Mr Saffron, the question you asked there (kinda thinking to yourself) does indeed throw up some weird, and probably impossible, interactions. But myself, I was only summising. I'm not an expert in the upper-level workings of ADSL and so that's precisely why I've posted this and have been hoping that you'll all coax me along without yourselves using too much jargon or assuming that I have the same level of expertise as yourselves.

I might point out that the Netgear router (router-modem) is one that I've been using for several years and which, thus far, has given no problems, though I have noticed in recent months that when I go to a website from my browser's address field it sometimes fails and I have to tell it to do it again. Invariably, it gets the website on the second go. I don't, in any event, have another router to try in its place. It'd be a lengthy and costly exercise to buy a replacement, just in the hope that the router was the source of the problem.

So, XRay, you reckon it's due to an issue with my ISP's authentication server (whatever that is)? Unless you've since had a change of mind about that, or Mr Saffron vehemently disagrees, I'll get on to my ISP and put that to them and get them to investigate. There was a major outage of their e-mail server just over a week ago. We users were unable to use any e-mailing for varying numbers of days, though I myself was affected for only a few hours. Their backup e-mail server kicked in apparently but soon got overloaded and that too then crashed. When things were finally returned to normal after 2 or 3 days, the MD of Skymarket sent out an official letter of apology to everyone by e-mail. I had all of that in mind when my connection first started playing up this last Monday and I duly asked my ISP support people if that server and the service generally was definitely now okay. I was told yes. I lose browsing as well, of course, and to me (with my limited knowledge of such things) it didn't seem logical that a failed e-mail server could also affect that.

Afterthought: By 'authentication server', perhaps you're referring to the entity that checks my Internet logon details before allowing me access into the Internet? Hmm, why would my authentication details fail by me just resyncing the line? Until just this last week it's never done so before.

Edited by deleted (Sun 22-Apr-12 14:22:33)

In reply to a post by meditator:

Afterthought: By 'authentication server', perhaps you're referring to the entity that checks my Internet logon details before allowing me access into the Internet?

Exactly! They sometimes play up for all ISPs and by resyncing/rebooting you give them a kick up the backside

EDIT: MrSaffron won't disagree. He came to exactly same conclusion.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 22-Apr-12 14:45:16)

The only remaining oddity to this saga is the malfunctioning of the voice circuit on my line, ie. the uncontrollable ringing of my phone on Sunday evening and during the Monday. That coincided with my initial full loss of the Internet. The strange ringing appears to have now gone away, though, as over the last two or three days I've run a ringback test from time to time and it's rang fine every time.

In reply to a post by meditator:

... The only remaining oddity to this saga...

Glad to hear you are nearly all sorted - was it the 'transistors' in the end?







Sorry TBB

b4dger, Saffron and XRay,

I'm afraid the problem is far from resolved. I've been communicating with my ISP on this in a far more pressing way these last few days and they tell me that they can find nothing amiss in their domain (I use the term loosely).

Over the last few days they've been monitoring the authentication server and have been telling me that they've seen no evidence of any authentication failures with my account. This is odd because I know it's happened many times in that period. In fact, I find I can engineer the failure myself quite easily - by getting, via DMT, my router to negotiate a resync with the DSLAM. All access to the Internet disappears. After that, I'm able to restore access to the Internet by logging into my DG834 router and re-applying my Internet login. That re-application causes a momentary reset of some sort much further up the hierarchy, somewhere between the exchange and the wider Internet. During all of the non-access I can see, via DMT and other things, that the line is synchronised and working normally in that regard.

Skymarket's latest reply to me this morning was seemingly addressing the point I made to them about my raw IP addresses failing as well as the normal URL. They say: It is quite normal for the hosting IP address of a website to fail to display anything, as the hosting server is rarely set up to display a page when someone browses to its IP address. The majority of web servers host multiple sites and they therefore leave the "raw IP address" without a binding. This doesn't make much sense to me - but it might to you!

They also say: To date, we have still not seen any authentication issues for your user account on our Radius server.

Note that they had a major e-mail server failure a few days before my problems began, and in the end they had to completely replace that server. As far as my problem goes, was that just coincidence or what?

Incidentally, using my backup arrangement, I restored my PC back to the status it had on 15th April, just before these problems first began. I've recalled also that when the symptoms first started appearing on that day outward-going e-mails from me were getting badly corrupted - in some instances, attachments were getting stripped off before they reached the recipient, in others the body text arrived at the recipient completely garbled - and then every such corrupted e-mail was later returned to me - but up to nine copies of it! Meanwhile, my Sent box showed the original message and the attachment quite perfectly. Since that day there have been no further occurrences of e-mail corruptions.

In reply to a post by meditator:

It is quite normal for the hosting IP address of a website to fail to display anything, as the hosting server is rarely set up to display a page when someone browses to its IP address. The majority of web servers host multiple sites and they therefore leave the "raw IP address" without a binding.

I don't know. That may be so in some cases but these 2 particular URLs lead to the same webpage:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk
• http://212.58.246.91 (found by pinging www.bbc.co.uk)

The former needs assistance of the DNS the latter doesn't.

You can re-create the problem using DMT, but does the problem show up if you reboot the router, e.g. turn if off and on.

If not, then whats happening is you've found a way to rebuild the ADSL layer connection, without triggering the PPP to rebuild. Resulting in a stall session, rather than an authentication failure.

The multiple sites on one IP can be the case, hence why you test this when the connection is working fine, to know which hosts to use.

Saffron,

Right, I've just run that quick test. I powered off the router, gave it a minute or so, and then powered it back on again. 'PPP' came back, then some seconds later 'Internet'.

When I then went into DMT, DMT wasn't 'connected' and so to sync the line and get a plot I had to specifically use DMT's Connect button. This resync'd the line but (as to be expected) at a speed about twice that of which it's actually capable, in stability terms. I then used the Target SNR facility to bring the speed down. The DSLAM appeared to negotiate okay on this occasion and, once more, the line's now running okay.

I'm still getting strange things happening, though, especially with the e-mailing side of things. A few minutes ago I sent yet another test e-mail to myself, one including a small attachment. When a few minutes later I read it back off the server, the name of the attachment had become appended to the subject line. Also, the subject line now said '1/7', indicating that this was likely to be the first of seven identical copies coming back to me in due course. This was happening about a week ago, when indeed I did subsequently receive multiple copies back.

I can't see that anything I can be doing or any possible fault in my router could cause such corruptions of my e-mails other than something much further up the ADSL chain, most likely the Skymarket e-mail server. And whatever it is also affects access by browser. Do you agree?

DMT does things at a lower level, so no surprise it behaves oddly sometimes.

On the email - no idea on how good or bad SkyMarkets email service is.

In reply to a post by meditator:

Skymarket

That's the first time I think you've been prepared to name your ISP! Not a company I've heard of - just looked at their website - WOW not sure I like their pricing/allowances!

In case you missed it they posted details about their email outage here: http://dmtrk.net/964-RNJB-32/sv.aspx