I have Charter Cable, and about 2 weeks ago I started having a problem. My system is a Windows XP, and I am running Zone Alarm firewall.
When I am through for the night I normally simply disable Zone Alarm, then when I get back on in the morning I reenable it. Normally the internet connection has disconnected at that time, and I run "ipconfig /renew" to reestablish the connection. At that point I can do everything. But about 2 weeks ago I found that after reconnecting with the internet receiving emails was very slow, and ssh2 and ftp both would time out, ahtough browsing was fine. This would continue for 5 to 10 minutes, then suddenly all would work fine. I also noticed that during the day sometimes emails would connect slowly (1 to 3 minutes instead of
1 to 2 seconds), and although if I had an ssh2 connection established it would contunue to work fine, attempts to establish another ssh2 connection would fail. Eventually emails would start working fast again, and I could connect ssh2 and ftp again.But this morning, I still cannot get the ssh2 and ftp to connect, and emails are slow, even after 2 hours of trying. I have tried ftp with other servers unsuccessfully, and have had my son connect with the server I am trying to connect with successfully with his computer, so I know it is not the server. I removed zone alarm and that did not help. I also rebooted, and that did not help either.
I called Charter, but as expected they claim it is not their problem, and all they guarantee is that I can connect to the net, not that anything will work.
Anyone have any idea what is going on, or what to try to troubleshoot this? BTW, when I attempt an ssh2 connection, I see traffic to and from the server, it just never completely connects.
Thanks,
Marshall