Crazy dream last night involving a notebook containing technical details for #HamRadio repeaters around the #TwinCities having been stolen in a burglary, and needing to go downtown to the office in the middle of the night to change a bunch of passwords. Even though it was the middle of the night, all my co-workers were there, including one of my bosses, Helen Yarmoska… except the part of Helen Yarmoska was played by actress Julie Bowen. And any of you who know Helen can see what a brilliant bit of casting that is.

I opened a ticket with their help system 6/15/23 8:02 AM with the following:

Xfinity internet had been dropping 2-4x/day briefly the past couple weeks. Then yesterday morning, it was out first thing, and this time the outage really was on their outage map. Outage ended on time, and everything came back online except my Cisco SPA525G with three lines (voip.ms, hamsoverip, hamshackhotline).

I have had to MANUALLY edit some things in the web UI for each of voip.ms and hamsoverip, and they both came back to working.

I need to MANUALLY edit whatever’s wrong with hamshackhotline, but because you guys do this auto-magical provisioning script thing, I’m unable to find plain instructions/screenshots of what fields need to say what. I don’t even know what my SIP account’s password is. If I’d ever been told, it’d be in my 1Password – it is not. Was only ever known by someone on your crew who did stuff remotely.

Where can I get the details necessary to MANUALLY re-configure SPA525G for HsH 11079?

This was their response…

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Bill Lewis posted 6/15/23 8:32 AM 

Hello Kelvin D. Olson,

As requested, here is your password: a3869(obfuscatedBitsForReasons)5903b728

Please be advised that because you will now be modifying settings in your endpoint, you are now transitioning from “Full Service Support” to “Self Service Support”. This basically means that it might be possible for you to accidentally change a setting in your phone and disrupt your service with us.

Because we won’t know what you changed, there will be no way for us to effectively help you.

If you find your phone in a condition where it does not operate as it should anymore, you will be required to perform a full factory reset on your phone, and then perform a re-provision to restore your phone to the settings we recommend for optimal performance.

Regards,

 Closed by Bill Lewis with status of Closed 6/15/23 8:32 AM

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Kelvin D. Olson posted 6/15/23 8:44 AM 

Well… aren’t you just awful?

Please close my account.

So… these guys work from the assumption that if you’re getting a VOIP phone, you’re getting it to do one and only one thing. They have you point your VOIP phone at an automated provisioning script which wipes out anything ELSE you’ve got going on that phone. When you instead sign up with HamsOverIP.com, you get access to a Wiki wherein the left menu contains…
Configuration Guides
..Endpoints
….Hard Phones
……Cisco
……..Cisco 525g
…and there you find step-by-step instructions, and screenshots of all the settings on the web UI for the phone.

NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENT from giving me the password (one of MANY things I needed to know), closing the issue, telling me there’s “no way for us to effectively help you.” Uhm, fuck you, I can show you a great example of a way to effectively help me. You’re just an Alpha Hotel and a LID, Bill.

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