FIOS anyone?

[altenbach]

If any of you have problems getting to the NI forums while connected via Verizon FIOS, while things work via other providers, please tell us here.

Some users have issues, so let's see if we get a better overview of the extent of the problem.

Thanks! 

[RavensFan]

Hi Christian,

I don't have Verizon FIOS, but I do have Verizon DSL.  I noticed all weekend I was unable to connect to the forums.  I can get to NI.com, but the link to Discussion Forums causes it to sit and spin forever until it eventually times out.  I even tried connecting by way of a bookmark in the history items, but it failed also.  I just assumed the forums were down.

At work today, I noticed there were messages posted to the boards all weekend long, even at times I know I was trying to connect and failed.  Later in the day I saw this message of yours.

I got home tonight and tried again, but it still failed.  I was going to try to VPN into my work desktop and try.  I didn't even need to get that far.  Once the VPN connection was up and running, I was able to access the forums.  I assume that my messaging is now being directed through my work's VPN rather than through my Verizon account although I am sitting on my DSL connection to access the work VPM.

So I think there is a definite problem that occurred sometime this week with Verizon not allowing connections to the forum.

[altenbach]

Ah, this is good information! Thanks.

So far I was suspecting the FIOS router (which has some other bugs), but according to your information it is probably internal to Verizon on a bigger scale.

In the current state, It is not just these forums. I cannot connect to anything by Lithium, e.g.:

http://www.lithium.com
http://forums.creative.com
http://www.dellcommunity.com
http://forums.linksys.com
http://www.onlinemerchantnetwork.com/

 ...

etc.

Everything else on the internet (=non lithium) works fine.

(I also use VPN to post this :()

[Ben]

Just to keep the public record straight, I am having the same problem.

Either Lithium Verizon changed something late Thrusday night.

Funny but it is only affecting the machine that has LV on it. My wife's laptop still connects fine.

Ben

[RavensFan]

Just a little more detail.

When I log into my VPN it sets up a proxy server in the connections option of Internet Explorer.  Things worked.

When I disabled the proxy server manually, but was still connected to the VPN, it failed to connect.

The reason I disabled the proxy server is that I was trying to track fantasy football stats while the game was on.  And of course our company's proxy would block that.  So I disabled the proxy, but I was still unable to connect to the fantasy football site.  I was only able to connect to that when I completely disconnected from the VPN.

[RavensFan]

---

altenbach wrote:

Ah, this is good information! Thanks.

So far I was suspecting the FIOS router (which has some other bugs), but according to your information it is probably internal to Verizon on a bigger scale.

In the current state, It is not just these forums. I cannot connect to anything by Lithium, e.g.:

http://www.lithium.com
http://forums.creative.com
http://www.dellcommunity.com
http://forums.linksys.com
http://www.onlinemerchantnetwork.com/

 ...

etc.

Everything else on the internet (=non lithium) works fine.

(I also use VPN to post this :()

---

Is anyone else out there also having problems, or are a Verizon customer not having a problem?  Since Verizon is one of the top ISP's in the country, I think there have to be other Verizon users out there who use the forums

Laura,

Has Lithium been made aware of problems with Verizon users connecting to the forums?  Is this technically a Lithium problem or a Verizon problem?  I'm not sure how I could go about reporting something like this to Verizon in any meaningful way that could get it fixed.  I think Lithium would have to be the ones to communicate it with Verizon and demand the problem get resolved.

I decided to try again last night from home and found I still couldn't connect.  So I ran a tracert to lithium.com to see what would happen:

Tracing route to lithium.com [208.74.204.6]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  dslrouter [192.168.1.1]
  2    25 ms    23 ms    22 ms  10.4.28.1
  3    22 ms    22 ms    22 ms  P3-1.LCR-01.BLTMMD.verizon-gni.net [130.81.33.116]
  4    28 ms    29 ms    28 ms  130.81.17.197
  5    28 ms    28 ms    28 ms  10gigabitethernet1-3.core1.ash1.he.net [209.51.161.33]
  6   103 ms   102 ms   103 ms  10gigabitethernet1-4.core1.pao1.he.net [72.52.92.29]
  7   108 ms   102 ms   102 ms  10gigabitethernet4-1.core1.sjc2.he.net [72.52.92.70]
  8   112 ms   109 ms   109 ms  ed-pri-rtr-c3-43.lithium.com [206.51.38.77]
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11     *        *     ^C
C:\>ping lithium.com

Pinging lithium.com [208.74.204.6] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 208.74.204.6:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

You can see that the lithium.com server is getting resolved to an IP address.  But you can see the path breaks down once it hits  the lithium servers.  I'm not an IP expert, so I'm not sure if these results mean anything.  I can connect to the forums from work, but I found the tracert also breaks down at a similar, but differently named point.

H:\>tracert lithium.com

Tracing route to lithium.com [208.74.204.6]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

{I am only posting the end section of the tracert, for security reasons and because the beginning part isn't showing any problems} 

 14   298 ms   234 ms   274 ms  te3-4.mpd01.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.165]
 15    92 ms   226 ms   237 ms  te3-4.mpd01.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.1.26]
 16    82 ms    81 ms    82 ms  te4-4.mpd01.sjc06.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.146]
 17    89 ms    90 ms    89 ms  lithium-tech.demarc.cogentco.com [38.104.134.3]

 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.

[altenbach · Accepted solution]

As of this morning, everything seems to be working fine again. We will probably never know where the actual problem was. Things were down for a full 5 days.

Ravens, the Lithium servers don't repond to pings so the tracert will fail. It does not tell us much, except that the two scenarios reach lithium via a different border router.

I did some packet traces that show that even with failed connections to the forum, the first few packets were working, but that the connections stalled only after a few packets. This means that routing is at least partially OK (or no packets would make it at all).

Most likely, the problem was much more complex, either having to do with some accidental misconfiguration e.g. of load balancing, some partial harware failure, or some other obscure combination of things. It cold even have been the action of a disgruntled employee or some other wild conspiracy theory. 😮

Funny thing is that forums.verizon.com is also hosted at lithium, and a significant number of verizon custemers were unable to reach it. 😄

[RavensFan]

I won't be able to check until tonight when I'm home.

---

altenbach wrote:

Funny thing is that forums.verizon.com is also hosted at lithium, and a significant number of verizon custemers were unable to reach it. 😄

---

That is hilarious!  Maybe that gave them the motivation to fix it.

[Laura F.]

Hi altenbach,

I shared all of the correspondence from you with Lithium.  I have not heard back from them other than that they had found some reports from a similar timeframe of Verizon users not being able to connect to a number of Yahoo sites, so they suspected it was an issue with Verizon.  I was going to check back with them today, so I am glad to hear that the issue is resolved.

Feel free to contact me via this thread or email if the issue starts again.  Sometimes I can get a lot of subscriptions so moderator notices or emails can be a faster way to let me know what is going on.

Thanks,

Laura 

Message Edited by Laura F. on 10-23-2008 04:09 PM

[altenbach]

Ultimately, it would be interesting to know what actually happenend. 🙂

My best guesses:

Lithium blames Verizon

Verizon blames Lithium

Both blame cogentco

wash...rinse...repeat... 🙂

It would be nice to know if Verizon is to blame, because then I could request a bill adjustment. 😄