Identifying cause of routing issues.. help?

[Dean Ashton]

Hi,

I'm on NTL's 2Mbit service in Cambridge (CB5), and in recent months I've had what looks like strange routing problems when trying to get to news.claranews.com.. Sometimes connections are fine, and other times I get nothing.. well, apart from 'Destination host unreachable' when I do a ping. It didn't seem to be a DNS entry, as the names are resolving properly. In the end I just put it down to ClaraNews/Clara.Net being a bit crap.

Anyway, recently I decided to move from ClaraNews to EasyNews. And now, all the time, I cannot access their server from NTL's network. If I ping news.easynews.com, it's just 'Destination host unreachable' again. In EasyNews' case I can access via their proxy (proxy.news.easynews.com, via port 443), and it works just fine.. but I find it suspicious that it's just news servers that I'm having problems accessing. I've got a laptop here too, accessing my work network via VPN.. I can access the sites perfectly well all of the time via that (but this is less than ideal).

Is there any way to find out the cause of my problems? I've tried disabling firewalls (i run Kerio 4.2.0) and so on to see if there was something wrong, but to no avail.

I'm kinda ok, in that I can still access EasyNews, but I find this slightly worrying..

Cheers,
Dean

[sheilablige]

Have you checked to see if you have a proxy server specified on the PC - Tools>Int Opts>Connections>LAN - should be no tick in "use a proxy" .... if there is remove close IE and then try.

Alternatively you may need to try one (double edged sword) - check laptop to see what that's got. On the PC you may need to specify one if there are network issues as TEMP resolve.

Hope this helps - I have a few routings you can try if you like

Sheila

PS proxies do not always solve the issue

[Dean Ashton]

Hi,

Originally Posted by sheilablige

Have you checked to see if you have a proxy server specified on the PC - Tools>Int Opts>Connections>LAN - should be no tick in "use a proxy" .... if there is remove close IE and then try.

No explicit proxy is specified.. from looking at other tracerts it looks like NTLs transparent proxy is being used.

Unfortunately I can't use the proxy that my laptop uses, as that only works via the VPN connection (it's through PSInet, who do our corporate network).

Are there any free/public proxies that I can use? Assuming this is the sort of thing that NTLs transparent proxy could cause?

Thanks,
Dean

[Dean Ashton]

Mystery solved.. it looks like it was PeerGuardian, which has both easynews, and some of ClaraNews' servers in its disallow list..

Doh..

[patrickp]

Originally Posted by Dean Ashton

Hi,


No explicit proxy is specified.. from looking at other tracerts it looks like NTLs transparent proxy is being used.

Unfortunately I can't use the proxy that my laptop uses, as that only works via the VPN connection (it's through PSInet, who do our corporate network).

Are there any free/public proxies that I can use? Assuming this is the sort of thing that NTLs transparent proxy could cause?

Thanks,
Dean

Here's the page from Robin Walker's very informative site listing ntl's proxies, Dean.