Hopping Mad.
I run a multi-WAN environment, yesterday it started dropping, anywhere from every 10 to every 20 minutes my PFSense router would flag the service as down, and then before the full switch over, the failover could occur the heartbeat would come back.
This was of course killing IRC/FTP/SSH usage, anything stateful - causing various file transfers to die mid-stream, killing processing requests, compiles and alike because of the death of the connection.
CenturyLink claimed there were no problems on the line, so I started trying to debug my homebrew router, my beloved Cerberus. Having made no changes, a possible NIC failure? Nope.
Finally got to the root of the cause, in February 2012 CenturyLink instituted a Excessive Use Policy, if I exceed 150GB/250GB in a month they warn you that you are exceeding limits.
The problem is that the excessive use notification system kills your net connection for a couple minutes. For normal consumers, this causes a HTML balloon to be thrown, but if you run an IDS system behind your provided modem/router it just makes you think you are going mad.
I don't like these EUP policies, especially now that they have gradients to get you to upgrade your service, making them nothing more than marketing mechanisms. But they appear to be part of the evolving landscape, and complaining is like tilting at windmills. The crown goes to Century Link though, to make your net service unusable, and to not be able to identify this as a symptom of their new policy is inexcusable. This cost me several hours that I could of used do real work, an expensive distraction.
So if you see this behavior, that is the likely cause. There is no reason to see if you are able to put router into orbit by simply throwing it really hard.
Cerberus survived this ordeal.
I run a multi-WAN environment, yesterday it started dropping, anywhere from every 10 to every 20 minutes my PFSense router would flag the service as down, and then before the full switch over, the failover could occur the heartbeat would come back.
This was of course killing IRC/FTP/SSH usage, anything stateful - causing various file transfers to die mid-stream, killing processing requests, compiles and alike because of the death of the connection.
CenturyLink claimed there were no problems on the line, so I started trying to debug my homebrew router, my beloved Cerberus. Having made no changes, a possible NIC failure? Nope.
Finally got to the root of the cause, in February 2012 CenturyLink instituted a Excessive Use Policy, if I exceed 150GB/250GB in a month they warn you that you are exceeding limits.
The problem is that the excessive use notification system kills your net connection for a couple minutes. For normal consumers, this causes a HTML balloon to be thrown, but if you run an IDS system behind your provided modem/router it just makes you think you are going mad.
I don't like these EUP policies, especially now that they have gradients to get you to upgrade your service, making them nothing more than marketing mechanisms. But they appear to be part of the evolving landscape, and complaining is like tilting at windmills. The crown goes to Century Link though, to make your net service unusable, and to not be able to identify this as a symptom of their new policy is inexcusable. This cost me several hours that I could of used do real work, an expensive distraction.
So if you see this behavior, that is the likely cause. There is no reason to see if you are able to put router into orbit by simply throwing it really hard.
Cerberus survived this ordeal.
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