This is strictly a matter of curiosity, as the problem has gone away without any
action on my part.  For two and a half days, I had extremely limited internet
connectivity... with odd symptoms unlike any problem I've experienced before.
If there's any kind soul out there in POV-Rayland thinking "Aha! I recognize
that", I'd very much appreciate any sharing of insight.

Here's what happened...

I come home from work on Friday to discover that my internet connection, which
is provided via cable modem through a company contracted by my local
municipality, is connecting very slowly to a few sites and timing out with all
the rest.  On the POV-Ray site, for example, I could get the home page, but
"Support" would always time out.  I did the usual restarts and checks, my system
(XP Pro) continuously insisted my network connection was just fine.  "Ping" and
"tracert" tests repeatedly returned normal results.  I spent nearly thirty
minutes on the phone with a support tech who seemed reasonably competent. No
other customers in my area were reporting similar issues.  We tried powering
everything down and up (again), releasing and renewing the IP address as well as
assigning a static IP address.  Nothing changed the connection status. We gave
up and made an appointment for a physical service call.

The situation continued throughout Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning I
discovered that the connection was gone entirely.  I did yet another standard
power down and up of the cable modem and, lo and behold, POOF! the problem is
gone like nothing was ever wrong.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  If it happens again, is there something
better to do about it than just wait patiently?  Thanks in advance for all
replies.

Best Regards,
Mike C.

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On 17/01/2011 01:04 PM, Mike the Elder wrote:

> Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Not really. Although at one time I had a router and I discovered that 
reading a specific post on this newsgroup would reliably and repeatedly 
crash the router. (WTF?) As in, trying to read the post would cause the 
router to suddenly stop responding to all network traffic. Reboot and it 
works again. Really frigging weird...

Post a reply to this message

> This is strictly a matter of curiosity, as the problem has gone away without any
> action on my part.  For two and a half days, I had extremely limited internet
> connectivity... with odd symptoms unlike any problem I've experienced before.
> If there's any kind soul out there in POV-Rayland thinking "Aha! I recognize
> that", I'd very much appreciate any sharing of insight.
>
> Here's what happened...
>
> I come home from work on Friday to discover that my internet connection, which
> is provided via cable modem through a company contracted by my local
> municipality, is connecting very slowly to a few sites and timing out with all
> the rest.  On the POV-Ray site, for example, I could get the home page, but
> "Support" would always time out.  I did the usual restarts and checks, my system
> (XP Pro) continuously insisted my network connection was just fine.  "Ping" and
> "tracert" tests repeatedly returned normal results.  I spent nearly thirty
> minutes on the phone with a support tech who seemed reasonably competent. No
> other customers in my area were reporting similar issues.  We tried powering
> everything down and up (again), releasing and renewing the IP address as well as
> assigning a static IP address.  Nothing changed the connection status. We gave
> up and made an appointment for a physical service call.
>
> The situation continued throughout Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning I
> discovered that the connection was gone entirely.  I did yet another standard
> power down and up of the cable modem and, lo and behold, POOF! the problem is
> gone like nothing was ever wrong.
>
> Does this sound familiar to anyone?  If it happens again, is there something
> better to do about it than just wait patiently?  Thanks in advance for all
> replies.
>
> Best Regards,
> Mike C.
>
>

1) Did you ping with the regular 64 byte packets, or did you also try 
larger packet sizes?  If your line is noisy, larger packets will be mroe 
enclined to suffer from it, statistically speaking.  This is why a ping 
test can look ok, but loading a web page is troublesome.

2) How was the weather like in your area on friday?
2.b) was there any power interruption?

3) Did your customer service rep mention anything about signal/noise ratio?

I ask this because I recently experienced something very similar, and it 
turns out that the neighborhood signal booster died during a 
thunderstorm and the signal coming from my modem was so faint that 9 
times out of 10, they wouldn't even pick it up.

The CS rep also initially gave me the "none of your neighbors are 
reporting the issue" line, to which I replied, "of course... they're all 
at work.  I'm the only one in my area that works from home".  After a 
little digging, he found out that the non-VoIP in my area were all 
having the same problem as I did, and was able to confirm that VoIP 
customers have a different make of router, one that seems to be less 
affected by S/N problems.

Depending on your local carrier's network monitoring tools and the 
skills of their operations staff, they may or may not be able to link 
their network monitoring system warning them that booster unit AE-1135 
is about to lose battery power, with customer calls in the neigborhood 
of 243 Evergreen Terrace, so it's possible that their repair crew fixed 
the problem on the pole last night without the guy to whom you spoke on 
staurday knowing there was even a problem there to begin with.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote:

> 1) Did you ping with the regular 64 byte packets, or did you also try
> larger packet sizes? ...
No, didn't think of it.. good advice / will remember... thanks.

> 2) How was the weather like in your area on Friday?
> 2.b) was there any power interruption?
No power interruptions, no drastic weather conditions.

> 3) Did your customer service rep mention anything about signal/noise ratio?...
> The CS rep also initially gave me the "none of your neighbors are
> reporting the issue" line...
I'm familiar with the CS rep disinformation issue. That's why I asked the same
question of my *local* municipal service office. You can really count on the
phones there lighting up like Christmas trees if there's a local issue. It did
seem that it was just me reporting on a Friday afternoon when many users would
be online.

> Depending on your local carrier's network monitoring tools and the
> skills of their operations staff, they may or may not be able to link
> their network monitoring system warning them that booster unit AE-1135
> is about to lose battery power, with customer calls in the neighborhood
> of 243 Evergreen Terrace, so it's possible that their repair crew fixed
> the problem on the pole last night without the guy to whom you spoke on
> Saturday knowing there was even a problem there to begin with.
Although I wouldn't be able to be anywhere near as specific as you were, I was
tending to suspect something along similar lines, that an infrastructure issue
not visible to the Tech Support rep arose and was eventually fixed.

Thanks much for all the input.  I'm feeling a bit less bewildered.

Best Regards,
Mike C.

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Invisible wrote:
> On 17/01/2011 01:04 PM, Mike the Elder wrote:
> 
>> Does this sound familiar to anyone?
> 
> Not really. Although at one time I had a router and I discovered that 
> reading a specific post on this newsgroup would reliably and repeatedly 
> crash the router. (WTF?) As in, trying to read the post would cause the 
> router to suddenly stop responding to all network traffic. Reboot and it 
> works again. Really frigging weird...

Did the post have +++ATH in it?  ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

Post a reply to this message

>> Not really. Although at one time I had a router and I discovered that
>> reading a specific post on this newsgroup would reliably and
>> repeatedly crash the router. (WTF?) As in, trying to read the post
>> would cause the router to suddenly stop responding to all network
>> traffic. Reboot and it works again. Really frigging weird...
>
> Did the post have +++ATH in it? ;-)

Nope. Actually, it didn't have much interesting in it at all. At first I 
thought it was coincidence, but I was able to reliably repeat it. One 
particular post, same one every time. Really odd.

You'd expect better from NetGear, but apparently not...

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