On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 02:55:00PM -0400, Wendy Tate wrote:

> Hi there;
>
> Can anyone think of something that changed in the past week or so that would
> cause an incoming connection to an MSU computer to fail? One of our
> economists has called "VNC" set up on his Windows XP PC. He used this to set
> up an account so a user at the World Bank could access the computer.
> Suddenly it has stopped working. The computer has internet connectivity, but
> the remote machine can't get to it.
>
> The remote user sent me this paragraph:
>
> Mr. X's IP address is 35.10.68.(*). However this address has not been
> accessible from outside of the university -- cannot even be pinged -- for
> the past couple of days. The question is why. I tried to trace the route
> from the World Bank to his address and it failed at the point of reaching
> SPRINTLINK ( sl-gw19-rly-7-0-TS6.sprintlink.net
>
> [160.81.221.69] (unreachable). Thus I wonder if you may have a problem with
> your internet connection (I assume Sprint is your provider).
>
> Any ideas you might have would be welcome!

I don't believe anything should have changed on MSU's end that would be
affecting this type of connection.  As for doing a ping or traceroute from
an external address to MSU, that would be blocked at the MSU border router.
However, the last good IP address you should see in a traceroute would be
198.108.23.209 (ge-0-0-0x23.msu5.mich.net), not the SprintLink IP address.

I also see a failure on the SprintLink IP address 160.81.221.69 when doing
a trace from MSU, but that system may just be blocking ping/traceroute to
its own address.

If you can send me the remote user's IP address, I'll see if there's anything
further I can determine.

Doug

--


Doug Nelson, Network Manager             |  [log in to unmask]
Academic Computing and Network Services  |  Ph: (517) 353-2980
Michigan State University                |  http://www.msu.edu/~nelson/