Saturday, February 05, 2011

Awww -- Rain, Man!

Well, that's two winter storms in a row: we get a bit of snow but mostly what falls is rain, or even freezing rain. We got slammed Tuesday night and into Wednesday with ice, and we woke up to rain and near-freezing temperatures -- and in the words of long-time reader Greg (in the context of MTB racing), "I'd rather it be 25 and snowing than 35 and raining." Amen to that!

Tomorrow is the Superbowl of Chili, and I think we'll be doing directly there instead of our usual pre-chili outdoor workout fun.

So anyway, instead of doing anything outside today, I'm playing on the computer, posting more scanned photos and Browsing Around The Online... seems like something's hanging up in the intertubes though, several sites are down or very slow. Ping returns "packet filtered" errors, traceroute says "no reply" partway through the "route" (?); sure I wish I knew what these things meant but it was fun pushing the buttons. Meantime, it looks like maybe some intermediate connection is either down or slow -- savvis.net is a common factor -- or something is blocking something, and that something might be an ad company since many of the websites that are hanging have ads in them. Or maybe it's the ice storm? Or something on my machine?

2 comments:

Euphoria said...

using linux? where are you pinging to? could be a firewall not allowing icmp.

do you get packet filter errors when you ping the node jsut before you get the timeout or no reply from traceroute or is it jsut when you try to ping the end node?

Don said...

Wow I should look here more often, didn't see your comment until just now...

Linux:Yeah I've been M$-free since 2000. I started on Red Hat, but my laptop came with Ubuntu so that's where I've been at for about two years now.

Internet: The two main problem sites were mtbr.com and slashdot.net, though I had intermittent problems with Facebook and some others sites that used ads -- they'd hang with the browser's status bar reading "connecting to [whatever]." I could get to the sites from my phone, as long as I was using the phone's internet connection and not the house wireless.

Pinging mtbr.com got a lot of "packet filtered" messages, and slashdot randomly either worked fine or didn't reply at all. Traceroute to either one would wander off into savvis.net and die there, with lot's of "no reply" messages until it got to too many hops or died for other reasons.

I Googled some of my results, found an IT forum where a similar problem was happening, and based on what I saw there I think the problem was "packet switcher errors."

Since these are just words to me, and since the problem went away on its own, I stopped worrying about it.