Thinkpads Forum

Am not sure where to post this, so Mods please move this if it's not in the right place. For the last week or 2, I have been having a heck of a time getting to this site consistently (many timeouts). This is the same problem on a few different machines on my home LAN. Any other site I go to has no problems. I run Firefox over XP Pro. Has anyone else been having connection problems with this site? If not, any ideas on how to troubleshoot this? Traceroute maybe? I'll try that next time it fails.

I have been having some problems off and on as well. Same as you.

I have been having problems for the last 2 days, but it is random. Sometimes it is pretty fast, sometimes it times out.

It's been fine for me from the other side of the globe... local routing issues perhaps?

Cheers,

Bill B.

I've had more problems with other sites in terms of slowness - generally I can get around here reasonably well.

Might be a US only problem? Where is the site hosted ... country?

I believe it's somewhere in the MidWest. Not sure of the exact location at the moment but Kansas or Missouri seems to ring a bell.

Looks like Missouri ...

whois 216.229.83.235 wrote: OrgName: Fidelity Communication International Inc.
OrgID: FIDN
Address: 64 N.Clark
City: Sullivan
StateProv: MO
PostalCode: 63080
Country: US

NetRange: 216.229.64.0 - 216.229.95.255
CIDR: 216.229.64.0/19
NetName: NETBLK-FIDN
NetHandle: NET-216-229-64-0-1
Parent: NET-216-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: SULLIVAN.FIDNET.COM
NameServer: ROLLA.FIDNET.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1999-06-03
Updated: 2003-08-11

OrgTechHandle: NOC2396-ARIN
OrgTechName: Network Operations Center
OrgTechPhone: +1-573-468-1220
OrgTechEmail: nocadmins@fidnet.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-06-25 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

Here'a a tracert I just ran which seems good. If the site starts timmg out I'll run it again. If we get a few folks doing this from a DOS prompt and posting here when the site times out maybe we can pinpoint a failure in the path.

C:\Documents and Settings\User>tracert 216.229.83.235

Tracing route to alto.csdatamanagers.com [216.229.83.235]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 24 ms 23 ms 23 ms 10.26.1.1
3 24 ms 23 ms 24 ms so-1-1-0-0.CORE-RTR2.PGHK.verizon-gni.net [130.8
1.9.206]
4 26 ms 26 ms 25 ms so-1-2-1-0.BB-RTR1.NY5030.verizon-gni.net [130.8
1.20.114]
5 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms 0.so-3-1-0.XT1.NYC8.ALTER.NET [152.63.10.33]
6 58 ms 58 ms 58 ms 0.so-7-1-0.XL1.KCY4.ALTER.NET [152.63.88.58]
7 60 ms 58 ms 58 ms POS6-0.GW1.KCY4.ALTER.NET [152.63.92.189]
8 70 ms 69 ms 69 ms fidnet-OC3.customer.alter.net [157.130.172.222]

9 78 ms 78 ms 79 ms 216-229-82-198-empty.fidnet.com [216.229.82.198]

10 77 ms 77 ms 77 ms alto.csdatamanagers.com [216.229.83.235]

Trace complete.

You can do better yet if you run winmtr, which will spot the cause of packet loss, even if it's not 100%.

http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/

tomh009 wrote:You can do better yet if you run winmtr, which will spot the cause of packet loss, even if it's not 100%.

http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/

Nice tool. Thanks

OK, had several timeouts today and ran winmtr each time. I can't see any problems getting to this site except for some packet loss on my ISP's backbone, but that does not prevent me from getting to other sites. I have to think that it is this site itself timing out.

Unfortunately, this has been a hit-or-miss problem, for as long as I have been around here.

For those that get frustrated with it, please keep in mind that this is still a free forum, and that Bill is doing the best he can.

It has taken time, but I have finally learned to be somewhat "ok" when there is an outage. In the past, I would feel like a heroin addict vying for a fix...

Now, if this forum AND YouTube were down at the SAME TIME...look out...

Harryc wrote:OK, had several timeouts today and ran winmtr each time. I can't see any problems getting to this site except for some packet loss on my ISP's backbone, but that does not prevent me from getting to other sites. I have to think that it is this site itself timing out.

I'd agree with this - I had about 15 mins of time outs about an hour or so ago.

tfflivemb2 wrote:Unfortunately, this has been a hit-or-miss problem, for as long as I have been around here.

