Is the 'status' line always right?

No connection to Yahoo! this pm. So I wait 3 hours, still nothing. Router stats tell me that the connection to my ISP has failed, can't ping bt.yahoo etc. Icons etc.tell me that everything is connected after the router, and when I go into the voyager.home setup, the connection page keeps refreshing instead of connecting. Now all of this suggests to me that there's something wrong at BT's end (all line stats/passwords/logon normal). Nothing on the status line. I wait another 20 minutes, then suddenly get my connection back. To me, this says that the status line only reports major and probably long-lasting faults, and that the majority go unmentioned.

No problems here today (in Berkshire). But you do occasionally get a fault in one of the bt network servers which can cause these kind of problems. Best thing is to do a tracert from a dos window on one or two IP addresses which will show a timeout somewhere a few nodes down the line - if it passes through your router and times out later this normally indicates a network fault outside your control.

And to answer your question, don't expect those sort of problems ever to show on the Status pages. It seems to have to be a pretty major fault before that happens, and even then it normally is only announced after the fault is cleared. There have been endless discussions on this on news.btinternet.com
Dave

Doing a tracert might help identify a network problem, however it is common for routers and switches and other network devices to drop ICMP packets in order to prioritise legitimate traffic. BT certainly do this on some parts of their network kit. And if there is no sync with the exchange you won't be able to traceroute

Always worth checking the BT Major Service Outages on the PlusNet website
http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php

If you are located somewhere in the south of Englan, the following may have been the cause of your problems
http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php

Things like this are normally indicated as a "network problem" on the BT Yahoo! status page
http://help.btinternet.com/yahoo/help/servicestatus
Not today though! This is very typical

Nicola

Edited by nredwood (Thu 29-Jun-06 00:20:19)

Very informative reply - many thanks. Please remind me how to do a tracert.

To do a tracert open a Dos window (or start/run) and type eg

tracert 193.69.116.19
or
tracert www.opera.com

You can try with any IP address or domain name.

The first few lines are your own computer/router then the initial bt hops. You should then get some more bt network nodes than those further out to the destination.

If you don't have a path to your DNS server you can only use the IP address version.

Was getting a few timeouts just now doing this, but the broadband is basically working fine here today.

Dave