Anyone else down this morning?

[cavillas]

Not sure if this gives any light on the mater in hand. https://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status_consumer/ss_cat/2468,2470

[andrue]

You shouldn't lose any email afaics, except possibly if you run your own mailserver?.

Yes, I do. Much preferred 99% of the time but just occasionally..not. Mind you it's only the fourth outage in a decade which isn't bad. I caused one. ISPs caused another two and the fourth was HDD failure. Actually my SSD had a firmware bug that manifested itself after six months of 24/7 running. Luckly Crucial had issued a fix a month previously

But as it's not a local network problem and as my router maintains the connection, and yours goes down doesn't that mean to this ignoramus that your router needs to be "fixed" (a reboot): and IDNet have even less chance of doing that remotely than you?

It could do I suppose - depends what state the router is in. If it's somehow crashed or locked up then clearly they can't help. I think it's more likely though that the session it has is bad and it just needs to establish a new one. I suppose it's possible that IDNet don't have access to 'dead' sessions but I doubt it. I'll have a look tonight and let you know what I see. The chap I spoke to just didn't seem interested in a lengthy conversation. He just offered 'reboot your router' as the likely solution to any and all problems and short of pushing him (which it doesn't really warrant) that was that. I can't really blame him for it but it's the kind of anonymous unsympathetic attitude I associate with bigger ISPs.

[Ruerin]

Was down also, router needed to restart to reconnect fully.

I thought it was my hardware acting up again as I couldn't access here to check!

[Steve]

I'm just wondering, bad thing really. PPPOE is established with the BT radius server, ok I guess they can reset their end but do they have access to the BT radius server to drop your connection. My suspicion is no they don't, isn't that one reason why we get stale sessions.

[Reya]

My connection went for Dennis the Menace red and black stripes (rather apt, as I was gnashing my teeth until I could get to the forum on my phone's 3G connection to see what was up) -



Thanks for the router reboot tip. Worked a treat! 

[andrue]

I'm just wondering, bad thing really. PPPOE is established with the BT radius server, ok I guess they can reset their end but do they have access to the BT radius server to drop your connection. My suspicion is no they don't, isn't that one reason why we get stale sessions.

You know that does make sense when you put it like that. Ah well. In less than an hour my mail server will be back online one way or the other. Meanwhile I also have a collection of stripes to show:

[Steve]

It might make sense but could be utter tosh.

[karvala]

Glad to come across this thread; was wondering what had happened this morning.  Just to join in the TBB fun:-



BTW, if anyone can explain the regular periodic max latency (yellow) spikes (I'm on FTTC), I'd be curious to know the cause.  No big deal, though.

[andrue]

The good news is I'm back. I suspect Steve was correct - my router was sat there happily connected to all intents and purposes.

The bad news - had another response from Support. Apparently I shouldn't expect an uncongested service. Well fair enough - sorta. Except that I fail to see how they can blame a four day drop in throughput that occurs on the 19th of every other month on  congestion. As I've replied to Simon - is he really claiming that everyone in my town goes mad for the internet on the 19th of every other month and that this madness lasts for four straight days without a break then just stops?

Either he doesn't know what he's doing or (more likely I think) he's just trotting out the first excuse he can think of to try and get rid of me.

[Clive]

I couldn't access any UK based websites such as my bank or the BBC yet other websites were perfectly fine.  Since I was visiting the bank this morning I thought I may as well complain about their website being down and they clearly thought I was a half wit.   

[zappaDPJ]

 

[Simon]

Always check here first before going to the bank.  We may have found something else to spend your money on. 

[Steve]

Karvala - During the night do you have anything running on your computer? It looks like a a pattern of periodic but short lived heavy use.

[mervl]

Could it just be worth keeping an eye out for how different routers seem to perform? I wouldn't recommend it because of price and it's too highly spec'd for home use but my router/modem just seems not to suffer stale sessions - it hangs on (usually) even during what TBBQM appears to show as a momentary loss of connectivity; or drops the connection and always reconnects as soon as the network fault clears, until then it just keeps on trying. The only time I can recall suffering apparently with a stale session necessitating a reboot was strangely with IDnet's supplied WNR1000, even though my former nameless (and shameless) ISP supplied equipment built of bricks from the electronic stone age, but it worked faultlessly in the same way! My other Fixed Wireless connection has a different Netgear cable router that hangs on through thick and thin, but kills two birds with one stone as it doesn't have to suffer a radius server (and I don't get a bill either!.)

[andrue]

Could it just be worth keeping an eye out for how different routers seem to perform? I wouldn't recommend it because of price and it's too highly spec'd for home use but my router/modem just seems not to suffer stale sessions - it hangs on (usually) even during what TBBQM appears to show as a momentary loss of connectivity; or drops the connection and always reconnects as soon as the network fault clears, until then it just keeps on trying.

I've been toying with the idea of changing my router. I'm interested in playing with IPv6 and although my router is supposed to support it now it doesn't seem to. But I want to be sure the next one supports IPv6 since that would be part of the reason for changing. Probably I'll leave it until April. That's when my IDNet contract period ends so it seems like a good time to review everything.

