strange isp problem

goodrob

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 10, 2001
Messages
317
This is more for my curiosity to get people's opinions on what might have been going on.

So I was having this problem with my ISP over the last 4 or 5 days where I could not VPN to work at all. Thankfully I was technically on vacation and didn't really have to work. From a packet capture on my laptop I could see syn packets leave it but no acks back. When I called my ISP they said well maybe its the line and wanted to send a tech out. The next day still could not connect to VPN and then my gaming (mainly World of Warcraft) started to disconnect repeatedly. I called the ISP back and they said yeah they were having strange issues being reported to them but only people on one /16 subnet. I checked and yeah i was within that range. I asked what strange problems people were reporting and they were told VPNs, streaming and gaming. I checked all my streaming services they all came up just fine no issues. Checked my other gaming systems (Ps4, Switch, etc) they could all access things no problem, but then i found like 1 or two websites that didn't work, and Steam would also go up and down constantly like WoW was doing. The second or third day this was going on suddenly my Amazon streaming wouldn't work but netflix and disney + still good to go. Well yesterday I got up and tested things and everything is back to working again.

I know I will never get an answer from the ISP on what really happened because all you can talk to is the Tier 1 people. I did ask if they had a engineer or someone technical i could speak with and provide what I was seeing on the captures. Was told no i cant speak to them. Although when I told the person to pass on to them about seeing just syn packets for VPN at least, she did and got an immediate response back from support to send my info on to leadership. nothing ever came of that as far as I know.

Any one have any guesses as to what might have been going on? I can't seem to think of anything that would affect just one subnet minus an ACL or something similar but also for it to be random people within the same subnet just confuses me. I do have a coworker that lives a couple miles down the road and he had the same vpn issue and he could not get his apple streaming stuff to work, others were fine for him.
 
Pretty much just a routing issue on their end. You'll never get real the answer as to what was going on specifically as I've dealt with things like this before with multiple ISPs. Be happy that it's fixed! I've had issues like this drag on for years before resolution. :mad:
 
Pretty much just a routing issue on their end. You'll never get real the answer as to what was going on specifically as I've dealt with things like this before with multiple ISPs. Be happy that it's fixed! I've had issues like this drag on for years before resolution. :mad:
I was thinking routing as well, but only from some IPs going to other IPs? I may need to see if they will hire me part time just to look at their network setup. I am very curios into what was going on. The only other thing I can think of might be some horrible QoS was implemented. but then you would think it would affect way more than just one subnet.
 
I was thinking routing as well, but only from some IPs going to other IPs? I may need to see if they will hire me part time just to look at their network setup. I am very curios into what was going on. The only other thing I can think of might be some horrible QoS was implemented. but then you would think it would affect way more than just one subnet.
Yep, that's pretty much what routers do--route from IPs to other IPs. I've just a few times in the last few decades got to people at the noc (network operations center) and they are super-super sharp people, but they are basically isolated and being told what to fix and when, so they in effect are just worker bees. Most isps seem like they would be horrible places to work, especially since every few years they change their name/get bought out/whatever and you're starting from scratch on a new set of problems. But whatever makes money--it seems that is the only thing that matters anymore. :(
 
Had an issue with FIOS a few months back. Google failed to load 1/4 times I opened it. Twitch streams kept dying. Could not even ping Amazon or Google. Some sites like [H] were completely fine. After running a bunch of MTRs I noticed that there was a point where either my traffic took a good hop and everything was fine, or it went another way and I had massive packet loss. Luckily in my case a VPN fixed everything, including the ability to ping everything.

Knowing calling Verizon would get me no where I hopped on DSLreports to the FIOS support forums and wrote up a post explaining my findings. Eventually they made me do a web chat and shockingly they guy who I talked to said "I cant see anything wrong on your end, I'll send a ticket to the network engineers". I was shocked. He said that normally the engineers get to tickets within 24 hours but some hours later Verizon acknowledged they had an issue. They obviously fixed it before getting to my ticket so by the time they got to me it was just marked as resolved. It took them about a day and a half to acknowledge the issue which was kind of surprising to me but hey it's the only hiccup I've had. I really cant complain.
 
major ISPs also reroute certain traffic through packet scrubbers for DDoS protection from time to time.

this could have resulted in the problem.
 
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