[Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow

[Andrew 'Leny' Lindley]

From: Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 11:08:03 +0000

> On 03/02/2016 19:07, Andrew 'Leny' Lindley wrote:
>> From: Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> Subject: Re:
>> [Wylug-discuss] Network outages, the wrong kind of snow Date: Wed, 3
>> Feb 2016 09:38:59 +0000
>> 
>>> On 03/02/2016 03:04, Andrew 'Leny' Lindley wrote:
>>>> I had difficulties at that time.  But I'm on ADSL2+ (all copper
>>>> to the exchange) which was doing one of it's periodic retrains of
>>>> the line then.  It does these between 20:00 and 23:00 then again
>>>> around 01:00 several days a month.  I assume they're exchange
>>>> maintenance slots.
>>>> 
>>>> See this
>>>> 
>>>> http://aaisp.net/broadband-office1.html
>>>> 
>>>> For guidline costs for more reliable Internet.  "You get what you
>>>> pay for" I'm afraid.
>>>>> 
>>> Not directly relevant, since I'm not in Leeds and not online at
>>> that time, however....
>>> 
>>> My normally reliable FtC connection has been very flakey every time
>>> that high winds and lashing rain occur - and at 800ft in the
>>> Pennines that has been quite often lately.  I found it difficult to
>>> believe that the weather could be causing it, but it has happened
>>> so often lately, in an exact pattern, that I've come to accept it
>>> as true.
>> 
>> Mine isn't in sync with the weather and I'm with A&A so I get to see 
>> the line logs from the exchange in their control pages.  That's the 
>> advantage of the small number of additional pennies for 'the 
>> propeller heads ISP'  :).
>> 
>> Yours could be the copper between you and the cabinet.  Which you 
>> might be able to work out if your router &| modem has the right 
>> blinken lights (i.e. carrier / [V]DSL goes off).  However, it's also 
>> the case that more people stay in and so use the Internet more
>> during bad weather.  So it might be something like your provider's
>> contention at your exchange or e.g. they don't pay for decent network
>> priority for your service in their backhaul provider's MPLS network
>> zone. However, if it was this depending on your provider/exchange's
>> customer demographic I'd expect you to also notice the problems on 
>> e.g. 'homework nights' sometimes (i.e. Sunday eve, end of school 
>> holidays) or e.g. odd Saturday afternoons when people are streaming 
>> sports coverage.
>> 
>> Leny
> 
> Things to think about :-)
> 
> I can't see any relationship to the heavy-usage times you mention.
> Typically the VDSL light is steady.  Pinging the router gets a very fast
> reply, but pinging my DNS provider gets "unreachable".  Rebooting the
> router makes no difference, and the connection returns of its own free
> will when it's ready.  There was just one day when I couldn't keep the
> connection for more than a few minutes at a time, and I had to abandon
> it altogether.  Mostly, though, it hasn't been anything like as bad as
> that.  It's just that I've never seen this problem before this winter.

Turn the router off for at least 2 minutes, preferably have a coffee,
then turn it on again..  It might be that the exchange is having
problems, but it could also be that you've suffered a successful DoS
attack on your router. To antidote which you need a new dynamic ip
address.

I found what might have been a successful DoS router crack by checking
with

traceroute -n 192.168.y.1

Where y was not a value on my local network and 

geoiplookup <ip address>

on the addresses it produced.  Either the exchange had given me a
Dutch ISP who happened to have broken routes or someone had cracked my
ISP provided and configured router.  I replaced the ISP provided one
with an Open Source router and the problem went away <selah>.

Leny