[pctech]

All I would say in defence of any ISP is that I doubt BT is forthcoming with exchange backhaul load data and any they do give out is probably out of date historical.

The only folks with a realtime view are likely to be Openreach's main Network Operations Centre and best of luck trying to get them to talk to you even if you manage to get hold of a number to get through.

[andrue]

All I would say in defence of any ISP is that I doubt BT is forthcoming with exchange backhaul load data and any they do give out is probably out of date historical.

The only folks with a realtime view are likely to be Openreach's main Network Operations Centre and best of luck trying to get them to talk to you even if you manage to get hold of a number to get through.

Oh you're probably right. I think it's something odd in the DLM or profile handling so almost certainly within BT's network. I wouldn't mind if they'd at least investigate it though. It's the inane responses and disinterest that annoys me. I chose to pay a premium for IDNet because I thought I'd be getting quality support. Maybe it's just a lack of customer awareness but personally I'd find 'It's a fault in BT's network and not in our control' to be more acceptable than some cock-and-bull about congestion and suggestions that second-best is all I should really expect from a residential connection.

[pctech]

Hmmmm, I'd agree with you.

Ofcom should really be holding BT to a higher standard by making it accountable to ISPs and ultimately their end users.

Only thing I can suggest is if people are on ADSL ask to be switched to the Telefonica connection if available or move to an ISP whom I don't care to mention who are well known for giving BT grief on behalf of their customers at least until the fault is investigated.

[adrinux]

Me too. (Not fttc though) just plain old idnet via BT wholesale.
Still down, sort of.

I've been trying to debug this all day. I've been using a TP-Link WR1043ND router flashed with OpenWRT for the last year or so, paired with a TP-Link 8616 modem. No problems. But today the net was down, a simple router/modem reboot didn't fix it. To cut a long story short:

I can see the modem is in sync, adsl light is green etc.
Authentication won't happen - I get an error 'timeout waiting for PADO packets' and 'unable to complete PPPoE discovery'.
I've tried swapping most of the cables, connecting directly to the bt socket etc, made no difference.

What did work: getting my old Netgear DG834 out of the loft and plugging it in. Instant connection. This made me think it was the modem, so I put the DG834 into modem only mode and connected it to the TP-Link WR1043ND, but it still won't go through authentication, same errors. So I think I've narrowed it down to something to do with the WR1043ND.

But I don't get it. It was working fine at 1am and broken by 9am, I changed nothing. Reverting to saved settings (from may) didn't help.

I'm really getting the impression that something has changed, some setting needs tweaking on the WR1043ND and in its PPPoE stuff, but damned if I know what.

Left the DG834 plugged in for now so the wired computers have access for the evening, but I have no wireless with the DG834.

I need to get to the bottom of this though, any suggestions welcome.

[andrue]

Authentication won't happen - I get an error 'timeout waiting for PADO packets' and 'unable to complete PPPoE discovery'.
I've tried swapping most of the cables, connecting directly to the bt socket etc, made no difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-point_protocol_over_Ethernet#Server_to_client:_Offer_.28PADO.29

I'd guess at it being related to today's outage but it might be a coincidence. You could try re-configuring your login details in case the router has scrambled them internally. Any such scrambling might not appear on the UI. I had a bug like that once several years ago in something else I was working on. The UI had a group of radio buttons and a numeric value indicating which was active. The code treated 0 and 1 as the first two but the third was activated by 'anything else'. The back-end engine however only accepted 0, 1 or 2 (I wrote it which is why ). So a value of 255 showed to the user as button 3 but the application blew up when my engine objected.

[Simon]

Sorry, can't help on the technical front, but

[Steve]

 
Same solutions as Andrue really but mine more desparate.


Sorry I've absolutely no idea, I assume you've tried resetting the router, has rebooting the router lost some manually entered setting, obviously I'm clutching at straws.

[Simon]

Oh, just a literal stab in the dark, but I don't suppose it's at all possible that the "flashed with OpenWRT" has been removed / reset by any chance, if that would make a difference?

[mervl]

Can't help with the technical side of things  but I think it's an easy cop out to blame BT. OK the 20CN network is outdated and ADSL DSLAMS and the local loop can be dodgy; but on 21CN unless there's known local congestion (because everyone suffers) - and which affects even LLU services in some parts - BT Wholesale seem to me to be well on top of things on the backhaul. BT and Sky are investing heavily, though I'm not so sure about Telefonica and Voda (C&W) though a reducing customer base must ease the pressure. To try and ensure reliability I chose the best EU equipment I could afford - and I haven't regretted it, in fact I've come to the view it's been worth it - and that it makes more of a difference than choice of ISP if you want to optimise your connection.

After all isn't the point of automation to keep human hands off?

[Technical Ben]

Um. Is it my connection then, dying router, or anyone else experiencing more disconnects? I have a sync and "connection" to something but the internet shows as non existent. Then it starts working again.