Routing problems with Earthlink in Palo Alto ??

I've been having problems with my dsl connection -- its Earthlink service, on copper provisioned by Covad about 5 years ago. (This fine service was $50/month, now $40/month).

For the last 3 weekends we have lost our ability to reach the internet at least on Sunday evening, and this past weekend we had poor connectivity from Saturday afternoon to Sunday.

Symptoms were: (using ping, from a machine on my home network) Could not reach the regular DNS server Could always reach the backup DNS server (I eventually changed the server settings on the Netgear 814 router to go directly to the backup) Could occasionally reach the mail system: smtp.mindspring.com At other times could not ping, mail would time-out. Could not ping or reach other sites on the internet (not even google)

On Sunday evening I called mindspring. After 10 minutes, reached a tech, who discovered that I had a home network, and forwarded me to home network help / non-help. After >50 minutes on hold, I gave up.

Tried a 3rd time, got to a reasonably helpful person, though she was fairly insistent that I change my trusted sites setting in Internet explorer. (I do not trust anything to Internet Explorer. We use Firefox on Linux and Mac OS at my home.) We did converse at a reasonable level about pings and DNS settings.

At the same time as I started the 3rd call, I power cycled the netgear router. I had previously power cycled it with no help the previous night. In the course of that call, the connectivity came back. Hurray! (time to change my service to sonic.net?) My question(s):

Is it possible that this was a problem in my gateway/router, not on Earthlinks network? Since I could get outside my firewall to some addresses, it seems unlikely that the problem is local.

Could the Earthlink tech have fixed something?

Could it be a coincidence that connectivity came back while I was speaking to someone at Earthlink?

Does ANYONE else use this covad/earthlink service?

Thanks for your feedback. I lurk in ba.internet primarily, but thought this may be of interest in comp.dcom.xdsl

-- Robert Neff snipped-for-privacy@neffs.net goes into a spam bucket. try robert at that domain.

Reply to
google
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The router is a Netgear firewall-router. Ping tests are from hosts on the internal network. I've resisted connecting without the firewall because, well, I want the firewall there. I don't have pppoe login software conveniently installed on a system which should be allowed on the other side of the firewall.

-- Robert

Reply to
google

I had Covad/Earthlink service for several years. It would periodically go down compeletely, or slow down without explanation. Of course it was impossible get any help.

Near the end, Usenet started going down for weeks at a time, then it would come back up for a while, go down again, and getting any technical support was of course impossible.

Earthlink support is horrific. It's endless power-cycling of everything, modifications to your browser or network set-up, rather than any actual diagnostics.

I switched to Sonic. I first got one machine going, before bringing up the wireless network. Sonic apparently locked on to the MAC address of the PC, and when I plugged in the router and it saw a different MAC address, it got upset. I called them, and before I could finish explaining what happened, I was being interrupted with, "yes, yes, I know the exact problem, I've corrected it on my end."

The other thing I really like about Sonic is that they include VPN service with every account.

Reply to
SMS

Possibly. When doing ping tests, do you use the ping command of your router, rather than pinging from a host on your local network? If the former works but the latter does not, then it's likely to be a local problem.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

You should be able to telnet to the router and find a "ping" command there.

If it's an older Netgear it may be failing.

Good luck.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

Did your ping tests use numeric IP addresses or host names? Covad or Earthlink could have been having DNS server problems. In fact based on the symptoms you describe it could have been all DNS.

Reseting the router may have also gotten you a fresh PPP session with better results.

Reply to
dave.wombat
[POSTED TO ba.internet - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

Look in the mirror, Steven.

Reply to
John Navas

I was using numeric addresses. The failures are beyond DNS problems. It turns out that reaching the primary DNS server has been an un-reliable part of the experience. The backup DNS server has been solid. Well, not really solid, but better.

It's past time to have a simple connection monitoring script going. Any

*ux favorites out there? Google is my friend...

-- Robert

Reply to
google

I like smokeping. It makes a set of plots for various time scales, using intensity and color to show latency and packet loss versus time on the same plot. Intensity is used to show the latency distribution at a particular time, hence the "smoke" part of the name.

It sends a small set of pings to the sites of your choice every five minutes.

Reply to
John Serafin

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