Tomble's Journal: Fautly Connection

OK, this one's driving me fucking mad.

My first clues that something was going wrong started several months ago. Our ISP always disconnects us after 120 minutes without fail, as a matter of policy. Very occasionally, when reconnecting, I'd find the new connection didn't seem to work right somehow, but I wasn't sure what was going on. I assumed it was the p2p client I was using at the time, not always being able to deal with the change in IP address.

Since then, early this year, I realised when using more conventional internet stuff, that I wasn't able to resolve any domain names. I looked further into it, and found the problem seemed to be that I was getting connections that somehow didn't have any routes defined. It was working such that when I gave the "route" command, it'd just sit there indefinitely until I killed it! The routeless state remained until I disconnected. Reconnecting again, it seemed to work. But I soon found that the screw ups became more and more frequent.

Now, I'm inclined to blame Freeserve (hock-ptui!) as they clearly changed something that made shit break, but my parent's Windows machines don't seem affected, and it's pretty obvious the route command shouldn't be acting that way. If there's no route, it should be less shit about it. Although of course the route command is just a symptom. Probably.

Well, I'm getting a bit desparate now, because just now when I tried to get online it took me about TEN TIMES of "connect, test route, disconnect, wait a few minutes, start again" before I got a working connection, and I don't see it getting any better. A few weeks ago I tried upgrading the ppp packages to the ones from Debian/Testing, figuring there might have been a fix, but it made no difference. Does anybody know where this comes from?

(apologies for unanswered posts, I've not slept since, uh, some time yesterday, I don't know when, and I just had to rake the lawn this afternoon in the baking heat, and then I ended up stupidly double-posting what was meant to be a quick message in e2.com, and embarrasing the crap out of myself, then getting incredibly confused with opening too many browser windows trying to do I don't know what. What am I saying? Don't know... I'm saying I'm worn out and I'll be back tomorrow probably when I'm capable of writing more, and thinking, yes that's handy. I'm only writing this because, well, what I said before. Must sleep now. Bye)

(PS Apology for lack of coherence too. I'm sure you get the picture)