[Wylug-discuss] Virgin internet (lack of) connection

[Roger Beaumont]

Again, thanks to all...

> http://status-cable.virginmedia.com/vmstatus/summary.do
> Lots of areas suffering an outage right now ...

That makes sense if my guess is right - that they are changing the port 
filtering (if that's the right term) across the board; they'd be taking all 
their connection servers down to bring them back up under the new rules.

'Normal' stuff like web browsing and email has been fine since the 
connection came back up by Saturday morning.  My problem is that incoming 
traffic like ping, traceroute, SSH and http requests that don't seem to get 
past the ubr04-brad.blueyonder.co.uk server.

Ok, I can see that might be useful protection for ordinary users, so not 
_too_ many hard feelings there (and I'm prepared to pay for the extra 
connectivity); what really riles me is not being able to reach anyone who 
is competent to discuss the issue ("If you can browse the web and do email, 
then your connection is perfect." is all I can find), while I'm being 
charged for the futile attempts to do so!

And the ntl: business service isn't too impressive as yet: bland assurances 
that it will do all I want, without any evidence that the people I'm 
speaking to understand what that is; a 3 week wait for 'installation'; and 
a charge of about £70 to replace the modem and tweak their routing tables. 
  The up-side is that phone-line rental plus 4Meg broadband will be £30 a 
month instead of the £36 (25+11) I'm paying now, with FREE tech support.

...

Ho hum!  "Give the VM help line one last try" I thought, and got through to 
Maria, who actually seemed to understand what I was talking about - and who 
said that she can ping right through to my cable modem and repeated that 
their server rules hadn't changed (pinch of salt, but she did seem to 
understand what she was saying).  Further, if I point firefox at 
http://www.bradwan.co.uk/ (one of the sites I'm trying to serve), that now 
gives me the weblet from my firewall (which is what used to happen before) 
instead of simply timing out.

Nevertheless, when I SSH into my mate's machine, I still get no forrarder: 
traceroute cuts out at the ubr04-brad server; ping draws a blank; and lynx 
just times out.

The only thing I can think of now (since the hardware allows me to see 
external websites and email comes and goes perfectly - so I can't think of 
a hardware fault that could cause the problem) is to wonder if the IANA 
table has altered and it's my mate's machine that's being blocked by my 
firewall rules (I had a similar problem before, when the IANA table was 
altered to add an IP range for BT ADSL connections: they couldn't get 
through, while others could).  I'll get a new table and see if that helps.