RoadRunner outages

[Jason Clinton]

On Thursday 26 May 2005 09:15, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> Anybody else seeing outages on RoadRunner in the early morning hours?  I've
> noticed it for several weeks - being six hours ahead in England, 2:00 -
> 5:00 AM here is 8:00 - 11:00 there, prime time to connect.

I have noticed it too. I was having connectivity issues 5-6 times / day where 
the connection would drop offline for about 2 - 3 minutes and then suddenly 
return -- on rare occasions, for an hour or two. It turns out that the copper 
braided shielding on the coax line leading to my house had a burr in it. More 
on that in a minute. I collected some ping logs and used gnuplot to make a 
PNG that someone at RR would be able to easily interpret. The short version 
is that, after 3 techs on-site and several phone techs whom all but called me 
a liar, they finally fixed that but this problem you describe still exists. 
I'm thinking of starting the customer service cycle over again for this 
problem but am dreading the amount of effort it might take to convince them.

The trouble is that it's not consistent. I've noticed it as early as 3:30 AM 
and as late as 4:35 AM. And it's not on every night.

Anyways, I'm going to start making ping logs again. ("ping <next node in 
network > pinglog.log") The trick this time is going to be to ping the next 
hop in the RR network and something guaranteed to be outside their network 
simultaneously so that I can show without a doubt that it's a node in the RR 
network to blame.

I'll post the gnuplot script here when I write it.

On that burr problem... it's really interesting to me that this was happening:

 (ASCII diagram follows)

+-------+ <------- outer black plastic
|+-----+| <----- copper braided shielding
||+---+|| <--- white plastic shielding
||| * ||| <- copper data core
||+---+||
|+-----+|
+-------+

So, the troubled line was installed after the last ice storm in near-dark 
conditions very quickly by a RR sub-contractor as they were trying to restore 
service as fast as possible. What happened is that a piece of the outer 
copper shielding was frayed off and became wrapped around the inner copper 
data core. So, the exterior shielding was acting as an antenna and the 
signals it picked up were carried on to the data core. Unfortunately for me, 
some EM interference source from one of my neighbors was close enough to the 
RETURN data frequencies used by RR to interrupt my service for however long 
it may be. I'm guessing that it was a cell phone due to the nature of 
interruptions. The weirdest part of all of this was being able to use 
Ethereal to see ARP and TCP traffic _inbound_ but being completely unable to 
send anything out.

Anyways, I found it interesting.

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