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Keep a log of internet service issues?

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    #11
    Originally posted by d000hg View Post
    When it starts complaining I generally see everything else go wrong... VPN connection to my client, etc... and it's typically a precursor to the connection dropping entirely. So it's not perfect but seems to be good enough in practice. Good point though.
    Do you have a telephone sharing the same line? If so, do a quiet line test (see below). Quite often when our's was playing up, the line was noisy.

    See Line testing:
    https://www.clouddirect.net/knowledg...-phone-testing

    ps. rather than testing it at the master socket, try it first in the socket the router is plugged into.
    Last edited by DealorNoDeal; 10 June 2022, 15:23.
    Scoots still says that Apr 2020 didn't mark the start of a new stock bull market.

    Comment


      #12
      Yeah it's on the list of things to do. We got PlusNet to send a replacement router (2.0 apparently whatever that means) to try and rule out something obvious too, or at least make life easier dealing with support that we're not doing anything unusual.
      Originally posted by MaryPoppins
      I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
      Originally posted by vetran
      Urine is quite nourishing

      Comment


        #13
        You mentioned that you've seen the speed throttled back. The cards in the cabinet do this to minimise packet loss, and invariably it's caused by poor line quality (hissing, crackling) so it's definitely worth doing a quiet line test when it's running slowly. When we had a really bad line, it would sometimes throttle it back to old fashioned modem speed.

        On one occasion, Openreach did find the card we were connected to was faulty, so that could be a possibility.

        We used to get at least one line fault a year, and it sometimes took up to 2 weeks to fix it, which is why we ended up giving up on the landline and switching to mobile.
        Scoots still says that Apr 2020 didn't mark the start of a new stock bull market.

        Comment


          #14
          PS. when we had the landline broadband, I occasionally used to run this script to keep a log of the ping times

          Save this in test.bat

          Code:
          @echo off
          
          :loop
          echo ======== %TIME%
          ping -n 1 www.google.co.uk
          echo.
          timeout /t 600 /nobreak > NUL
          goto loop
          In a cmd window, run this

          test > test.txt
          Scoots still says that Apr 2020 didn't mark the start of a new stock bull market.

          Comment


            #15
            I remember we had a similar problem and so did some of our neighbours who use different ISPs and all of us had had engineers out who did lots of technical stuff but couldn't find the problem. We eventually got a tip top engineer who called the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency) and this engineer traced the problem right back to the source. One of our neighbours, an elderly lady, had a dodgy power supply for some piece of equipment and everytime she plugged it in, it sent faults through the various network and power lines back to the junction box causing these fluctuations. We got her to replace it and no problems since...
            Brexit is having a wee in the middle of the room at a house party because nobody is talking to you, and then complaining about the smell.

            Comment


              #16
              Originally posted by d000hg View Post
              Can any Powershell (for preference) experts give me any ideas how I could run a similar script, which would continue to stream to my command window but also write problematic entries to a log file?
              This might be redundant (now that other people have pointed out GUI tools), but here's a basic PowerShell script that would do what you want:

              Code:
              $target = "www.google.co.uk"
              $logfile = "C:\Temp\ping.txt"
              
              while ($true) {
                  $ping = Test-Connection -ComputerName $target -Count 1
                  Write-Output $ping
                  if ($ping.ResponseTime -gt 1000) {
                      Get-Date | Out-File -FilePath $logfile -Append
                      $ping | Out-File -FilePath $logfile -Append
                  }
              }
              Obviously you can change the values to suit your circumstances.

              Comment


                #17
                Originally posted by darmstadt View Post
                I remember we had a similar problem and so did some of our neighbours who use different ISPs and all of us had had engineers out who did lots of technical stuff but couldn't find the problem. We eventually got a tip top engineer who called the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency) and this engineer traced the problem right back to the source. One of our neighbours, an elderly lady, had a dodgy power supply for some piece of equipment and everytime she plugged it in, it sent faults through the various network and power lines back to the junction box causing these fluctuations. We got her to replace it and no problems since...
                Reminds me of this story https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/u...gbr/index.html

                We had an issue just now - ping jumped to 2000ms, speed to a crawl. I managed to do a Quiet Line Test and there were definitely some sounds, but before I could do anything else it went back to normal performance.
                Originally posted by MaryPoppins
                I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
                Originally posted by vetran
                Urine is quite nourishing

                Comment


                  #18
                  Originally posted by d000hg View Post
                  We had an issue just now - ping jumped to 2000ms, speed to a crawl. I managed to do a Quiet Line Test and there were definitely some sounds, but before I could do anything else it went back to normal performance.
                  Noisy lines are hard to pinpoint where the fault is, and even worse when it's intermittent. Been there.
                  Scoots still says that Apr 2020 didn't mark the start of a new stock bull market.

                  Comment


                    #19
                    Originally posted by d000hg View Post
                    I run a constant
                    Code:
                    ping -t google.com
                    window on my main PC which runs 24/7 and this will catch my eye if the ping suddenly jumps from 20ms to 1000ms which tends to precede a problem, or will report outages you might not notice in everyday computer use. But it doesn't log anything. I don't want to log all the results as it will end up a big log file.

                    Can any Powershell (for preference) experts give me any ideas how I could run a similar script, which would continue to stream to my command window but also write problematic entries to a log file?
                    Or would I be better to spend an hour writing my own little C# application rather than faffing about?

                    (We have persistent intermittent internet supply issues on our FTTC supply - short outages somewhat often and longer outages or prolonged very slow speeds. We're an isolated house with a overhead line at the limit what the cabinet can supply but still typically get a 30/6 sort of speed... except it seems to be increasingly unreliable. Had the engineer out a few times but there's never a fault when he's here. He suspects our internal CAT6 wiring or mesh WiFi is the problem but anyway)
                    Have you taken it into conssideration that the latency may not be due to issues inbound to your router whether this is ISP related or infrastucture related?

                    Sometimes atmospheric conditions can affect the transferrence of data within my house even when the speed at the router is good and even when I am accessing the network from the same position in the house as I was yesterday. This is the only variable as far as I can see.

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