What Do They Have In Common?
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Here's a teaser for you: The town across the river where my ISP's servers reside had a power failure Wednesday - I lost contact for 3 hours. Since then all chat services have become unreliable. Trillian, AIM, MSN, ICQ, and even Sonork all disconnect every few minutes, which destroys the chat session in progress. The connection itself is working perfectly - 11 Mbps with 0% packet loss - and DNS is cranking along nicely, as I've had no trouble navigating the 'net with a browser. Contacting the ISP would be a waste of time, as the guy that set it up and knew about networking sold his interest to his silent partner and left the state for a place with trees. His partner doesn't know squat about computers, and the tech support remaining is the cable-puller. Needless to say, there's little hope of the cable guy finding the problem - if there's a green light on the front panel, he's happy. Beyond that he's helpless. So, what, if anything, do all these chat services have in common? My thinking is that, since the power failure happenned at night, there was no one in the office and the UPSs ran down, letting the works go down in a highly informal manner. The machines are still on WinNT 4.0, so any number of complications could result, and I suspect that something has been corrupted in the OS that affects these services, but not the basic http transport. I'd go over there and fix it myself, but I haven't a clue what to look for. Any suggestions? "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)
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Here's a teaser for you: The town across the river where my ISP's servers reside had a power failure Wednesday - I lost contact for 3 hours. Since then all chat services have become unreliable. Trillian, AIM, MSN, ICQ, and even Sonork all disconnect every few minutes, which destroys the chat session in progress. The connection itself is working perfectly - 11 Mbps with 0% packet loss - and DNS is cranking along nicely, as I've had no trouble navigating the 'net with a browser. Contacting the ISP would be a waste of time, as the guy that set it up and knew about networking sold his interest to his silent partner and left the state for a place with trees. His partner doesn't know squat about computers, and the tech support remaining is the cable-puller. Needless to say, there's little hope of the cable guy finding the problem - if there's a green light on the front panel, he's happy. Beyond that he's helpless. So, what, if anything, do all these chat services have in common? My thinking is that, since the power failure happenned at night, there was no one in the office and the UPSs ran down, letting the works go down in a highly informal manner. The machines are still on WinNT 4.0, so any number of complications could result, and I suspect that something has been corrupted in the OS that affects these services, but not the basic http transport. I'd go over there and fix it myself, but I haven't a clue what to look for. Any suggestions? "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)
Roger Wright wrote: Any suggestions? Is changing ISP an option? (I know you live near the border of the world) The unreliable connection may come from a unstable web proxy or from a failing unity in a cluster of firewalls. If they don't have tech support, you're in bad waters. You could try turning off your HTTP proxy, if there is any... I see dumb people
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Roger Wright wrote: Any suggestions? Is changing ISP an option? (I know you live near the border of the world) The unreliable connection may come from a unstable web proxy or from a failing unity in a cluster of firewalls. If they don't have tech support, you're in bad waters. You could try turning off your HTTP proxy, if there is any... I see dumb people
Changing ISPs is an option, but then I'd have to settle for a mere DSL connection and pay at least twice as much. For 11 Mbps @ $28/month I'm willing to put up with much! I'm not using any proxy, and I don't believe the ISP is using any firewalls, but I do recall that they have about 6 servers running in the office. If they're clustered, there might be some synchronization issues after the power failure, but I'd expect that sort of problem to have more extensive effects. I was hoping that there might be some service or feature that chat agents all use and I don't know about, but maybe there isn't, and it was just a coincidence that this nonsense started the same day the lights went out. With luck, maybe it will just go away:-) "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)
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Here's a teaser for you: The town across the river where my ISP's servers reside had a power failure Wednesday - I lost contact for 3 hours. Since then all chat services have become unreliable. Trillian, AIM, MSN, ICQ, and even Sonork all disconnect every few minutes, which destroys the chat session in progress. The connection itself is working perfectly - 11 Mbps with 0% packet loss - and DNS is cranking along nicely, as I've had no trouble navigating the 'net with a browser. Contacting the ISP would be a waste of time, as the guy that set it up and knew about networking sold his interest to his silent partner and left the state for a place with trees. His partner doesn't know squat about computers, and the tech support remaining is the cable-puller. Needless to say, there's little hope of the cable guy finding the problem - if there's a green light on the front panel, he's happy. Beyond that he's helpless. So, what, if anything, do all these chat services have in common? My thinking is that, since the power failure happenned at night, there was no one in the office and the UPSs ran down, letting the works go down in a highly informal manner. The machines are still on WinNT 4.0, so any number of complications could result, and I suspect that something has been corrupted in the OS that affects these services, but not the basic http transport. I'd go over there and fix it myself, but I haven't a clue what to look for. Any suggestions? "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)
It also may be a router problem. (My thinking being that chat services use specific ports and if the router reset to a default configuration, those ports may be now blocked and/or improperly configured.)
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It also may be a router problem. (My thinking being that chat services use specific ports and if the router reset to a default configuration, those ports may be now blocked and/or improperly configured.)
Good call! Though not exact, that's sort of what happenned. The fact that it started at the time my ISP lost power seems to be coincidence (what are the odds?). Much digging and gnashing of teeth led to the discovery that Zone Alarm Pro, after many months of working perfectly, suddenly started blocking most of the packets going to and from Trillian. It did this on its own, with no change in settings, and there's a mystery! It also started, a few hours later, blocking messages from Sonork, as well. I deliberately added Trillian, and the subnet it operates on, to the Trusted Zone in ZAP, then removed and re-added the program itself to the list of apps permitted to access the Internet. Rebooting a couple of times changed nothing, but when I shut down both Trillian and ZAP manually, then cold-started the server, it went back to operating smoothly again as it always had before. Problem solved, though not the mystery of why it happenned, or perhaps more importantly, why it had always worked before without any special settings in ZAP.:eek: "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)