grahamlthompson - 12 hours ago »
Results with VPN
Thanks Graham, it's useful to see a trace via Virgin Media (VM). Each hop is a network device the route goes through, not all devices respond to the ping so timeout which isn't helpful for diagnosis. The VM route stays within VM.net for a while, no idea what it's doing on hops 4,5,6,7. I wasn't sure if VM use a proxy which might have explained some of the problems with VM.
If you look at the VPN route the trace gets there in 9 hops, similar to my route via plusnet.
If you look at #29 Wotu2's trace using the smart dns that fails, hops 6,7,8 really struggle so no wonder that it does not work. The smart dns that does work, albeit with pauses, has 3 hops that timeout, but these devices are likely to be configured to ignore pings, which again is unhelpful as we lose some diagnostic stats.
I won't get to test my hb1000s until the weekend, however I've tried without success to break All4/4OD on the fvp4000t which I assume runs similar code.
I can't use VM or Sky's DNS without being part of their network unfortunately. I've tried BT, google, openDNS amongst others and a smart DNS and couldn't break All4/4OD, all had 9 hops
I did come across a really useful DNS tool, namebench:
https://namebench.en.softonic.com/
it took 20mins or so first time to run, but quicker thereafter. I've not used it before and it times generic name lookup's across different DNS providers. My plusnet DNS has an average name lookup time of 80ms and a maximum of 3 seconds. OpenDNS similar average of 80ms but nothing longer than 1.2 seconds so quite a bit quicker. You might want to give it a try, I found it interesting.
I noticed that the adverts won't work without DNS and each advert a new lookup so anything that speeds up lookups can only help.
You didn't mention if there was any difference in service between VPN and non-VPN. In theory VPN should have been slower and more problematic, but we can't see what's happening with hops 4,5,6,7 on non-VPN. If you get chance, next time you have problems with All4/4OD, could you check what happens when using VPN? as your VPN by-passes the VM timeouts. It's not important so backburner stuff, but it'd be good if we could get a bit closer to seeing where it breaks.
| Thu 23 Feb 2017 23:54:55
#40 |