Internet issues: Level3(backbone) and CogentCo

StratocasterMaster

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Anyone notice a lot of major video/picture host sites suffering and being unreachable?

I dont know the real cause or if this IS the real cause but Putfile reports that its the fault of Colorado based telecommunications company Level3. I've looked and expected this to be major news on the [H] but nothing. So now I'm wondering, is there just some major outages occuring or has Level3 really screwed the home user and partitioned off connectivity to a major part of the world?

photobucket, putfile.... even some webcomics (nothingnice for example...) all suffering.

http://www.putfile.com/boycott-level3.php

~Kris
 
I think a lot of Florida is being affected.

there was a thread in genMay that mentioned it a a few Orlando people were also having problems.

I think RoadRunner is largly affected at least.
 
you can always use www.slackerserver.com for image hosting if you need it :)

anyways, i have not hear of any widespread outages, i will have to look into this and see what i can find
 
Level 3 has ceased peering with cogent due to the "financial feasibility" of the agreement. Level 3 is stating that cogents network isnt big enough to justify a peering connection with them.

Edit:Linkage

Not sure if this addresses your question or you already knew this...I'm tired and have the flu so please forgive my stupidity! :D
 
Cogent didnt do this. Level 3 screwed them by terminating the peering between to the two.
 
Sorry, I didn't really read up on it to see who's fault it is.

What is more important that I hope something gets done about this very soon. I'm pretty sure DePaul is served by Cogent and I can't ping them at all. From previous tracert, I'm pretty sure that I go through Level3.
 
Regardless of who is at fault, it just highlights the need for truly diverse WAN connections if your organization deems internet access "mission-critical".

It sucks all around, the two companies need to quit their bickering and resolve the issue. This is the kind of nonsense that makes customers leave and never come back, which is exactly what I'd be doing.
 
Agreed, fault is irrelevant. I too hope it is resolved as I always hate to see network problems let alone problems caused on purpose!
 
wow i just noticed stanford's site is down, is that from this? and are the folding servers affected?!?
 
Lugztaz said:
wow i just noticed stanford's site is down, is that from this? and are the folding servers affected?!?
Doing a tracert, the last hop before stanford's network is a cogent router. Their site works for me. If it doesn't work for you, then you might be going through an L3 hop trying to get to stanford's network.

It's important to remember that doesn't knock out L3 and Cogent customers from the whole rest of the world, just traffic that is routed through L3's network before it gets to Cogent's, and vice versa...which is still a lot of people.
 
min freaks out when it goes ouside my router...o well i used nerotrace and it looks like im on the t3 side :(
 
Okay, well I had reported my issues to Earthlink as I also noticed high latency rates going to google.com (240+). They never got back to me but I just checked and I'm able to access Photobucket again. I'm not sure if there has been some rerouting, or returned connectivity, or if this whole Level3/Cogent thing is unrelated but several others I spoke with said that their issues specific to Photobucket were caused by that. Since it was working at my office I thought nothing of it but it wasnt working last night at home or earlier tonight. We will see how long it lasts.

I dont like how either company is handling it, no matter who is at fault. They are screwing the home users because they want to play their little political games on the big table. They both should be rerouting but from what I can tell neither are and thus are working against the grand design of the internet.

~Kris
 
I'm on prolog express out of pennsylvania, recieving a timeout on my first hop to multiple sites , latency on google. I can't get to anything related to blizzard, worldofwarcraft.com, the logon servers appear non existant for me.

No WoW for me :(
 
Level3 and Cogent have re-peered, so everything should be getting back to normal now.
 
im on the L3 side and i can't access that :( i was just at their site tho :rolleyes: i hate alltel :mad:
 
From http://status.cogentco.com

******************************************************************************
** Cogent Network Status Report Last Updated Fri Oct 7 17:45:00 2005 **
******************************************************************************
******************************************************************************
Network Status: Normal
DNS Servers Status: Normal
Dialup/IPASS Status: Normal
Mail Servers Status: Normal
Webservers Status: Normal


Cogent Network Status/DNS Server Status Description:
Date: 10/07/2005

10/7/05 (4:20pm edt): Level 3 has restored all peers with Cogent as of 4:00pm edt. We are seeing some latency in traffic across to Level 3 as sessions re-establish, mail servers deliver messages, etc. We hope the above normal traffic volumes will decrease within the next hour.

