Did they do it?

[Niall]

My connection was utter pants at 7am this morning. The only two webpages I could load were the facebook and natwest login pages, but couldnt actual get beyond them. I had to reboot the router 4 times before I could see the rest of the web.

I haven't got time to check status pages as I'm about to run out of time on my break in work!

[Rik]

One of the new routers fell over, Niall.

[cavillas]

It seems my router went down this morning, sometime.  Perhaps BT have actually done the work but for the 9th-10th instead of 8th-9th.  I now seem to have a far quicker repsponse and connection.  Sorry if I've pinched everyone elses connections.

[Technical Ben]

One of the new routers fell over, Niall.

Who walked into it then?! 

[Rik]

Simon shouldn't keep them next to his bed, we keep telling him.

[Bill]

There's some odd routing going on somewhere... before the weekend problems my BQM trace showed essentially a nice constant ping time. Then it started varying quite a lot, as though I was on a more congested route somewhere. Then on Wednesday (when IDNet were "tweaking" the routers) it abruptly got a lot better, and after this morning's outage it looks as though it might be back to where it was before.

Most odd, but as it's getting better each time I'm not complaining

[esh]

Yep, it was messed up for a little while here this morning too, 7:20 to 7:55 according to the server.
If anyone could enlighten me, would I expect my ADSL speed to decrease regarding these drops? I've had quite a few this week now which is pretty unusual for me I have to say so I really don't have a clue. My connection sync speed hasn't dropped but I am guessing this is like ethernet, it just agrees the protocol at 8128kbps but doesn't mean you'll actually get it.

[Rik]

It shouldn't have affected your speed, sync should not have gone down.

[esh]

No MSN connection and also Windows Update can't connect to get updates on systems... Microsoft or routing?

[aurichie]

I'm having connection problems hitting sites and servers in the US. Same thing happened earlier this morning between 07:30 and 08:30. The same sites and servers work on my Zen connection from the same exchange.

[esh]

Thanks, aurichie.

[Rik]

Simon's working on the router now.

[esh]

Yeah, stuff is coming back. Cheers, Rik.

It's not a Netgear is it? 

[Rik]

No, it's a Belkin. 

[esh]

Oh that's easy then. Just shake it until it starts working again. I remember using some old Belkin wireless thing in America but it would only work properly if someone stood beside it. We considered drawing straws each day...

[Rik]

In charcoal or pencil? 

[pctech]

Out of pure geek interest, what routers are they using?

[Rik]

Cisco afaik, Mitch.

[klipp]

No, it's a Belkin. 

* shudders at the mere mention of Belkin *

[esh]

I guess Cisco are the safe bet. I don't know who else make routers/switches at that kind of level. HP maybe? I think our institution uses 'extreme networks', but I have no experience with any of these.. mostly because the products are an ungodly price.

[Rik]

* shudders at the mere mention of Belkin *

You are not alone.

[pctech]

HP specialise in switches but now own 3Com who make routers.

Cisco are supposed to be the gold standard but I think they have been pipped in terms of processing speed by Force10, Extreme and Juniper.

Where I work they have just swapped Foundry Networks (now owned by Brocade) for a couple of large Cisco 6509 routers and HP Procurve switches to serve the endpoints.

[Rik]

I'm now totally lost, of course.

[pctech]

Its getting a bit like the AMD vs Intel debate used to be but this time its how many millions of packets can a router process a second.

It has of course been driven by the bankers and science community.

[Rik]

You did say bankers, didn't you?