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On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 05:34:35PM -0500, Ehren Benson wrote:
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that the problems with
> MERIT are becoming more and more frequent and annoying. I have had
> difficulty doing things all day today and the past few times there have
> been intermittent failures. All the time I have been around msu I don't
> remember there being as many or as frequent of issues as there have been
> the past few months. What's up with that? Is their service headed
> south?
Yesterday's issues were somewhat curious. For most of the day, we observed
many instances where web sites would have difficulty loading, but a refresh
often loaded the missing items fairly consistently. Observations were that
streaming media generally worked without drops or delays, *if* the stream
started successfully.
All of this points to some type of network difficulty that would affect
the TCP "handshake" (the first 2-3 packets of a TCP transfer), and not
the remainder of a data transfer. We checked the network components that
we operate that were most suspect, and found nothing.
Yesterday, we were under the impression that this was a Merit network issue
due to an alert which Merit posted which was vague about the scope of the
particular issue. When Merit eventually clarified the scope, we found that
it was limited to a number of end sites in the Ann Arbor area only.
Today, we have not observed the same behavior, nor am I aware of user
reports similar to yesterday. So at this point, the nature of yesterday's
troubles, and why they cleared overnight or this morning, remain a mystery
to us.
We will dig into this, of course, if the troubles resurface.
Doug
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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/
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