10/7/05 (3:40pm edt): Level 3 has restored some of their peering sessions with Cogent at this time. We do not know if this is a temporary or a permanent change, and will continue to negotiate with Level 3 to resolve all the issues they have with Cogent.

10/7/05 (2:23pm) For an update on the Level 3 issue, see our recent press release asking Level 3 to turn their side of the peers back up while we negotiate.
Also, please note that traffic between Cogent and Road Runner/Time Warner cable has been restored at this time.
 
Thanks to these two bickering asshat companies I bet some parts of the internet will now become regulated. Thank you level 3 and cogent.
 
BoogerBomb said:
Thanks to these two bickering asshat companies I bet some parts of the internet will now become regulated. Thank you level 3 and cogent.

Umm, no. On a side note I have a couple of very close friends that work at Level 3. The details under which the reconnect happened would blow you away. While I can't disclose details without getting parties invovled in serious trouble...(yet), I can say Cogent is going to come out of this looking like a little brat.
 
Comcast in South Jersey I think is being affected by this dick bite situation. Alot of sites aren't loading, displaying pictures or just extremely slow load times and DNS resolution, it's been going on since October 5th and hasn't gotten better.

What does Comcast use? Cogent or Level 3?
 
number69 said:
Comcast in South Jersey I think is being affected by this dick bite situation. Alot of sites aren't loading, displaying pictures or just extremely slow load times and DNS resolution, it's been going on since October 5th and hasn't gotten better.

What does Comcast use? Cogent or Level 3?

One way to tell is to open up a command prompt and then use traceroute to one of the sites that isn't displaying properly. For instance, traceroute tells me that my connection from the University of Maryland, after passing through all of the local routers, goes out to a Cogent pipe (so pretty much all of my internet traffic is carried at first by Cogent) and then to savvis.net en route to HardOCP.
 
comcast uses ATT (Philly here). I didn't have any problems when this all was going down. I doubt your problems would be caused by this even if comcast used one of those two considering that they've been peering for a few days now.
 
da sponge said:
comcast uses ATT (Philly here). I didn't have any problems when this all was going down. I doubt your problems would be caused by this even if comcast used one of those two considering that they've been peering for a few days now.

I'll agree that number69 shouldn't be having any problems at this point because the peering has been reestablished, but there were issues depending on what locations a person might access at the time the peering was disconnected.

When the peering was dropped, I had a couple clients lose connectivity from the SJ area to their email systems which are hosted in Texas. Hell, even my own website became unavailable from Verizon DSL or Comcast. Traceroutes from both ISPs were stopping at Level3.

Nor I or my business clients haven't noticed any problems with Comcast in this area of SJ since the peering has been reestablished.
 
I switched over to level 3 DNS servers 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 in my router instead of using Comcast's DNS servers and everything flies.

If I switch back to using Comcast's DNS servers, I get slow loading pages, page cannot be found, images don't display on certain websites, etc... Comcast is having DNS issues, at least in my area.

This all started on October 5th for whatever reason.
 
UMCPWintermute said:
One way to tell is to open up a command prompt and then use traceroute to one of the sites that isn't displaying properly. For instance, traceroute tells me that my connection from the University of Maryland, after passing through all of the local routers, goes out to a Cogent pipe (so pretty much all of my internet traffic is carried at first by Cogent) and then to savvis.net en route to HardOCP.

Damn, even running a tracert while using Comcast's DNS servers takes forever. Again, if I switch to level 3 DNS servers it's fast. This is happening on both my computers on my network at home. Both choke when using Comcast's DNS servers.
 
number69 said:
Damn, even running a tracert while using Comcast's DNS servers takes forever. Again, if I switch to level 3 DNS servers it's fast. This is happening on both my computers on my network at home. Both choke when using Comcast's DNS servers.

comcast dns has had many problems this year. I usually use genuity's DNS servers (4.2.2.2, .3)
 
This is messed up. It might be my router. I usually have it set to get DNS servers automatically from the ISP.

I bypassed the router and the pages loaded right up. So I attached my router again and went into the setup and this time I looked at the router status page which told me which DNS servers it was using from Comcast.

I went in and turned off the feature to automatically get the DNS address from my ISP and manually entered the Comcast DNS address and the pages loaded right up. For some reason my router is getting the addresses automatically but something is slowing things up. It's a WGR614v4 latest firmware. Don't mean to hijack the thread.
 
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