A simple matter of…

Well I’ve been pretty busy at work recently and therefore not felt up to blogging much – I’ve not had much life to blog about!

Today I’ve swapped my netgear 834 ADSL router into “dumb modem” mode. This means that my linux firewall uses PPPoE to talk to my ISP and authenticate (the netgear just chucks this traffic over ADSL). Hopefully this will help fix a problem where occasionally (heavy traffic related AFAICT) TCP connections fail (though ping’s work).

Eclipse support are too lazy/daft to bother reading emails – when I poked them to see if they had any ideas they basically replied saying “try pinging google”. When my original email said “pings work, TCP doesn’t”. My support request:

I've been experiencing dreadful ADSL for the quite some time now.

One particular thing I've seen is that pings work but TCP connections don't work.

For example, I can ping www.google.com but if I try and surf to it I can just see SYN packets going out repeatedly with no response what so ever.
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Their reply:

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To help try and identify the cause we would ask you to carry out ping and traceroute tests.
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(Blimey – just written my first bit of CSS to reduce the gap between lines in pre-formatted sections of this blog)