[TriLUG] RE: Roadrunner email has been down since yesterday afternoon!

[jonc]

You should also ping your local internal router and your local
Roadrunner router.  This will let you know if the problem is local (like
your firewall dropping packets) or if it's the local Road Runner router
that is simply overwhelmed.

I've found Road Runner's internal network to be very robust (despite
todays fun). The problem comes at the edges of their contact with the
customer - ie the community hub/switch that your cable modem connects to
inside RoadRunner.

One way to get better connectivity is to have Roadrunner put your cable
modem into bridged mode. The cable modems tend to run low end cpu's and
they drop or delay packets significantly when under load. If you remove
the NAT function from them that helps very much.

Jon Carnes

=== original message ===
Hey folks,

Looking for a suggestion. I have noticed that my VPN tunnels seem to drop on a 
random order. 

So I have set up a simple ping cron job, I have it sending out 60 pings every 
minute to three servers (one on the RR network {DNS}, one on the east coast, 
one on the west coast).

The job is run every minute, so in fact this is a continuous ping that sends 
results every minute.

I see that of my 60 packets, I loose a few almost once every 3 minutes. This 
seems to affect all three servers.

So my questions are:

1. Is this providing me with a valid network test?
2. What kind of results should I expect?
3. What type of network reliability test would you recommend?
4. What type of network reliability should I expect?

Thanks,

Ron