For those that get frustrated with it, please keep in mind that this is still a free forum, and that Bill is doing the best he can.

Not frustrated at all, only trying to be helpful. If you guys are aware it and have been for some time, then carry on ... no harm no foul. I appreciate Bills forum.

I've been affected again this evening as well. I am also using my somewhat flakey at&t cellular connection, so I am never sure if the problem is with at&t or this site, or ? But at the time, I was connecting to other sites successfully.

This morning, at&t went out on me for about 5 hours. I had a good signal, and could connect, but I was not receiving any packets. I was on the phone with at&t tech support for nearly an hour while they had me try this and that. Eventually they had me type in the IP address for Yahoo directly, and the page started loading (I might have tried this myself, but I did not have the IP address for any website written down). About 30 minutes later, everything was up again. I haven't lost service like this for a long time (except of course, when I didn't have a good signal).

tfflivemb2 wrote:Unfortunately, this has been a hit-or-miss problem, for as long as I have been around here.

For those that get frustrated with it, please keep in mind that this is still a free forum, and that Bill is doing the best he can.

It has taken time, but I have finally learned to be somewhat "ok" when there is an outage. In the past, I would feel like a heroin addict vying for a fix...

Now, if this forum AND YouTube were down at the SAME TIME...look out...

No worries on my end, that's for certain - I have my own personal favourite sites where I get anxious when there's an outage, so I know what you mean by The benefits of this forum far, far outweigh any downtime.

Just a sanity check... the site appeared to be off-line (to me anyway) for about two hours (3:47 to 5:49pm PDT) today.

rkawakami wrote:Just a sanity check... the site appeared to be off-line (to me anyway) for about two hours (3:47 to 5:49pm PDT) today.

Thats not fair Ray, because you ARE insane...hehehe

I was offline too, on this end...

I had trouble then as well. Went down to the doghouse to work on my train, and when I emerged, it was back up. ... JDH

It was offline here too, plus I am still having intermittent connection problems to it, timeouts, etc.

Same here and I'm pretty close to the hosting site (couple hundred miles).

I received timeouts as well yesterday, but not for as long as Ray experienced. Once it came back up though, the connection was super fast.

When this happens, I always open a new tab (firefox) and try loading something like sleezeBay or NewEgg, and they always come up as expected.

I totally agree with tfflivemb2. Free site. The timeouts are actually good for me, I realize how much like a herion addict I am, and take the time during the timeout to take a timeout!

The forum is very very slow last few weeks.

Yes, it is, I have cut down on my trolling here because it takes to long to load a page. I switched to firefox a couple of days ago and that is a little quicker, but still there is latency. Could be a specific router path which some of us are on

Ray;

Do you think our path to the forum is over a ComCast server?? (Since they seem to be in the business of throttling bandwidth these days)

Connection speeds have gone from bad to worse over the past several days for me, yet all other sites load as normal.

I'm on DSL (PacBell/Yahoo/SBC/AT&T; whatever they are calling themselves today) and have seen connection problems with EVERY site I try so some of my problems are due to my ISP. If everything you try except thinkpads.com seems to work fine, then I'd say it's an issue with the site's servers.

Comcast has been throttling P2P connections from the article I read yesterday:

AP tests Comcast's file-sharing filter

I'm on full-octane RoadRunner

Over a wireless connection, eBay loads to "Done" in 2 sec, NewEgg in 3 sec, New York Post in 3 sec.

ThinkPads.Com 35sec (And that was a "fast" load). It seems to load the first 1/4 of the page fairly quickly, but then the wait is on for the rest of the page.

losmeme wrote:I'm on full-octane RoadRunner

Over a wireless connection, eBay loads to "Done" in 2 sec, NewEgg in 3 sec, New York Post in 3 sec.

ThinkPads.Com 35sec (And that was a "fast" load). It seems to load the first 1/4 of the page fairly quickly, but then the wait is on for the rest of the page.

Exact same problem here for the last week or so. 1/4 page loads, then the cobwebs start to form over the keyboard. At night, the Ice weasels come ... LOL

My solution whenever the forum is slow: click on the STOP button (in Firefox) and re-click the wanted link. It then comes up immediately every time.
I'm on 3Mb Verizon DSL.