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#348590 - 29/10/2011 03:04 Re: Ping Logger [Re: Robotic]
tonyc
carpal tunnel

Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
Quote:
Moot point now- they laid me off today. So I don't care much now if they ever sort it out


Ouch -- very sorry to hear that. Was it something you knew was coming eventually, or was it a surprise? Not that there's any good way to get let go, of course.

Good luck with your next move.
_________________________
- Tony C
my empeg stuff

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#348593 - 29/10/2011 11:27 Re: Ping Logger [Re: Robotic]
tanstaafl.
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5549
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
Originally Posted By: Robotic
Many thanks to Doug for sharing his trials and tribulations from the networked netherlands.
It took some patience and perseverance, but I did get some results.

My English-speaking tech was kind of a dead end. His job, and his entire focus, is working with cables, connections, modems, and routers. "If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." His focus was on what he was used to fixing (noise in the line, bad connection on the pole outside the house, reboot the modem and router, etc.) and I could not get through to him that the problem was not local.

Why did I think this? Because even when pinging Google showed absolutely no connectivity, I could always ping the gateway IP address and get practically instantaneous (<1ms) returns, and the cable TV never faltered.

After presenting him with a several printouts demonstrating this, he turned me over to the engineer at the office. He had about the same amount of English as I had Spanish, so we were able to more or less communicate, and he found the printouts informative and intriguing, although for the first two weeks he was stuck in the same rut as the installer, looking for local fixes. He, too, gave me his cell phone number!

I don't know if it was coincidence, or if the engineer finally put pressure on upstream (where I believe the problem originated) but at 3:30 (more or less) on October 22, following a nine and a half hour outage, the internet came back on, but with a difference. The ping times which had been running (on the occasions when there were any pings at all!) an average of 50-60 ms, were now running 70-90 ms, about a 50% increase, but still perfectly acceptable. The big difference, however, was an increase in reliability, from about 50% when I started logging to more than 97% since October 22. It would be more than 99%, except there was a [probably] planned outage of 2.5 hours on October 25. Other than that outage, all of my glitches have been single, occasionally two in a row, lost packets scattered randomly maybe 10 times per day. I'm told this is normal.

My thinking is that there was a problem with some piece of equipment upstream from the ISP, evidenced by gradually increasing ping times getting up into the 300-400 range before total loss of connectivity; then sometime later, frequently at the top of the hour, the service would return rock solid (for a while) with pings in the 50's, then after several hours (sometimes just a couple, sometimes 15 or 20) the cycle would repeat.

I think someone, somewhere upstream, was being reminded by their watch beeping on the hour, and going to "check the line" and resetting something. Finally they either replaced a failing piece of equipment, or possibly changed the routing so the ping to Google.com takes some extra hops, which accounts for the 50% increase in ping times, and the huge increase in stability. Of course, this is just surmise on my part, based on invincible ignorance of how the internet actually works, but it seems plausible to me. smile

I am now pressing the ISP to give me six months of free internet service as compensation for several months lack of service (the problem was there for at least one month before I began logging, possibly more) and for the thorough documentation I provided. The engineer has agreed that this is reasonable, and said he would work on it. I'm not holding my breath.

Since I doubt that anyone here is interested enough in my tribulations to want to look through 51,618 data points (that's what I've collected so far) I am attaching a screen shot, showing just the statistics for the first week and the last week (more or less) of the data collection. And if there are any Excel freaks among you, I am attaching the Excel template into which I paste the CSV data from the PingLogger batch file. There are a couple of neat things in it, particularly cells D2 and F2, and the conditional formatting in column C. [Owww, my arm hurts from patting myself so much on the back smile ]

tanstaafl.


Attachments
psCompare.png

$psTEMPLATE.xls (180 downloads)

_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

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#348594 - 29/10/2011 11:28 Re: Ping Logger [Re: tonyc]
Robotic
pooh-bah

Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
I was thinking it would happen in spring, after a big project we are (I was) working on.
Thanks for the luck!
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)

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#348940 - 06/11/2011 21:31 Re: Ping Logger [Re: tanstaafl.]
tanstaafl.
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5549
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
I am attaching a screen shot,
Here's another screen shot (not that anybody is likely to care) showing what my internet service was like, day by day, in September, October, and November.

The improvement in connectivity has been dramatic, the off-line periods have decreased by a factor of 35 in November as compared to September.

tanstaafl.


Attachments
Sep-Oct-Nov Summary.png




Edited by tanstaafl. (06/11/2011 21:33)
Edit Reason: Correct improvement factor
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

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#348941 - 06/11/2011 22:50 Re: Ping Logger [Re: tanstaafl.]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
Looking good. Somewhere archived, I have a web page I hacked together to do a very similar thing for my ISP in 1999. The support staff were so amazed that a customer was monitoring it so closely, they used my site to measure the outcome of some tweaks they tried. Being that it was a microwave based wireless solution, sometimes those tweaks involved driving up the mountain and reaiming antennas and quadrant boundaries.

Sadly it all went downhill when Sprint bought the local company out, but it still came in handy for me to use to decide when I was going to switch away. Sometimes companies out there do appreciate having a knowledgable customer interested in working with them to fix a problem.

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#348954 - 07/11/2011 08:25 Re: Ping Logger [Re: tanstaafl.]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Here's another screen shot (not that anybody is likely to care)


I can beat that frown

The purple is downtime.



Fortunately, a new router appears to have fixed it, for now.


Attachments
uptime.png (689 downloads)

_________________________
-- roger

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#349056 - 09/11/2011 19:47 Re: Ping Logger [Re: Roger]
altman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
So exactly wtf happened there? New router at your end or their end?

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#349062 - 10/11/2011 08:33 Re: Ping Logger [Re: altman]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Originally Posted By: altman
So exactly wtf happened there? New router at your end or their end?


Power notch appears to have killed my old router (but leaving it with enough magic smoke to appear to be working); I've borrowed a replacement from one of the guys at work until I get my FTTC upgrade installed (which requires a VDSL modem, rather than an ADSL2+ modem).

_________________________
-- roger

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#349080 - 11/11/2011 20:21 Re: Ping Logger [Re: Roger]
andym
carpal tunnel

Registered: 17/01/2002
Posts: 3996
Loc: Manchester UK
Originally Posted By: Roger
I can beat that frown

Impressive!

A&A have provided the best ISP user experience I've ever had.
_________________________
Cheers,

Andy M

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#349092 - 12/11/2011 18:48 Re: Ping Logger [Re: andym]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Originally Posted By: andym
A&A have provided the best ISP user experience I've ever had.


Agreed. They've been nothing but excellent while diagnosing this fault.
_________________________
-- roger

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