Ping oddities

[soup]

I am having really weird problems. I can't ping my own ISP.

My ISP is virginmedia (they were Blueyonder) so virginmedia.com, virginmedia.co.uk and blueyonder.co.uk all resolve to the same IP (62.254.129.91) when I try to ping this it reports a 100% loss

I first noticed a problem as Virgin's TV anywhere was giving quite glitchy playback so tried the Ookla speed test this shows me as south of London when in fact I am way north of this in Edinburgh (Scotland).

 

Then I tried the pings, BBC.co.uk was OK (0%loss) but VM was 100%loss.

Even tried a trace route to VM

  

C:\Users\Soup>tracert virginmedia.com

Tracing route to virginmedia.com [62.254.123.91]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms routerlogin.net [192.168.0.1]
2 7 ms 9 ms 7 ms 10.234.172.1
3 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms sgyl-core-2b-xe-322-0.network.virginmedia.net [6
2.253.0.121]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 22 ms 15 ms 14 ms leed-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.254
.42.230]
6 60 ms 15 ms 18 ms know-dcore-1a-pc1.network.virginmedia.net [212.4
3.162.50]
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

(I think sgyle is South Gyle [my ISP headend], leed = Leeds Ob and know = Knowsley[ physical site of VMs servers])

 

Have tried putting the Hub (router and MODEM combined) into pure MODEM mode Have treid going from Automated selection of DNS to 194.168.4.100 and 194.168.8.100

all produce no change .

Is there anything I can do or am I going to have to talk to VMs tech support (don't want to do this as usually you (TINY) get someone who barely speaks English and is working from a script)?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Why do you need to ping your isp. Can you acces the internet?

 

I normally use 8.8.8.8 (google dns)as my test ping and google.com as my test ping with dns.

[manikyath]

actually, a lot of ISPs and networks turn off replying to pings on most of their network nodes, since there's no reason to ping them, and it'd be wasted bandwidth for them to reply, so that traceroute may be -probably is- flawed.

[soup]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why do you need to ping your isp.

Can you acces the internet?

 

 

I am getting weird results so felt there was a problem.

 

Yes(ish) speed tests etc have it as the same speed as normal but I am getting glitchy playback and there is this vast difference in geographical location

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, soup said:

I am getting weird results so felt there was a problem.

 

Yes(ish) speed tests etc have it as the same speed as normal but I am getting glitchy playback and there is this vast difference in geographical location

Id try changing your dns servers to googles dns servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

[soup]

8 minutes ago, manikyath said:

actually, a lot of ISPs and networks turn off replying to pings on most of their network nodes, since there's no reason to ping them, and it'd be wasted bandwidth for them to reply, so that traceroute may be -probably is- flawed.

Sounds reasonable.

 

Still got this glitchy playback and Ookla placing me 500 miles or so from where I am.  I know there is no real location info in an IP addy but querying ripe mentions South Gyle (which is an area of Edinburgh) .

[brwainer]

Most webservers have ping (ICMP) and similar packets filtered at the firewall. The server of your ISPs website has nothing to do with the routers that provide internet service anyway. The webservers may not even be in the same datacenters.

[soup]

13 hours ago, brwainer said:

Most webservers have ping (ICMP) and similar packets filtered at the firewall. The server of your ISPs website has nothing to do with the routers that provide internet service anyway. The webservers may not even be in the same datacenters.

Fair enough. Have discounted the unpingability(<word?) of the servers anyway.

"TV anywhere" is non-jerky today but Ookla still has me 500 or so miles from where I am (and due to the way the speedtest is done this gives me a ping to a london server of 21 or so: Edinburgh one was 7).

 

Going to Ookla settings page, that has my geographical location as "Bexelyheath" but the lat long location, given on the same page, viewable on Google maps, gives Swanston village (an area of Edinburgh, still 4~5 miles away but a lot closer than "Bexleyheath".

 

Ookla uses GeoIP, could they have the location wrong and I just need to wait on GeoIP updating their database?

[brwainer]

5 hours ago, soup said:

Fair enough. Have discounted the unpingability(<word?) of the servers anyway.

"TV anywhere" is non-jerky today but Ookla still has me 500 or so miles from where I am (and due to the way the speedtest is done this gives me a ping to a london server of 21 or so: Edinburgh one was 7).

 

Going to Ookla settings page, that has my geographical location as "Bexelyheath" but the lat long location, given on the same page, viewable on Google maps, gives Swanston village (an area of Edinburgh, still 4~5 miles away but a lot closer than "Bexleyheath".

 

Ookla uses GeoIP, could they have the location wrong and I just need to wait on GeoIP updating their database?

Geolocation of IP addresses is a huge mess, regardless of which service is being used. The company I work for has hundreds of dedicated fiber circuits each with their own /28 or /29 of public IPs, and we regularly find that mysteriously the location of our IPs changes without us or our upstream providers requesting the change. I suspect that some ISPs are careless about updating the geolocation, and they end up changing more or different IPs than they ones they actually own. So what you should do is tell your ISP about the problem, and they might or might not submit a change, and either way you just have to wait and see if it improves.

 

And BTW, when you do an actual speedtest, it uses the GeoIP data as a starting point, but it does ping multiple "local" servers to see which is the best to test at. Also a different type of speedtest you can do is at dslreports.com - it's inportant to understand that speedtest.net is testing a single stream, while dslreports.com tests multiple streams.