More wireless weirdness

[snousle]

The chronically bad performance of my Internet service continues, but I have a new clue as to what might be going on. During the many periods when I cannot load Web pages or retrieve POP-based email, Remote Desktop works just fine. Which is helpful, since it's the one thing I genuinely need for work. But it's still super-duper annoying to have everything else flake out.

It's at the point where I am frequently browsing the Web through a browser on my workstation in Florida, because it works better than using my local computer (!). This surely narrows the range of what could be going on, but I have no idea why RDP data would get through when nothing else does.

Any ideas?

Comments

[pink-halen.livejournal.com]

Is your connection behind two sets of NAT?
http://blogs.forethought.net/blog/

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I have a directional wireless antenna that communicates with a station across the valley, about 10 miles away. Attached to that I have a wireless router. Unfortunately, removing the wireless router and connecting a computer directly to the antenna does not solve the problem (though I will try again to make extra super sure).

I really ought to learn how TCP/IP actually works sometime.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

At least the basics, yes. ;) I'm no wizard, but I usually can at least narrow down the problem.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Hm. Do secure sessions behave any differently than ordinary web browsing? I ask because secure sessions talk to a different server port, and that would give us a further hint as to what's going on. It's possible that there's something wonky going on with access to certain TCP/IP ports - http for web browsing is port 80, for instance, while the SSL secure browsing port is 443, etc.

The other possibility that comes to mind is that there's something wonky with the DNS server you're dealing with. Depending on how you're specifying what machine to connect to via Remote Desktop, you might be totally bypassing the need to consult DNS, or perhaps your machine simply has it cached and doesn't need to look it up every time you connect. You might try PINGing various domain names (like the ones for your mail server and any websites you visit often) and see if you get name lookup problems.

Another idea you could try would be to switch from your ISP's DNS servers to OpenDNS's nameservers - just as a test - and see if browsing and email performance improves. If it does, then there's something rotten in their DNS servers.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try OpenDNS presently.

Even things like "ping google.com" fail intermittently while RDP continues to chug along. Could a DNS problem cause a transient failure like that? Using PingPlotter shows the periods of failure can be remarkably regular, often being ~5 minutes long at ~20 minute intervals for hours at a time. At other times it seems to be random.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely it can if they have unreliable or overloaded DNS servers, or if they have some kind of internal network/routing problem that is impeding access. The regular outage might be explained by some internal process of theirs that for some reason impedes access to DNS. (Just as a for-instance - some kind of backup process that nearly saturates a link the DNS server is on.)

Here's another idea: run Gibson Research Corporation's DNSbench utility! Don't know why I didn't think of that to begin with!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

OpenDNS did not solve the problem. It did redirect misspelled URLs to its ads page, so I know it was operating as intended. It was an educational experience, but the outage periods continue.

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

I'm using Google's DNS (8.8.8.8). It's nice and fast and very reliable.

[oscarlikesbugsy.livejournal.com]

How very odd.

It does sound like RD is giving you some type of dedicated resource linkage, but your 'ordinary' connection type is 'negotiating' for resources, and it periodically fails to find them.

There may be a log to inspect to see if something is timeing out.

[westwind-mv.livejournal.com]

I wonder which port the RDP data are using. Sounds suspiciously like a firewall gone wonky to me, letting certain kinds of packet through and rejecting others.

[twobraids.livejournal.com]

Are remote ssh sessions reliable? Your storefront ISP may be proxying your external web traffic and they've screwed it up. Try bypassing them by setting your own proxy through to your remote workstation using ssh port forwarding (or whatever the windows equivalent is). I've done that to end run around proxying by nosy hotel WiFi networks.