[plug] internet problems

[Evan Lau]

hey guys,

thanks for all your thoughts regarding this problem....slowly it seems
that we're getting somewhere. i hope you guys will put up with me a bit
longer whilst i (hopefully) get closer and closer to finding the solution.

about the firewall, yeah i've tried to disable it temporarily but the same
thing happens after a while of downloading....the thing just stalls. funny
though, tonight the windows machine masqueraded behind this linux box
isn't on and the downloads seem to be working fine for me.

but about the mtu path discovery thingy....that seems
interesting. however, by resetting everything and defaulting to a policy
of ACCEPT for incoming, outgoing, and forwarding requests, anything should
be able to get thru right? well, the problem still happens so i guess it's
not that.

as for the hardware problems, i don't think it is as i don't have a
problem running windows on this linux box (yup dual boot) and downloading
stuff.

now i've looked at a few things and i've noticed when browsing the web,
netscape reports say a speed of (for example) 2.1K/s but the interface
icon reports a speed of 3.4K/s (for example). now this discrepancy would
be too big to say that it's just different measurements as i'm talking
about sustained periods of incoming traffic.

SO....from my limited knowledge from university and my own
experience....could it be that the extra bandwidth used (shown by the
interface icon) is due to the fact that many re-transmissions are sent
thru to me? for those not in the know, re-transmissions basically are
packets sent to you again because your computer has not acknowledged
previously sent packets. i've run "netstat" and ensured that nothing else
is taking up bandwidth so i'm pretty sure it's not some weird daemon or
another programme.

in the periods when i CAN sustain a download, it does sometime stall but
after say 20 seconds it resumes. this *could* perhaps lend weight to the
theory that something's going wrong in one of the layers in the tcp/ip
stack, maybe the transport/internet?

thanks guys again if you've read this far. have a good friday!

cheers,
evan

On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Matt Kemner wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Christian wrote:
> > > Have you got any firewall rules which would impact on traffic?  As a
> > > wild guess it could be something like MTU path discovery which is being
> > > prohibited due to a badly configured ICMP firewall rule.
> > It's not such a wild guess. Given the symptoms I'd say you're 90% likely
> > to be right. Evan, have you tried killing the firewall temporarily?
> 
> Speaking from personal experience there, Greg? ;)
> 
> The other thing it could be is dodgy cache, ide controller, or something
> else on the motherboard.
> 
> I have a machine here that is the gateway for a large webhosting company
> that has a dodgy motherboard in it and shows similar symptoms -
> when copying files to and from the machine the transfers keep pausing for
> a while.  On the other hand the webservers behind it are unaffected, and
> have no trouble sending or receiving at 100Mb, so long as it is not
> to/from the gateway itself. :)
> 
> I really should get around to replacing that motherboard some time...
> (although it does the job it is meant to do perfectly)
> 
> Evan, is it possible to try swapping hard drives between the 2 machines?
> That would prove immediately if it is a hardware or software/HDD problem.
> 
>  - Matt
> 
>