About a temporary loss of internet service (with help from bash)

[cobaka]

Hello all.

Recently I lost my internet service. (Careless, I know). In general it was "out" during the day, but when I got up in the early AM (a little before 6) - well, waddaya know? The internet service was "back". Then, on Wed and Thursday, after 6 AM - "it's gone." (On Thursday, it "went" at 06:01. Precisely) "Gone" for most of the day.

In a 'swapping' session I put a different system in place. Different (new, in fact) modem, ethernet cable, PC everything. (It's handy to have spare PCs and modems lying around, isn't it?) The only "constant" was the power supply (240V mains) and the copper (telephone) cable to my house/modem. Spintel techs (from the internet "service" provider) told me, "We can see your modem. It looks good."

Because of the time I lost the internet (6AM) and the reliable "ping" result I got when the service was good I suspect the "failure" was on the far side of my modem (but not the copper cable). What, (oh what) external circumstance could give the failure I observe? Is this problem too "deep" to even consider on the forum? My internet service is working now, has worked for the last 24 hours; I suspect it will continue to work for months/years before another problem arises.
So my "Q" arises from curiosity, not need.

собака

PS A brief history of PC h/ware only, because it's variable, not constant.
Desktop PC: Gigabyte motherboard, RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 06) FossaPup CE4 (probably)
OR Laptop == Dell 8600 (circa 2006) running 32 bit "Friendly Pup - 32 bit" OS. UPupBB 32. It's been working for a LONG time.

[bigpup]

Sounds to me like the service providers system went down.

If a call to who provides the service, does not tell you it was them having a system outage.

Any of your hardware could be the cause.

Process of elimination is needed to find it.

The devices that provide the connection in your home.
Every one of them is a small type computer.
A simple power off, wait 1 minute, power on, can fix some strange things.

[cobaka]

Hello all

I lost the internet service only during the day. Where did the fault lie?
There is a binary answer to the question. Either on my property, or "out there" in the big bad world beyond the copper cable that connected my PC to the exchange.

I had a clue. (strange, because people generally tell me I don't have a clue.) I switched my modem, my PC and the Ethernet cable between the PC and modem. The ONLY common item on my property (after making those switches) was the copper telephone cable.

But I had a second clue. What, I ask, was more likely to cause the internet dropping out at 6AM? Not just at 6AM, but at 6AM on two days in succession? And then, what magic might make the copper cable 'better' overnight? What is more probable? Some technician working "on the gear" or a curiously timed fault in the copper cable. Hmmm? What do you say?

I spent several hours in conversation with the 'technical types' at Spintel, my internet service provider.
They followed their routine troubleshooting procedure to the letter; wasting my time and theirs.
They proceeded on the assumption that the fault was 'at my place', but I had a clue that they were wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong - for the reasons given above. But the 'techies' stuck with their time-consuming, strategy, wasting my time (and theirs).

How could I (i.e. you) locate a fault and tell the service techs exactly which building to look for their fault? Even if the building was 100km from the copper cable going to my modem?

Puppy Linux has two very nice items in the terminal tool box that will a do that.
These are the "ping" and "traceroute" commands, but used in a script.
See below if you are interested.

собака.

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash

printf "a logging file, showing i-net connection to #my address,
in  NSW, Australia  Logging interval is 60m \n" >> net-log_Feb_11.txt
# (to screen only)
printf "The logging process has started \n\n";

for i in `seq 1 48`;
	do
	  printf "pass nr. $i \n";
	  printf >> net-log_Feb_11.txt "\n record nr. $i  - - - - - - -   "  
	  date   >> net-log_Feb_11.txt; printf " - - - \n"
	  ping  -qc59 -s1024  23.40.73.19 >> net-log_Feb_11.txt
	  sleep 30m
	done
printf "end of test \n"  >> net-log_Feb_11.txt
printf "logging test finished \n";

The code above logs connection to a single IP address over 24 hours, logging the result to a text file every 30m.
If the connection lies in your cable, modem or PC hard ware 'ping' will report 'cannot connect to the network'.
If the fault lies beyond the copper cable 'ping' will report n% packet loss. The jitter time will tell somewhat about the quality of the line.

You may substitute 'traceroute' for ping in the script above. Here is the command and the result.

Code: Select all

# traceroute -q 1 -m 12   23.50.217.191

traceroute to 23.50.217.191 (23.50.217.191), 12 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 pc2 (192.168.1.1) 0.610 ms
2 vgi1.bng.syd1.spintel.net.au (115.69.32.1) 13.395 ms
3 ae0-2080.core02.syd1.spintel.net.au (202.172.100.50) 13.669 ms
4 et0-0-1.edge02.syd1.spintel.net.au (202.172.100.7) 13.519 ms
5 *
6 lo1.r03.stem01.syd01.fab.netarch.akamai.com (23.39.110.24) 13.303 ms
7 lo1.r02.spine02.syd01.fab.netarch.akamai.com (23.39.110.11) 13.066 ms
8 lo1.r01.leaf01.syd01.fab.netarch.akamai.com (23.39.110.2) 13.056 ms
9 vlan100.r11.tor01.syd01.fab.netarch.akamai.com (23.46.180.1) 13.540 ms
10 *
11 *
12 *

See the first item on the list? 192.168.1.1 That's my modem talking to my PC.
Is the connection to my modem good? Appears that way, the two are on talking terms.
Item #2 shows a conversation with the first "hop" on the internet. It that's missing, then that may be (just possibly may be) a clue that something's wrong "out there".

[d-pupp]

@cobaka Interesting. Just curious where did you get the script? Was it from your service provider tech?

[cobaka]

@d-pupp

Your "Q" about logging script (earlier posting)

Interesting. Just curious where did you get the script? Was it from your service provider tech?

My answer: I wrote it myself. I'm a beginner with the terminal. I like the terminal. It's useful.
The service provider is (1) either ignorant of these simple commands OR (2) does not wish to disclose such (valuable!!) ideas.

собака

[cobaka]

Hello @bigpup

You:

Sounds to me like the service providers system went down.
If a call to who provides the service, does not tell you it was them having a system outage.

My answer: I'm confident you're correct, based on another post I made here.
The annoying thing: Spintel, the internet supplier in this instance, made no attempt to look anywhere beyond my system.
This may surprise you, (it's a very difficult concept, I know); If the problem is in their system they will find nothing in my system. Strange, but true.

The 'traceroute' command would certainly show whether my signal was getting "out" - or even getting to my modem.
"The" modem is the first item identified by the traceroute command. This is (generally) address 192.168.n.n.
If you see that IP address there is communication between you PC and the modem.

Thanks for your observation, bigpup

собака