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Author Topic: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections  (Read 4584 times)

Chunkers

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Once again the monkey (me) is intelligent enough to know when he needs the organ-grinder (you) to help him understand whats happening.

I am still having occasional problems with my connections, curiously it appears on both my WAN's (I have two WAN connections, one Zen ADSL and and one Plusnet VDSL).  Hee are some diagnsotics from both WAN's on my router :



Not sure if those will come out side by side or not.

As you can see I can ping the beeb from both connections but both seem to have trouble verifying a route.

Er, bit confused, is this at my end?  Sometimes a router reboot will fix it for a while but things seem to be working OK this end from what I can see.  Modems don;t seem to be showing any issues other than the very occasional disconnection.

I have temporarily switched DNS server to 8.8.8.8 to see if its a DNS issue but doesn't seem to have helped.

Any ideas or advice?

:fingers:
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gt94sss2

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2016, 05:05:41 PM »

What do you mean by 'having trouble verifying a route'?


Its common to get 'Request timed out' responses when doing a tracert - those servers have either been set not to respond to such requests and/or are busy and won't reply to such low priority requests as a result.


If you mean the BBC's IP address is different - they use several different IP addresses to help with load balancing their service among other things..


None of these should be causing you an issue
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Chunkers

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #2 on: December 27, 2016, 05:30:39 PM »

What do you mean by 'having trouble verifying a route'?

Its common to get 'Request timed out' responses when doing a tracert - those servers have either been set not to respond to such requests and/or are busy and won't reply to such low priority requests as a result.


Ah OK, maybe nothing is wrong with my ISP connections then, I didn't know it was normal to get time-outs.  This means I am now a bit suspicious about my router, which is fine as I am 60% into completing my pfSense build so i will have an alternative dual WAN router to try.

Thanks for the reply!

C
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Dray

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #3 on: December 27, 2016, 07:30:09 PM »

Are you doing what Ronski has done, using a new box for pfSense?

I run pfSense on a VM doing dual-wan currently
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Chunkers

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #4 on: December 27, 2016, 08:24:51 PM »

Are you doing what Ronski has done, using a new box for pfSense?

I run pfSense on a VM doing dual-wan currently

Yes, except mine is dual WAN, obviously.  I made a thread but I have been super busy at work (abroad) and over Xmas so haven't had time to configure it.
I managed to get TRIM enabled and can access the WebUI but its not configured for my network yet.

I back to to North Africa for a couple of weeks and will finish things off in the second half of January when i get back again.



I hope to have it running under test in January and it will be interesting to see if it fixes my issue above.  If you are running dual WAN it would be good any insights / tips in the linked thread  ;D

Cheers!

C
« Last Edit: December 27, 2016, 08:28:55 PM by Chunkers »
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j0hn

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #5 on: December 27, 2016, 09:54:58 PM »

I hope to have it running under test in January and it will be interesting to see if it fixes my issue above.
Cheers!
It won't.
As stated it's not an issue and you will get tracert timeouts with ANY equipment
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Chunkers

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #6 on: December 27, 2016, 11:15:44 PM »

It won't.
As stated it's not an issue and you will get tracert timeouts with ANY equipment

I am sure you are right that the above info does not indicate any ISP issues however I am experiencing occasional WAN freezes / lock-ups during which users cannot access the internet, this is what I have been trying to resolve. The problem occurs randomly but things can run stably for days between issues.  Typically when the issue occurs I am able to ping internet IP addresses but not access websites using browsers.  A router reboot things seem to sort things out for a while but I suspect it might be some problem / bug with the firmware or the load balancing. 

TP-Link suggested it might be a DNS issue and sent me a beta firmware (suggesting they know about the issue?) a while back which has made no difference.  Unfortunately although the TL-ER5120 is still on sale it has not had a firmware update since February 2014, this suggests it might not be getting a tremendous amount of ongoing support from TP-Link.

I think trying a completely separate dual WAN router will hopefully show whether it is a router issue or something else, I also think ultimately my pfSense build will be superior, once I getting it working properly.

Cheers

Chunks
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burakkucat

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #7 on: December 28, 2016, 12:06:10 AM »

. . . I am experiencing occasional WAN freezes / lock-ups during which users cannot access the internet, this is what I have been trying to resolve. The problem occurs randomly but things can run stably for days between issues.  Typically when the issue occurs I am able to ping internet IP addresses but not access websites using browsers.

When the problem occurs, is it possible to access websites using their IP addresses but not by their names? If the answer is "yes", then I would have to agree with TP-Link . . . the symptoms are indicative of a DNS problem.
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Weaver

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #8 on: December 29, 2016, 03:06:35 AM »

When you do future tests, look up the domain name by hand first, maybe several times to see if the answer keeps changing, which is quite normal. Then pick one of the IP addresses you got from the lookup and ping or tracert to that address rather than to the name.
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Chunkers

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #9 on: December 29, 2016, 08:51:44 AM »

Thanks guys,  yes I think it may be DNS related too,  I'll do some more checks when I get back home in a couple of weeks as I am away on business at the moment.

Thanks for the advice

C
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Chrysalis

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #10 on: December 29, 2016, 12:23:59 PM »

now days its not uncommon for some routers on the net to block all udp/icmp which will make it all timeouts on traceroute's, as long as the end point is not affected then those are red herring's to be ignored.
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aesmith

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #11 on: December 29, 2016, 04:39:01 PM »

Thanks guys,  yes I think it may be DNS related too,
You could try setting DNS servers on the PC/Mac/Workstation as a test.  I like Open DNS 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220
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Chunkers

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #12 on: December 29, 2016, 11:09:10 PM »

now days its not uncommon for some routers on the net to block all udp/icmp which will make it all timeouts on traceroute's, as long as the end point is not affected then those are red herring's to be ignored.

You could try setting DNS servers on the PC/Mac/Workstation as a test.  I like Open DNS 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220
Good idea, I have messed around and changed the DNS settings on my router but never thought about setting it manually on a PC, will give it a try when I get home
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NewtronStar

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Re: Diagnostics - what is this telling me about my ISP / router / connections
« Reply #13 on: December 29, 2016, 11:38:18 PM »

The only time you would need to change DNS settings on the PC side is if the router has no settings to change the DNS the last time I used the PC to change the DNS was when using a HH3A
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