ADSL problems

[eppie]

Dear fellow-lurkers,

I have a computer related problem, and because for me the lounge is the place with most people that know a lot about computers that I know of I thought, lets ask my question here.

Since a month I'm living in Italy for work, and to keep in contact a bit easier with people back home I wante to get adsl (to use things like skype and msn mainly, but also for general internetting).

So I got adsl, I received the modem, and also the message that stuff was activated. (I use internet at work so I can receive email about these things), but as you understand it doesn't work.

The strange thing is that msn and skype work, several (a few) webpages work.....but most webpages (like lurkerlounge.com and blizzard.com for example) don't work. Also when I want to send or receive files with msn the downloading (if at all) is incredibly slow.....much slower then when using a simple telephone connection.
I tried switching of the firewall but this doesn't help. I tried both IE and firefox, but I have to say that the computer (without changing anything) used to work on the network of my old university without any problems....so I think the problem is the adsl modem, of course I filled in everything like was written in the booklet....but there are many more options...where they don't talk about...and I don't know what they mean.

Anyway, my question (before calling the helpdesk which I have to do in Italian....and talking about computerthings is tricky) is 'does anybody of you know why something like this happens, and what I might do to change it.' (the modem is a utstarcom adsl2+ ut-300r2u by the way)

If I know what is the problem, i can tell it directly when I call the helpdesk....I have the feeling that otherwise it can be a very long phonecall without answer.

Any help is appreciated. I cannot wait to have internet at home, so I can finally have some nice discussions about politics on the lounge again....
greetings, and thanks in advance
eppie.


ps, the food is great though over here :D

[Flymo]

It is odd that only some web pages are working. Are you sure you are not just seeing cached versions? If you hit the refresh button, do they refresh properly? If they do not you can access no web pages, which might indicate that you are being redirected to a proxy server by malware. If you can get to pages by entering their IP address but not their URL, you might be being redirected to a DNS server by malware.

Run Hijack This to detect and (with luck) remove malware. You can get it from http://216.180.233.162/~merijn/index.html.

Failing that, then a rebuild of your PC might resolve the issue but that is of course a drastic step.

Edit:

If you do run Hijack This, be aware that it lists everything that might be malware, including a lot of stuff that is necessary. So don't ask it to "fix" anything unless you're sure it is unwanted.

Another possibility is that your PC is running something like Cybersitter configured to bar access to game-related web pages, but since you say you're working I assume that's unlikely:)

[[vL]Kp]

Both from work and from home, run traceroute against some of the slow sites. (OS-specific note: on Microsoft Windows systems, this utility is misnamed tracert.) Compare the output, looking for any obviously slow hops. Anything greater than 1 second is usually considered unacceptable / a sign of problems. The slowest hop between me and the Lounge is ~200ms at present. In its standard operation, traceroute should provide you with three numbers for each host in the route, corresponding to the responses for each of three probes it sent to that host. If a response is not returned, traceroute places a * in that position. If you see many stars, that's a bad sign (high packet loss). If you see all stars, it means the packets traceroute needs for correct operation are being disallowed, so you cannot measure responsiveness at all. That's very bad from a network diagnostics perspective, but does not say anything specifically about the problem you observed. When a packet is lost, it must be retransmitted. To avoid flooding the network, there is a delay before retransmission occurs. If you are losing many packets, that translates into many delays before the remote host finally receives all your traffic.

From work and from home, look up the IP addresses of various slow sites. Both places should show the same result for a given site, assuming enough trials. (Some places, like Google, have many IP addresses. It could take a while to find all of them. Therefore, you should prefer looking up places like the Lounge, which have very few IP addresses.) If the results differ, it's likely that, as Flymo suggested, you have some sort of infection. You may also wish to consider anti-spyware utilities such as Spybot: Search&Destroy and Ad-aware.

How stable are you in UDP based games? Such games (e.g. Diablo 1, Starcraft, or Warcraft II: BNE, but not Diablo II, Warcraft III, or World of Warcraft) are very sensitive to a lossy connection. High packet loss will usually make the games unpleasant, if they are playable at all.

You may also want to try downloading a large file over http or ftp, to rule out protocol-specific traffic shaping as a culprit. This seems less likely since you said some web sites are slow, but if nothing else turns up, you could try this. I recommend downloading a copy of the Linux kernel or a Linux LiveCD distribution (such as Hakin9), since they are large and legal downloads. As a bonus, if you grab Hakin9, you could burn it to a CD and reboot into it to test whether the problem is in your modem or your system. If Hakin9 comes up and you get good performance in it, but poor performance on your normal desktop OS, it is a problem with your system. Since it is a LiveCD, you can use Hakin9 without erasing your existing Windows installation. Just don't try to write to your Windows filesystem(s) from Hakin9.;)

[eppie]

I tried the tracert website thing.

The first line always gives three asterisks

For example the lurkerlounge is reached....but does not display. At work it even takes several steps longer (with in between several lines with just asterisks....but it works)

Another site (from a bank) works fine (at home), but from the 12 line on untill 30 it gives asterisks again.

The famous ikea.com, is found in 5steps (first line always asterisks) with low (19ms) speeds......but it does not open on my computer....


I will try that malware check, but I cannot imagine that there is something like that or spyware installed. The last time the computer was attached to a network everything went fine.

Anyway to both of you thanks for the help......and if I found out what was the problem, I will post it here of course.

[Flymo]

Tracert often does not return complete results - some sites protect themselves from DOS attacks by disallowing ping etc. so it does not get that far.

Your problem could be contention (too many people assigned by your ISP to the same circuitry). I have seen this reduce the speed of a 2Mb DSL line to that of a dial-up line. Measure your DSL speed at somewhere like http://www.adslguide.org/tools/speedtest.asp. If it is low in the daytime but reasonable at times when noone uses the Internet (late at night, early in the morning) get a different ISP.

[Occhidiangela]

Dear fellow-lurkers,


Since a month I'm living in Italy for work,

ps, the food is great though over here :D

Is sure is.:)

Where in Italy, if you don't mind my asking? The cuisine differs a bit from region to region.

Occhi

[eppie]

Is sure is.:)

Where in Italy, if you don't mind my asking? The cuisine differs a bit from region to region.

Occhi

The Milano Hinterland......not the best region for typical Italian cuisine (more a risotto area than a pasta area....and I'm more of a pasta person).
But anyway, I do very fine here....I'm starting to gain weight (I really should start doing sports again).
As a wine-fan I'm also in the right place, the choice in the supermarkets is excellent....