On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 7:13 PM, TE Dukes tdukes@palmettoshopper.com wrote:
Lately I have been getting slow and partial page loads, server not found, server timed out, etc.. Get knocked off ssh when accessing my home server from work, etc. Its not the work connection because I don't have problems accessing other sites, just here at home and my home server.
Is there any kind of utility to check for failing hardware?
I have the exact same problems from time to time via Comcast. Mine comes and goes, and lately it hasn't been too bad. But when it comes, it's down for very small amounts of time, maybe 30-90 seconds, which is just long enough to be annoying, and make the service unusable.
When it was really bad (intermittent dropouts as described above, almost every night during prime time, usually for several hours at a time) I wrote a program to do constant pings to several servers at once. If you're interested, I'll see if I can find that script. But, conceptually, it ran concurrent pings to several sites, and kept some stats on drops longer than some threshold. Some tips on a program like this: use IP addresses, rather than hostnames, because ultimately using a hostname implicitly does a DNS lookup, which likely requires Internet service to work. I also did several servers at once, so I could prove it wasn't just the one site I was pinging. Included in the list of servers was also the nexthop device beyond my house (presumably Comcast's own router). Use traceroute to figure out network paths.
After running this for a while---before I called them with the evidence---the problem magically cleared up, and since then it's been infrequent enough that I haven't felt the need to fire up the script again. When it comes to residential Internet, I am quite cynical towards monopoly ISPs like Comcast... so maybe they saw the constant pings and knew I was building a solid case and fixed the problem. Or maybe enough people in my area complained of similar problems and they actually felt uncharacteristically caring for a second.
I haven't been there in a while, but in the past, I've gotten a lot of utility out of the DSLReports Forums[1]. There are private forums that will put you in direct contact with technical people at your ISP. It can sometimes be a good way to side-step the general customer service hotline and get in touch with an actual engineer rather than a script reader. Maybe not, but worst-case you're only out some time. Also, you might post this same question to one of the public forums over there, as there seems to be lots of knowledgeable/helpful people hanging out there. (Despite the name, it's not only about DSL, but consumer ISPs in general.)
[1] http://www.dslreports.com/forums/all
Good luck, let us know if you come up with any decent resolution!