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Author Topic: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information  (Read 15857 times)

sevenlayermuddle

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Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« on: November 20, 2008, 04:24:29 PM »

One evening about a week ago, demon seemed to suffer a major outage that lasted a few hours.  Their helpline was jammed 'busy' so I think it wasn't just me who was affected, and after an hour or two things started working(-ish) again.

But - ever since then, when browsing web pages, I get intermittently redirected to a BT Wholesale Service Information page at http://62.6.38.125/index.html.  The same website is OK one minute, not the next (a minute ago www.kitz.co.uk got redirected, now it's OK).

I've emailed the demon tech support people and I'm awaiting a reply, but past experience leads me to think they'll struggle to be any help unless I can point them in the right direction.

Any suggestions?

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edit by admin - amended url
« Last Edit: November 21, 2008, 01:06:30 AM by kitz »
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2008, 04:38:23 PM »

Sorry, I meant of course http://www.kitz.co.uk/ (rather than '....go.uk') just in case anybody's thinking that ham-fisted typing might be the problem  :)
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kitz

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2008, 05:34:27 PM »

Looks like theyre having a problem with their 'Central Pipes'.
That message could be displayed if theres a problem at the ISP Gateway. 

Either all there Centrals are down (highly unlikely), or theres a link failure on one or more of their centrals/Edge routers which could be causing a strain on their remaining centrals.

The most common reason for seeing that is if some of their centrals are full (have exceeded the maximum session limit allowed by BT Wholesale), and you either have to try again to find a pipe with free sessions.. or wait for some other person to disconnect.
Admittedly you would normally only expect to see it when trying to negotiate an ISP session.. not if you already have one.

At a guess if youre intermittently seeing it whilst surfing then theirs a fault with the ISP gateway/edge router.

Whilst Demon had problems with over-crowded centrals about a year ago..  I'm not aware that they do have now and it all seems to have been mostly ok since they brought in CAPs.

The other thought that occurs that if they had a major outage last week, their centrals could be vastly imbalanced, but I would have thought that would even out over a couple of days...  or this could tie in nicely with they have a problem with one of their edge-routers which is still poorly and putting a strain on the others.

BTw use something called 'round robin' to put users on to the ISP centrals.. and once that pipe has 30,000 users per 622Mb .... BTw says 'no more'.  If the first pipe is full it will try another, then another, but Im sorry I cant recall off the top of my head how many attempts it will try before you get that message.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #3 on: November 20, 2008, 06:17:38 PM »

Wow, that's a lot of info.  Thanks, we don't pay you nearly enough, you know. 

Because the fault's intermittent, it's hard to 'prove' any of the sypmtoms, but I did notice that an XP laptop, running IE6, consistently opened www.diy.co.uk several times, during which time my XP desktop, running ie7, consistently failed.  Both are working fine now, for that website at least.

I'll wait and see how demon respond - hopefully they'll just tell me they're dealing with the problem.   Then again, I recently called them to suggest that neither of their DNS servers was working.  On that occasion they seemed surprised by my suggestion and insisted on getting me to answer all sorts of pointless questions about my router status, before eventually admitting that they already knew their DNS wasn't working. :'(

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kitz

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2008, 01:08:39 AM »

I must admit that if you told me pages weren't loading in that manner - aside from you getting the BTw wholesale page - I would have immediately though DNS problems.  :-\
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #5 on: November 21, 2008, 09:32:02 AM »

So far, Demon haven't responded to my email.  But I didn't see that redirection at all last evening. 

It's almost as if it myseriously stopped an  hour or two after I complained about it.  I'll brace myself for the usual questions when they do respond... 'Is your modem plugged into the master socket?' etc.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #6 on: November 21, 2008, 11:15:17 AM »

PS:
I see demon have responded now and, actually, it sounds like quite credible advice... Their suggestion is to login as bt_test.... user, then logout and login again as normal.  That, apparently, will ensure 'a fresh connection with proper routing'.

I'm certainly willing to give it a go when I get home (I'm in the Office today), but since the problem already seems to have (probably) sorted itself it may be hard to say whether it does any good.  Annoyingly, all of this will do nothing to help my ongoing crusade to show BTW's DLM that my line is stable and get my SNR back to something sensible (I'm still under domestic pressure to resist the well-discussed option of getting & tweaking a DG834GT).

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kitz

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #7 on: November 21, 2008, 02:23:37 PM »

I can understand where they are coming from re the bt_testuser login as it should refresh the session, but its still curious as to why its happened in the first place.
I still think the most likely cause is that its something to do with a problem theyve had on their centrals.

>> I'm still under domestic pressure to resist the well-discussed option of getting & tweaking a DG834GT

Keep your eyes open on ebay, weve got a few old sky ones and successfully flashed them.   iirc one of them chris got was only about £7, I paid a bit more for mine but not that much.  I set a limit of £15-20 inc postage..  if you wait long enough and keep looking hopefully one will turn up.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #8 on: November 21, 2008, 02:37:40 PM »

I can understand where they are coming from re the bt_testuser login as it should refresh the session, but its still curious as to why its happened in the first place.

Well, the initial 'outage' was interesting too.  On the face of it, all Internet access just stopped working despite restarting the router and PCs, etc.  However, looking at the router log I noticed that the IP address being assigned to the router wasn't  my normal demon 'static' address.  In fact, it wasn't even in the same subnet range.   The router was 'happy' with this address inasmuch as I could ping it from the local machines, but it didn't facilitate internet access -  even the (demon) time server wouldn't respond to router's requests.  At regular intervals the connection was broken & re-established from the network-side, with another dodgy-looking IP address, and so around the loop again.
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kitz

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Re: Redirection to BT Wholesale Service Information
« Reply #9 on: November 21, 2008, 03:11:35 PM »

It will have been a BT allocated one in BTw's range.

(IPStream) authentication is a 2 part process..  first of all onto the BTw backhaul..  then on to the ISPs domain. 
Once youve 'reached' the ISPs RADIUS, this then authenticates you and allocates you your ISP IP..   but if for some reason the ISP RADIUS 'says no', then youre stuck on the BTw backhaul and cant get 'out to the internet'.   Theres a couple of sites you can browse to on the BTw backhaul - such as digital demo and speedtest domain, but thats about it.

BTw's routing takes you from the exchange - through the RAS (super exchange), down the Colossus backbone and to the ISP's gateway which is normally located in Docklands, London (Zen for eg is an exception, as theirs is in Manchester). 
If you cant get on to the ISP gateway for any reason then all you can do is traverse up and down the backbone. Once youre connected to the ISPs gateway, this first part of your connection is normally hidden using L2TP tunnelling.

Which has just made me think of another possibility - it could be the ISP RADIUS servers which are playing up... but there should be 'a farm' of these to provide resiliency.
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