Intermittent connection problem

[jmmerliot]

Hi everybody,

I'm new here, and maybe I'm off topic ;-(

I started using serverbeach with a fedora core 1 system a few months ago, and for a long while it worked flawlessly. Services offered are POP3, SMTP and HTTP, using posftix and apache.

But a few weeks ago, problems started, from time to time, access to the server stopped working for a while, from a few seconds to a few minutes, either using http, pop3, smtp or ssh, sometimes http connection was impossible while I was using ssh on this server, sometimes http works but I lose my ssh connection. I checked and rechecked, I'm stuck there, and I have no idea what the problem could be.

It's really strange, trying to connect using firefox gives an error ( server not available ), just hitting reload and everything goes right, same problem with outlook express, error 0x800ccc0e, just retry and it works.

As I'm using this server from europe ( france, luxembourg and belgium ), I was wondering if it may be a routing problem, knowing frol time to time I have trouble accessing www.serverbeach.com too,but because quite often the problem is with an error I made I decided to ask if any of you may have a clue about what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help, ( and excuse my bad english )

JMM

[bow-wow]

You said it sometimes stops working for several minutes, have you/can you run a traceroute during this time to see where the trace stops?

It sounds to me like maybe some flaky hardware or a bad link between you and the SB network. It's just a matter of finding out where the problem is, so you know who to bug to get it fixed. I would start by trying to get a traceroute during the time you cannot access your server.

BTW, your english is very good :)

[jmmerliot]

That's a good idea, but it happens that even if my ssh connection is working perfectly, I'm totally unable to reach my http server, then what about a traceroute ? which way will it take ? AFAIK, the route is not fixed for ssh sessions, it's still packets going through the link routed as routing protocols decides, could it be that one route is flawed and not the others ?

JMM

PS
I'm glad to know my english is not that bad, you know I'm only a poor frog eater ;-)

[bow-wow]

It is an odd situation, but I think the traceroute still might be interesting. At least if it stalls or spikes on a certain hop you know where there is trouble. If you do enough traceroutes you should be able to see it take the "bad" route if that is the case. I think it's also possible that a bad router could be dropping packets at times. Perhaps it drops enough packets sometimes to prevent your http connection, but not enough to terminate your established ssh session?

I would like to see traceroutes and pings to your server and the www.serverbeach.com server at times when you are having trouble. That should help to narrow down the cause of the problem anyway.


Je ne suis que hypocrite américain, donc c'est certain que ton anglais est meilleur que mon français ;)

[jmmerliot]

OK, that's a good start I'm going to trace a few and I'll post my findings...

Thanks for your help,

JMM

PS
Your french is very good too, be careful, you may start a liking for frogs and garlic butter.