[TriLUG] troubleshooting spotty internet connectivity with TWCBC

[Dewey Hylton]

> From: "Bill Farrow" <bill at arrowsreach.com>
> To: "Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion" <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 8:46:09 AM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] troubleshooting spotty internet connectivity with TWCBC
> 
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 7:29 AM, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I also have/had smokeping running against the work VPN endpoint,
> > the first
> > TWC hop outside my router, the router and the cable modem so I can
> > show
> > them the graphs of everything fine on my side of the connection and
> > how
> > crap it is to their gateway.
> 
> Hard evidence like log data works every time. I have a cron job that
> pings the router, modem, and an external site and logs failures with
> a
> time stamp. I run this in two places, inside my work network and on
> an
> external machine.
> 
> Here is a good example:
> http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/simple-linux-and-unix-system-monitoring-with-ping-command-and-scripts.html
> 
> My problem was resolved once I showed TWBC support that their modem
> was disappearing while all other hosts stayed up. TWBC replaced the
> Ubee modem with a Motorola which fixed it.
> 
> In Dewey's case, it sounds like a TWBC internal routing problem.
> 
> Bill

hard evidence only works where it works, and in my case TWCBC refused to look at the evidence. i already have the above type of script running continually.

so ... i drove the hr to get onsite, got TWCBC on the phone, connected a bsd laptop directly to the modem, and saw the same exact results. no shock there.

i then removed power from their modem, counted to 5, and reapplied power. once i was able to ping the gateway again the tests magically worked. so i cycled modem power once more and placed the firewall behind it. once the modem came back, everything magically worked.

i suggested that the customer be added to the queue for receiving a new modem, and TWCBC support agreed. but until that happens, i have to assume the same will happen again at some random point in the future.

at no point would TWCBC agree to seeing any of my logs, and that was the _first_ thing i offered on each of my 3 calls to them.