Comcast calmed down, countdown

So as promised the other day, I followed up once again with Comcast and got some action finally.  The action didn’t come from me ranting and raving, it was more the result of me being fortunate enough to get a guy on the other end of the phone that actually gave a damn. I explained both the problem and my frustration with Comcast not doing anything tangible regarding it for four business days.

I just realized I didn’t outline the odd problem I was seeing.  Within the last couple weeks various people on the network were getting certificate errors when they would start Outlook.  When you would view the details of the certificate it would show it was coming from “CableLabs” aka, the Netgear CG3000DCR cable modem!

Now of course this made no sense so I went to Google to see if I was alone with this strange error. Initially I found tons of people complaining about this particular model of modem but not my specific scenario.  After some more specific search parameters I actually stumbled across a message board thread that outlined the same sort of problem, email certificate errors via the cable modem.  Unfortunately all the thread said was it resolved as a Netgear issue but with no further details.

When I contacted Comcast they were clueless as this was a very strange thing.  Logically it didn’t make sense how a cable modem could be presenting a SSL certificate into our back end Exchange email system.  The tech that I talked to last did a factory reset on our modem to see if that would clear things up.  It did not.

I finally convinced him to just send a tech out with a different modem. The guy showed up late yesterday afternoon with an older but less buggy SMC cable modem in hand.  After about 15 minutes he had the SMC box up and running.  Since the swap the certificate error has vanished from our network.  Yep I don’t get it either but I’m glad the ghost has been vanquished from the machine.

So tomorrow I have a race to time for the 3rd time in 4 weekends.  It’s down in Marco which is a pain in the ass.  On the plus side it does not start until 8 and there shouldn’t be more than 250 people participating so it shouldn’t be too hectic of a scene.

Being the last weekend before Christmas there will be tons of other things to keep Cindy and I busy as well however we definitely will make time for fun, including going to see the new Hobbit movie at some point.

This is a big weekend for me in the fantasy football league since I am competing in the league championship game for the third year in a row.  Unfortunately I have some pretty huge injury obstacles to overcome.  Two of my star players, Julio Jones and Demarco Murray are injured and might not play at all this week.  If they both sit out my odds of winning drop down next to zero.