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

[Anne Wilson]

On 04/02/2016 20:18, Andrew 'Leny' Lindley wrote:
> 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>.
> 
Thanks Leny.  Next time I run into this problem I'll try these steps.

Anne