Best way to troubleshoot intermittent network outages?
- by Ben Scheirman
We have a Comcast 50/10 line into our office. We keep seeing very short but sometimes frequent drops in our internet service. It's enough to kick you off of skype and stop any websites from loading, which is obviously affecting our productivity.
We've tried 4 different routers, we've tried moving everyone off of wireless and onto wired via a switch and so far nothing has helped. Right now we're on a Cisco SB WRP400-G1 router. Attached to the router is a 16 port switch going to the ports in all of the offices.
We've moved to OpenDNS in the case that it was the comcast DNS servers going down.
Today we tried putting the modem, router, and switch on a UPS to make sure it wasn't power fluctuations that was causing it.
Every time we call Comcast, by the time they are here the internet is working fine.
I'd like to somehow prove that the problem is with Comcast, so if that means plugging in a machine directly into their router and collecting data all day, I'm up for that. I just want to hear ideas on what tools to run and how to collect this data.
I could just continuously ping google.com all day long but I'm not sure how valuable that data would be.
Thoughts?
