February 2014 archive

Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part Three

This is the third and final installment (for now!) in my brief series on Internet issues. This time we’re addressing throughput, because it’s another one that comes up occasionally. So here is the scenario, you’ve had a rack of equipment in a datacenter in New York for the last few months, and everything is going …

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Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part Two

Last week we covered traceroutes, and why you should gather data on both the forward path and the reverse path. This week we are looking at MTR, why you should use it, and how to interpret the results. ‘traceroute’ is a very handy tool, and it exists on most operating systems. If it isn’t there …

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Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part One

Having worked in the support team for a Network Services Provider, it’s fairly common to see customer tickets come in complaining about packet loss or latency through/to our network. Many of these are the result of them running an MTR test to their IP and not fully understanding the results, and with a little education …

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