Don’t know about you but I love and hate Verizon FIOS at the same time.
I love FIOS because of it is a high-performance, reliable service. In my experience, generally speaking it is better in both of those categories than competitive broadband service.
However, when it comes to functionality (and customer service), Verizon leaves themselves with a lot of room for improvement.
Besides the fact that they employ a non-standard way if issues IPs (they give all customers a /24 even if you only need say 14 IPs and then they do some kind of port or VLAN protection on their PE to prevent customer IP overlap), their stinking ARP cache’s are NOT dynamic. THEIR ARP CACHE DOES NOT DYNAMICALLY LEARN OF NEW MAC’s.
So why is this a problem for a Network Engineer such as myself? Because if you swap out old equipment (i.e., Firewall) for new YOU MUST CALL THEM BECAUSE THEIR EQUIPMENT EXPECTS THE MAC OF THE OLD EQUIPMENT!!!
And here’s the real kicker… you call them to discuss it their technicians do not know what they are talking about. I have called on numerous occasions for help on this issue every time I call them they are clueless of what I’m talking about. I’m asked “Well, have you rebooted your computer?” :-|
So today I’m doing another equipment (Firewall) upgrade and having the same problem. After programming the new Firewall with the exact same IPs as the old, I do a ping test to the gateway at Verizon and of course it times out…
So then I change the burned-in MAC address on the WAN interface of this new Firewall to match that of the old Firewall…
And then I re-verify to see if I can now ping the gateway at Verizon and of course I can…
VERIZON’S FIOS SERVICE DOES NOT DYNAMICALLY LEARN MAC ADDRESSES!!!
