Any VirginMedia users?

[trm]

Hi. I've been having increasing problems for 2 days now and am hoping there are other VM broadband users who can have a look at their cable modem stats so I can get an idea of VM are bullsh*tting me or not.

This is the Downstream Status page from my CM:

Downstream Receive Power Level : 0.7 dBmV

Downstream SNR : 37.2 dB

Upstream:

Upstream transmit Power Level : 43.7 dBmV

If anybody has a Virgin non-SuperHub CM (mine is a small black box made by Ambit) would they mind going to http://192.168.100.1/CmNavigation.asp, login root/root and checking the status options I've listed above please? I want to get an idea of other working values for the signal strengths to see if mine are low.

Much appreciated Sorry if this is posted 30 times but I keep having to F5 or resubmit to get anywhere.

 

[subcon959]

Downstream power level is 4.23 dBmV, the others are about the same.

 

[trm]

Cheers dude. Magically everything is working fine today (no changes on my end, no reboots) so based on that and the packet sniffs (I was getting out of order ACKs and loads of missed packets based on the sequence numbering) I'm sure the fault was inside VMs network.

Thanks for the data. Might look into why my power level is so low but I suspect I can't do much about that and if I ask VM to turn up the gain they'll probably just break sh*t again.

 

[subcon959]

Aye, I've learned not to even breathe on their stuff when it's working otherwise it all goes tits up.

 

[saleem]

yes,virgin are a bit bad for outages,i have had loads of probs and even gone 6 weeks without internet due to some cockup they had.just gotta grit your teeth and hold out most of the time.

they had to come here and lower some of my signals as everything was wrong so nigh on each day at certain times or around them i had outage,then it would come back and then go off.thats what happens when you have bad signals,the technician finaly went out to the caddy and adjusted it there and even shoved a FORWARD PATH ALTERNATOR in the modem plug to connect the line to.

 

[dannyboy]

Tim, when I was on VM broadband they used to occasionally suffer from intermittent DNS timeouts - it was only once every few months and would usually clear itself overnight. Sounds like what you're experiencing.

If/when it happens again you can always try setting one of the DNS servers on your router (or Windows NIC) to use something other than VM's DNS (e.g. Google's 8.8.8.8)

cheers

 

[trm]

Hi danny,

I should have mentioned I run my own pair of DNS servers as the VM ones are so crappy! The problem is definitely a routing issue inside of Vermin as I can traceroute from two hosts - one inside VM's network and one that uses VM to provide transit and the internal client loses routing at one of their border routers and the non-VM client gets through fine.

It's pretty much as if they've got a bad BGP table which has f**ked entries for some of VM's ASes

It's down again today after being fine yesterday and it's the exact same routers which are null-routing me. I'm having to post this from a box I own outside of VMs network and can luckily get to as the path here only has a couple of hops on VMs net and is then routed via somebody else's transit pipe.

Thanks for the input though - and it's a very valid point. I think their DNS runs on a Nokia 3310

tim

 

[Stone]

You could ask dsyde *snigger*

For reference, Google run a very good pair of DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Assigning them easy-to-remember IP addresses was a master stroke, they're great for debugging your connection in a pinch.

Usual caveats about Google being evil and using all your traffic to improve their searches applies...

Stone