Internet connectivity issues, Network guru requested!

[GoT HiTReG?]

IP addresses will be shown (not mine personally), since this is really hard to do without doing so. Those not tech savvy do not proceed.

Not showing subnet to hide my IP further (you shouldnt need).

Only removing IPs for my ISP.

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So yeah basically everyone on this ISP of mine has problems with connecting to sites, and the ISP (yes one guy, renting from a larger ISP) is either too lazy or lacks the knowledge to fix the problems. So basically I want to confront him with some concrete evidence of what the problem likely is.

Keep in mind my ISPs equipment is oldschool.

The symptoms are exactly what you would find in a DNS server that the ISP hosts going down all the time, but theres a catch... changing the dns server on devices does not fix the problem. However, I am not sure if the inability to resolve the DNS issue is caused by the equipment we use or not.

Symptoms:

- New connections cannot be established intermittently.
- Any established session (like to XBL, Minecraft, game servers, yada yada) will continue to function.
- Any DNS requests about an IP address cause any session with that IP address to be dropped (after DNS timeout fails)
- noted this from youtube videos hanging at similar times. Watching wireshark showed a name request was made during the download (likely an ad). A DNS request was made for a name tied to the same IP address as the TCP stream was to. After ~9 seconds (about time TCP stack for windows takes to drop a connection), RST flag was shown, and the download stops (will resume if a name request to same IP succeeds and video is left open.

Topology:

*** I assume once the edge of my radio is reached there is a star topology with what would be considered a hub since its wireless (half duplex yada yada), SOA MNAME interfaces to both this hub and to the gateway interface for my radio somehow***

Now I have no clue here really and this is mostly just guess work on the ISP side of things, but its important to note this is a WIRELESS provider. The radios we use are .11b (which may be part of the problem, but meh idk).

Me(x.x.x.x) -> My router(DHCP to host)(192.168.1.1 inside 192.168.100.100 outside) -> My radio(DHCP to router)(192.168.100.1 inside 209.IP-1.IP-11.IP-MINE) -> ISP's radio tower***AS that SOA MNAME for ISP's DNS is on starts here **** (DHCP to my radio)(IP UNKOWN) -> T3-ISP(mine)(209.IP-1.IP-11.IP-ISP) -> T2-ISP -> T1-ISP -> Internet


Stuff from intoDNS
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Nameserver records returned by the parent servers are:

ns.qcislands.net. ['207.34.147.84'] [TTL=172800]
ns2.qcislands.net. ['207.34.147.93'] [TTL=172800]
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Primary nameserver: (removed, not ns or ns2).qcislands.net

Parent server: qcislands.net
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- WARNING: Not all of your nameservers are in different subnets
- WARNING: Single point of failure
- WARNING: SOA MNAME ((removed, not ns or ns2).qcislands.net) is not listed as a primary nameserver at your parent nameserver!
- Your SOA MINIMUM TTL value is: 345600. This value seems a little high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 1-3 hours as recommanded by RFC2308. This value was used to serve as a default TTL for records without a given TTL value and now is used for negative caching (indicates how long a resolver may cache the negative answer). RFC2308 recommends a value of 1-3 hours.


Interesting tracerts. Taken at same time.

Tracing route to google.ca [173.194.33.55]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.100.1
3 9 ms 5 ms 5 ms 209.IP-1.IP-11.IP-ISP-1 *** GATEWAY ***
4 18 ms 27 ms 21 ms 209.IP-1.IP-11.IP-ISP-2 *** SOA MNAME ***
5 14 ms 5 ms 6 ms m102.gwaiitel.com [207.34.147.102] (T2 ISP)
^C


Tracing route to 209.53.238.1
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.100.1
3 9 ms 7 ms 6 ms 209.IP-1.IP-11.IP-ISP-2 *** SOA MNAME ***

Trace complete.

**When the inability to establish new connections happens, pings to the gateway for my radio fail, however any established connection doesn't care.**




So what I've been able to come up with is that his setup is completely confusing and silly... and that it is probably not a cut and dry case.

The reason the pings to the gateway may fail could be beacause the gateway itself is actually an entry in my ISPs answer section in his DNS.

I know very little about DNS however.

Help much appreciated!

 

[chapp]

I initially typed out a long reply but then my session timed out and it was lost so I will simply say this.

It sounds like a problem with a router on the ISP private side. If it was a DNS problem, all you would have to do is statically assign one of the many public DNS servers to your router or PC and that would fix the issue, although name resolution might be a little slower. From the topology you described, I am not surprised that you are having problems. Unless you are running Cisco enterprise level hardware and have a good deal of knowledge with them, sharing an ISP connection to multiple other connections is not going to work well at all. My advise is to get a real ISP or move because it sounds like this guy either doesn't care to fix the issues or doesn't know how. The fact that you have to go through all of this to convince him there's a problem is a terrible sign and probably means that it will never get resolved.

 

[Ric]

Get a real ISP, not some guy lol.

Wouldn't you be afraid of packet sniffing, eavesdropping, application layer attacks, etc on some poor isp? especially since you stated this guy uses old school technology. There's a lot of exploits one can run when you're using shoddy internet.

 

[GoT HiTReG?]

Changing ISP isn't an option, he's the only one here.

As for eavesdropping, its a risk for all wireless connections.

But hey the internet is down 95% of the time, so I'm only at risk 5% of the time!

 

[Johnny]

- WARNING: Not all of your nameservers are in different subnets
- WARNING: Single point of failure

This means there are multiple nameservers on the same subnet, or possibly in the same building. It's just showing you if the power goes out it's a "single point of failure."

- Your SOA MINIMUM TTL value is: 345600. This value seems a little high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 1-3 hours as recommanded by RFC2308. This value was used to serve as a default TTL for records without a given TTL value and now is used for negative caching (indicates how long a resolver may cache the negative answer). RFC2308 recommends a value of 1-3 hours.

This baffles me.

Your best course of action, as well as the rest of the people using this internet, is to use a public DNS.

These are the steps I use to get onto Google's DNS, they may vary for you depending on protocols being used.


1. Right click on your ethernet icon in the system tray and select Open Network and Sharing Center

2. Click on Change adapter settings

3. Locate your active network, right click and goto Properties

4. Select Internet Protocol Version 4 and click the Properties button(this step may vary depending on which protocol is being utilized)

5. Check Use the following DNS server addresses:

6. Enter 8.8.8.8 in the Preferred DNS server and 8.8.4.4 in the Alternate DNS server
IPv6 addresses are:
2001:4860:4860::8888
2001:4860:4860::8844

7. Click OK

8. Press Windows Key + R

9. Type in CMD press Enter

10. Type in ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter


This may help you or it may not.