To: Benjamin Ng who wrote (5109 ) 3/29/1999 6:51:00 PM From: Benjamin Ng Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 62347
OFF-TOPIC: Traceroute to CSW Revisited Just had a chance to do a traceroute from two Unix servers on very different networks (ie, two different providers). Both are able to hop to CSW no problems, and the intermediary node between reg4-1.bctel.net and m61.canada-stockwatch.com is 207.194.239.161 (seen as * * * Request Timed Out for most users here). I still get packet loss if I tracert www.canada-stockwatch.com from a Windows NT box. Interestingly though, I can tracert directly to 207.194.239.161 fine. (Could be a way the TTL/ICMP hop count is modified along the way if hops beyond 207.194.239.161 are required.) For fellow techno-geeks, here's my output from one server (upstream of me is Telus Advanced Communications): 3 192.168.12.17 (192.168.12.17) 2.994 ms 9.666 ms 4.499 ms 4 REGIONAL2-fe1-0-0.tac.net (205.233.111.3) 4.703 ms 31.639 ms 11.588 ms 5 inetgw1-tac-reg2.bctel.net (204.174.67.214) 38.782 ms 39.43 ms 42.249 ms 6 reg4-1.bctel.net (204.174.67.49) 42.018 ms 40.233 ms 41.905 ms 7 207.194.239.161 (207.194.239.161) 42.87 ms 45.225 ms 47.065 ms 8 m61.canada-stockwatch.com (207.102.62.61) 48.424 ms 64.513 ms 50.621 ms 9 m30.canada-stockwatch.com (207.102.62.30) 56.548 ms 48.405 ms 48.662 ms In this case, the offending node was hop #7 (for most people that posted earlier, it was hop #9 due to more routers along the way). It may be Windows-unfriendly for certain packets. I'm guessing that anybody using something like Netscape in Linux will have excellent access times compared to Windows users. I've seen this before: a bias against Windows TCP/IP (particularly Win NT) by certain routers. The TCP/IP parameters can be painstakenly tweaked to try and fix the problem. I'm not sure if it's a non-standard implementation of TCP or the parameters themselves. Thank Microsoft. I had a similar problem several months ago using Win NT on my ISP. I simply couldn't view specific sites. Using a different OS on the same machine worked, but was impractical. Tweaking the Win NT TCP settings turned out to be a pain (change registry, reboot, reconnect, repeat). I switched ISPs and the problem was solved (different host of servers and routers). Ben