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I have a problem with pinging and tracerouting and I don't know whether this is my router's fault or my ISPs. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am hesitant to call my ISP before I have some more information/reasoning, since most of the time they blankly say that everything is fine on their end.
I always used the ping command in Windows to monitor my internet connection. Since 2 days ago I can't ping any website, nor their IPs (I have 2 PCs connected to the same router, none of them can do it). I use a TL-ER6020.
I can ping all 3 of my internal IPs.
I read that it's possible that my router blocks outbound ICMP requests, but I can't see that option on my router's interface (besides, everything worked fine until now, with the same exact setup), or I don't understand it properly. I reset my modem, didn't work.
So before I think about investing in a new router, can anyone tell me what/where the problem is, and how can I fix it?
This is what my traceroute shows now, and this is the traceroute to google.com with a website
Andie
Posted 2018-01-29T22:42:27.103
Reputation: 1
As a general comment,
pingandtraceroute(with default options) are bad tools to monitor a connection, becausepinguses ICMP andtracerouteUDP by default, which both are/may not be treated by all active equipments on the network the same way as TCP, and I suppose most of your internet connection is used for TCP streams. Said otherwise they could show you a connection as broken when it works (for web, email, etc.) as well as the opposite case. Did you also ask your ISP about this? – Patrick Mevzek – 2018-01-29T22:51:53.740We use ping to monitor whether there is a signal disruption/latency/high ping, for gaming. Whenever we called our ISP, they always said that everything is fine on their end and that we should check our equipment. They said 2 days ago that pinging in Windows is not that reliable, but what else can we use that is more efficient in a case like this? For us, it was extremely useful, since browsers occupy bandwidth, other programs require more resources, and when the internet is suddenly down, we know to close the game and start it again when "reply from" starts up again. – Andie – 2018-01-29T23:24:44.110
If you are sensitive to some application good behavior, you should monitor it. Like if you want to monitor access to a website, you test connecting to TCP port 80 or 443 of the website. This would reflect what happens when you use the application, so the monitoring will be reliable. You need to find the appropriate test for your gaming application. ICMP traffic (on which
pingis based) it often more heavily rate limited - or maybe even dropped - than "true" traffic, so you could get one latency value with it, and a completely other while really testing your application... – Patrick Mevzek – 2018-01-29T23:32:53.300Try at least
tracertwith the-noption to remove the DNS reverse queries (I hope it is the good switch, please double check). Is it your personal router or one rented by the ISP? They could apply restrictions to your connection (like dropping ICMP and traceroute UDP queries) either on the modem at your premises if it is theirs, or on their end of your connection. In the later case, there is nothing technically you could change (except monitoring differently). – Patrick Mevzek – 2018-01-29T23:36:02.620This for example would be a better alternative: https://www.measurementlab.net/tests/neubot/ ; check their others tests tools.
– Patrick Mevzek – 2018-01-29T23:42:29.010Thank you for your answers! I realized I need to learn more in order to understand all this. We used ongoing ping command (ping google.com -t) since forever and suddenly not working on 2 PCs messed this up entirely. Do you think this is the router's fault or do we need to contact our ISP? (This is a personal router, and yesterday I created a rule to allow the flow of ICMP, but it didn't change anything). About the game we play, we are trying to find something to monitor it effectively. – Andie – 2018-01-30T07:14:13.910
It may be your router or anything inside the ISP. You can ask them but they will at the end of the day finally just say that your service works (web, email, etc...) and that (if you hit a technical guy) ICMP traffic is not really part of the service given to you anyway, in the sense that even if it is completely blocked, your "normal" activities are not impacted (which is half of the truth but anyway).In short you will have a hard time convincing any customer facing ISP to take care of that. Hence my advices to monitor differently.Try traceroute on the TCP level instead (tcptraceroute on unix) – Patrick Mevzek – 2018-01-30T14:45:27.453
Thank you so much for your help! I'll try all of my options and see where they lead. – Andie – 2018-01-30T23:20:04.910