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What to do when part of the net's broken?


Llama8

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I was trying to play Sacred 2 last night for the first time in a few weeks & it refused to connect to the Closed lobby (though it would connect to the Open lobby just fine, which is odd). After a while of checking my system (Sacred 2, router, etc) I tried a tracert & it keeps on falling over at hop 16 from core1.dts-online.net [212.62.68.250].

 

Anyone know what (if anything) can be done about it? Or am I doomed to languish in non-Sacred-ness until someone pulls their finger out & fixes their server/router?

 

If someone tells me how to copy & paste from the dos prompt I'll post the whole thing...

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You could take a screen shot and post that maybe...

 

I wonder if I have any difficulty getting online...might try that.

 

Edit: No troubles for me...I cant think of anything to suggest...any way to reroute your net traffic?

Edited by Dragon Brother
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Ok, here's the pic of the traceroute falling over:

Traceroute.jpg

 

As you can see it passes through Telehouse (#14) & LINX (#15) which are some of the major links into/out of the UK & then there are a few .de addresses (16-18), so it seems to be an issue with #19 core1.dts-online.net. I was getting the same from home, except for some slightly different addresses inbetween my router & #10/11, after that it's the same.

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My traceroute ends at same place.

 

A

host 84.201.80.43

 

results in

 

Host 43.80.201.84.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

 

There is no nameserver-entry for it anymore? Did they forget to pay/longen the annual fee, as it was with the forum site?

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Shouldn't the net work around stuff like this? Route traffic around a node/whatever that's not responding/working properly?

 

And if not, does it mean that we're not going to be able to connect to Closed until they pay up or :)

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Llama, this once happened to us. A company that our provider was routing through was having a jam somewhere in the States. I think Schot did a traceroute ...a lot of them, and send a complete documented package to our isp provider so that they could "negotiate" with the larger company and put some pressure on... eventually the bottleneck lessened.

 

:cry:

 

gogo

 

p.s. I'll have him come take a look at this topic

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6800 yes, 6801 no (why, what's that used for?).

 

Edit: Mind you, it seems to be back to normal now. Thanks everyone for their help. :) Assuming it stays fixed (if not I'll be back :nooo:).

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It's kinda intermitently broken now. Firstly I'm getting massive lag spikes randomly in-game (normally my in-game ping is ~150-350, but it can go anywhere up to ~8 seconds). Secondly, it seems that during mid/late evening (~8-10pm, when I normally play) I can connect once & that's it. If I leave the server I don't appear to be able to rejoin the lobby, or it may just be that takes several minutes (anything up to 20 mins?) to reconnect, rather than the more normal second or two. Things seem better in the early evening (say, 6-8pm) & in the morning.

 

I've got ports 7010-7011 (TCP & UDP) open, as well as 6800. I don't have a software firewall & moving my PC to the router's DMZ doesn't seem to have done anything, I'm running Avira antivirus.

 

Traceroute seems to be back to falling over at the same place again, despite the route being different this morning.

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I feel your pain Llama. I went through hoops when we were having a similar problem. Eventually I found the source of the problem located in New York. A datacenter of some kind I think it was. We also had intermitent functionality and only in regards to specific sites. Not the internet as a whole. Here's a piece of what we went through. Maybe it can help:

 

All seems well in the world again for me.

 

I had a lot of fun with this puzzle. I ended up first talking to my ISP here in Montreal who told me it wasn't something on their end. Then I talked to the big O'l networking corp called Savvis in New York and after several tests they "Nope. Not us." as well.

 

Well I finally got to the host Liquidweb a week or so ago and interestingly enough the tech tried to create a connection to me and his connection locked up and completely froze. Hehe, oops! He tried several times and he wasn't able to complete a trace or ping to my area so he kindly asked me for my tracerts which I emailed to their tech dept. A few days later and it's been smoooooth sailing since.

 

I can't remember exactly what Savvis said but they mentioned something about the possibility that Liquidweb may not have had their routes configured correctly for people in my IP range. We were all basically being sent through the wrong gate or some such thing. Dang I wish I could remember what he called that now...

 

Anyway! Great to be smooth sailing again.

