Need help with tracert results

[computerpro3]

I am at the University of Cincinnati and the campus internet is simply unusable now. It's gotten a lot worse in the last month to the point where google won't work half the time. It's a clusterfuck of the first order; IT has acknowledged the problem but they don't know how to fix it.

What's bizzare is that right now I'm getting 30mb/s on braodbandspeedtest.net which is blazing fast; however the internet is CRAWLING. Download speeds are under 10k/s and in counterstrike source I get 1500ms+ ping.

Now admittedly I'm not an expert on networking, but since our IT department isn't either I figured that I might as well poke around and see if there's something obvious sticking out.

The first thing that I noticed is that I can't ping any external websites. They all just time out. I can, however, ping internal network addresses that I found on tracert. I figure this must be due to some kind of restrictions they have in place.

I then ran a tracert, thinking that there may be one hop with extraordinarily high latency. Here's the result of a tracert to google. No matter what external IP I put in the same result is given.

Tracing route to 216.239.51.99 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms GWA-MCMH-Wireless.mcmh.uc.edu [10.130.254.2]
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms CoreSanders-to-CCMDistA.manage.uc.edu [10.29.4.1
]
3 2 ms 19 ms 19 ms CoreSvcsHPBL3-to-CoreSanders.manage.uc.edu [10.2
9.6.3]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.


It always craps out at hop four. What does this mean? Any clue what the problem could be?

Thanks for looking, any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[PanzerBoxb]

It seems they are blocking ICMP outbound at the perimeter.

 

[shade_star]

Can you ping external websites by IP address?
Try pinging 216.109.112.135 (its yahoo.com)
Does it also timeout?
Your traceroute on hop 4 would probably be the school's ISP. There are many possible issues but my guess its something with the link from the school to the ISP.
Some schools run weird logging/monitoring software..Or a router/routing issue with the schools hardware or hardware setup or blocking ping
Where was your tracert to?

 

[computerpro3]

Can you ping external websites by IP address?
Try pinging 216.109.112.135 (its yahoo.com)
Does it also timeout?
Your traceroute on hop 4 would probably be the school's ISP. There are many possible issues but my guess its something with the link from the school to the ISP.
Some schools run weird logging/monitoring software..Or a router/routing issue with the schools hardware or hardware setup or blocking ping
Where was your tracert to?

Pinging external websites by IP also times out. Ironically, on this same page there is another kid from the University of Cincinnati in the warcraft thread that posted an identical tracert.

Is there anything else I can do to track down the problem? If I call IT what should I tell them? They have no clue what is going on.

 

[shade_star]

Call your IT dept and see if they block ping requests. If they do (which is highly likely) then your tracert will time out and you cant test that way.
With a large school there are so many variables its hard to say. But there should be a direcotr/manager of IT who should be contacted. If he has no clue then someone with authority needs to get a good consultant (or someone who built the network) in asap to look at it.
Most likely someone made a change on the managment/firewall end that handles internet traffic

 

[computerpro3]

I called them and they are saying that they are now having DNS issues and that people can barely connect off-campus. There is no estimated uptime. Just frigging great.

 

[shade_star]

Typical. They hire interns to run the network for cheap labor and this is the result.
Very common

 

[archivalbackup]

I called them and they are saying that they are now having DNS issues and that people can barely connect off-campus. There is no estimated uptime. Just frigging great.

That's an easy one, use your own dns servers. I'd suggest 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222 (open DNS).

 

[computerpro3]

That's an easy one, use your own dns servers. I'd suggest 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222 (open DNS).

Thank you so much. That fixed my general intenet crappiness, but I'm still getting 1500ms lag in source. I think that's just because of how screwed up our network is though. At least I can browse with my sanity now.

 

[archivalbackup]

Thank you so much. That fixed my general intenet crappiness, but I'm still getting 1500ms lag in source. I think that's just because of how screwed up our network is though. At least I can browse with my sanity now.

No problem!

Your gaming traffic may be getting traffic shaped / QoS'd which is why your ping time is so high. If that is the case you would probably have a hard time convincing them it is 'school related' ;-). Hopefully they just have a bad router or net storm that they can fix / replace.