addresses are “dotted decimal” notation, like xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. See here for more details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addressing

Please re-check with support and verify the correct address.

Thanks-
Erik

Ugh…hopefully he’ll learn something from this…

general geekdom, general, internet, ugh, work