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I phoned the lovely people in India *cough*, explained the situation (that it's fine in the morning/afternoon & only started happening from last Wednesday-ish) & they're sending an engineer round (on Wednesday) in the "evening slot" - 1pm - 6pm... When does the fault appear? Well after 6pm...

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I feel your pain Llama. I went through hoops when we were having a similar problem. Eventually I found the source of the problem located in New York. A datacenter of some kind I think it was. We also had intermitent functionality and only in regards to specific sites. Not the internet as a whole. Here's a piece of what we went through. Maybe it can help:

 

All seems well in the world again for me.

 

I had a lot of fun with this puzzle. I ended up first talking to my ISP here in Montreal who told me it wasn't something on their end. Then I talked to the big O'l networking corp called Savvis in New York and after several tests they "Nope. Not us." as well.

 

Well I finally got to the host Liquidweb a week or so ago and interestingly enough the tech tried to create a connection to me and his connection locked up and completely froze. Hehe, oops! He tried several times and he wasn't able to complete a trace or ping to my area so he kindly asked me for my tracerts which I emailed to their tech dept. A few days later and it's been smoooooth sailing since.

 

I can't remember exactly what Savvis said but they mentioned something about the possibility that Liquidweb may not have had their routes configured correctly for people in my IP range. We were all basically being sent through the wrong gate or some such thing. Dang I wish I could remember what he called that now...

 

Anyway! Great to be smooth sailing again.

 

 

Didn't know you actually got asked by a liquid host rep to send info to help them with. It's cool, but I hope you got some kind of recognition with it or an official nod of respect.

 

Twould be awesome if the best ( and most expensive! :)) hoster on the net would offer us a a few month of free hosting if we went to them for hosting?

 

:P

 

gogo

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An engineer came round yesterday afternoon & (as expected) couldn't see any problems on my end or with my BB connection, though he did give me a replacement router/modem. He did ask me to take some notes of the bandwidth during the affected hours, but when I did that, the bandwidth is fairly stable (~6meg or so) from early morning to ~9pm, despite there being a massive delay between hitting the "ClosedNet" button & actually connecting to the lobby server at that time (I gave up after ~30 mins).

 

So, is BT blocking/throttling port 6800 (the one the lobby uses)? I've googled a bit & found some interesting things you can do with windows (running "netstat -ano" from a command prompt shows what software is using what ports), but I can't yet see the equivalent of a ping to a specific server on a specific port (ie, eu.sacred2.net for port 6800). Does anyone have any ideas? I've found this, but it seems a bit hardcore (& TBH, I'm not sure it'll actually do what I need, ie, show me whether packets are getting through, how long they're taking etc)...

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Gosh Llama, I feel your pain :D

 

You have to realise though....this is not a fault on the sacred servers........it is something major wrong with either your ISP or your pc.

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it is something major wrong with either your ISP or your pc.

Yup, I'm "dealing" with BT as we speak (albeit very slowly)...

 

Edit: Does anyone know of any software that will allow me to measure the bandwidth/throughput/travel time/etc of packets from a specific port to a specific port on another network? Ping gives the travel time, but doesn't allow specified ports. Iperf allows you to specify the port you connect to, but not the port you connect from. Wireshark doesn't send packets, though I think it does record traffic by port. Pathping is the same as ping in that it doesn't "do" ports & neither does tracert (and ping/pathping/tracert traffic may well be blocked where normal traffic isn't).

 

So, does anyone have any ideas (or is friendly with their comapny's network admin)?

 

Alternatively, someone suggested this which pings a destination server/port, but it doesn't allow you to specify what port it send the packet from. Would anyone be able to modify the source code to do that?

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've finally had some positive movement on this, it appears that when our bit of BT's network was moved over to 21CN the Sacred 2 traffic was classed as encrypted bit torrent traffic (note to self, that won't work anymore. Not that I ever dl'd anything *whistles innocently*) & therefore was being throttled/de-prioritised (the old 20CN network wasn't intelligent enough to do that), so the bloke I spoke to has/will put the wheels in motion to get the traffic for Sacred 2 correctly classified... Though that may take a few weeks to work its way through BT's bureacuracy...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Interesting, I am having this problem myself. tracert stops at core1.dts-online.net.

 

I have just moved house, but I'm still using the same ISP.

 

Annoying.

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