Is my ISP throttling my connection?

[RavenD]

We recently switched ISP's at my office building, went from one T1 to two of them in the process. Cisco router (provided by isp) plugged into pfSense firewall. These are three 2 minute traffic graphs I took when I was one of three people in the building, and was either installing something with apt, or downloading a linux image. The bandwidth cuts out every few seconds. I looked at some graphs generated under similar circumstances (athome (comcast 6/2 cable) and when i had a fast download going it would be pegged at 6MBit, no drops like this.

 

[gjvrieze]

We recently switched ISP's at my office building, went from one T1 to two of them in the process. Cisco router (provided by isp) plugged into pfSense firewall. These are three 2 minute traffic graphs I took when I was one of three people in the building, and was either installing something with apt, or downloading a linux image. The bandwidth cuts out every few seconds. I looked at some graphs generated under similar circumstances (athome (comcast 6/2 cable) and when i had a fast download going it would be pegged at 6MBit, no drops like this.

What do you pings like look??

 

[RavenD]

What do you pings like look??

While downloading a CD Image:

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 12 received, 0% packet loss, time 11002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 83.711/102.505/112.946/7.306 ms
--- c18-gdl-xw-lb.cnet.com ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 11 received, 0% packet loss, time 9999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 68.616/139.109/224.174/34.985 ms
--- www.hardforum.com ping statistics ---
14 packets transmitted, 14 received, 0% packet loss, time 13030ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 78.735/139.614/199.579/31.361 ms

While connection is close to idle:

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 12 received, 0% packet loss, time 11000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 18.195/23.328/52.175/10.103 ms
--- c18-gdl-xw-lb.cnet.com ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 12 received, 0% packet loss, time 11002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 49.434/54.447/80.129/8.763 ms
--- www.hardforum.com ping statistics ---
15 packets transmitted, 15 received, 0% packet loss, time 14001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 56.178/57.961/67.749/2.845 ms

Traffic shaping is not implemented on the pfSense yet. I tried once, but it started dropping packets when the network got really congested, and i've been too busy coding a database app to read up on how to make it work right.

 

[gjvrieze]

While downloading a CD Image:

While connection is close to idle:


Traffic shaping is not implemented on the pfSense yet. I tried once, but it started dropping packets when the network got really congested, and i've been too busy coding a database app to read up on how to make it work right.

I wonder if your t1s are working correctly, I would call the ISP and see if they can run some sort of test, like say a loop back and check their lines...

 

[RavenD]

I just realized that the WAN NIC is running at half duplex. The onboard NIC wasnt detected by pfSense, so I put in an old Intel 10/100 pci nic in. Its plugged in directly to the cisco router (Cisco 2610 IIRC). Could that have anything to do with this?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Is the Cisco set as basically a bridge so your *nix router is your only router? Or is the Cisco also doing NAT?

 

[RavenD]

Is the Cisco set as basically a bridge so your *nix router is your only router? Or is the Cisco also doing NAT?

I'm pretty sure its just set as a bridge, because the cisco belongs to the ISP, and I have no access to its configuration, but my router is successfully doing 1:1 NAT mapping 4 public IP's to private IP's on the LAN.

 

[Grentz]

I would contact you ISP and have them look into it.

One advantage of having T1 usually is having much better support from the ISP.