Cable Forum - View Single Post - Dropouts in web access to JANET and BBC...

richardw · 01-03-2008, 14:53

I've been having a weird problem for the past few months. I'm at a loss to know what's going on, but more importantly I'm at a loss to know how to effectively communicate the problem to VM.

What I'm seeing is dropouts in web access to certain sites, in particular the BBC and to web servers on JANET (the UK academic network).

This happens several times a day (almost without fail it'll happen at least once between 5pm and 6.30pm). It happens at weekends and on weekdays. It happened this morning (Saturday) at just after 11am.

I get "cannot connect to web server" for about five to ten minutes of retrying, then it suddenly starts working fine again. Access to other web sites on the Internet is fine during these intervals.

I work at a University, we have several web servers running on several machines, I run one of them. Without fail they *all* become inaccessible at the same time. Without fail the BBC website becomes inaccessible at the same time (I'm referring to their basic web page, not iPlayer for any of the streaming stuff). I found this morning that other sites on JANET (in this instance Nottingham University) become inaccessible to me at the same time.

During the affected interval I can SSH to the web server I run at my University, I can login, monitor the logs and watch the web server serving requests from elsewhere across JANET and around the world. I can ping www.bbc.co.uk.

So basic network connectivity seems to be OK, the web servers are up and working. It's just port 80 traffic between them and my cable modem which is being affected. And I reiterate, other web sites I frequent hosted elsewhere around the world work fine during these periods.

My basic question is -- who at VM can I get this information to for further investigation? And how? I really don't want to pay 50p/min to be told to reboot my cable modem, and then that the problem is fixed because I can see www.bbc.co.uk! I feel that from the symptoms above there's obvious something quite subtle going on and that it's somewhere between NTL and JANET, and that it's not obvious that it's my end.

I'm at my wits end.

01-03-2008, 14:53	#1
richardw Inactive Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Leicester Posts: 18	Dropouts in web access to JANET and BBC... I've been having a weird problem for the past few months. I'm at a loss to know what's going on, but more importantly I'm at a loss to know how to effectively communicate the problem to VM. What I'm seeing is dropouts in web access to certain sites, in particular the BBC and to web servers on JANET (the UK academic network). This happens several times a day (almost without fail it'll happen at least once between 5pm and 6.30pm). It happens at weekends and on weekdays. It happened this morning (Saturday) at just after 11am. I get "cannot connect to web server" for about five to ten minutes of retrying, then it suddenly starts working fine again. Access to other web sites on the Internet is fine during these intervals. I work at a University, we have several web servers running on several machines, I run one of them. Without fail they all become inaccessible at the same time. Without fail the BBC website becomes inaccessible at the same time (I'm referring to their basic web page, not iPlayer for any of the streaming stuff). I found this morning that other sites on JANET (in this instance Nottingham University) become inaccessible to me at the same time. During the affected interval I can SSH to the web server I run at my University, I can login, monitor the logs and watch the web server serving requests from elsewhere across JANET and around the world. I can ping www.bbc.co.uk. So basic network connectivity seems to be OK, the web servers are up and working. It's just port 80 traffic between them and my cable modem which is being affected. And I reiterate, other web sites I frequent hosted elsewhere around the world work fine during these periods. My basic question is -- who at VM can I get this information to for further investigation? And how? I really don't want to pay 50p/min to be told to reboot my cable modem, and then that the problem is fixed because I can see www.bbc.co.uk! I feel that from the symptoms above there's obvious something quite subtle going on and that it's somewhere between NTL and JANET, and that it's not obvious that it's my end. I'm at my wits end.