Hi Paul, Thanks for reaching out. I actually got a message from Virgin this morning saying that they've got network engineers looking into the problem (better late than never I guess), so with any luck things will be back to normal soon.
But I just did a quick bit of testing and it doesn't seem like the size of the packets make a difference (literally going down to 1 byte from the default 32...) At time of writing, I can't ping bbc.co.uk at all with any sized packets, but pinging uknof.org.uk works with any sized packets. ...And just after typing up the paragraph above, I'm able to ping 151.101.192.81 (bbc.co.uk) with packets up to 1472 bytes, but no higher. I still can't ping the name though. Cheers, Matt ________________________________ From: Paul Bone <paul@pmb.technology> Sent: 03 July 2020 15:26 To: Matt Carlin <m...@carlin.one> Cc: uknof@lists.uknof.org.uk <uknof@lists.uknof.org.uk> Subject: Re: [uknof] Virgin Media DNS issues North London Hi Matt, That sounds suspiciously like an MTU issue in the Virgin Media Network - I had this happen to one of my core network links when VM made a mistake on a configuration change. Have you tried checking the size of pings you can send to various IPv4 addresses without fragmentation? I can't help you get in touch with Virgin Media though I'm afraid! Paul On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 at 15:19, Matt Carlin <m...@carlin.one> wrote: Evening all, I hope an email of this nature is allowed, but I apologise if it's not (though I would still appreciate the help!) I'm hoping to bring to someone's attention a network issue which started Sunday evening and is affecting parts of North London (N13, N14, N21 and surroundings). I work in IT so I consider myself to be quite technical, but there's only so much I can do as a consumer in this situation and I don't know anyone who works for Virgin. My suspicion - based on our symptoms - is that there's a localised DNS or routing issue affecting the areas I mentioned. Symptoms include slow or failing DNS resolution and slow or failing connections to a range of servers/services (WebEx, Zoom, Discord, my Citrix desktop using Citrix Workspace). Actual download speeds, latency, and jitter all seem fine when I use speed test websites (when I manage to get onto them), and I can download large files at full speeds (when I manage to establish a connection to the server). Using different DNS settings on my devices does not work (verified by other people), but using a VPN to tunnel out of Virgin's network does mostly get around the DNS resolution and connection issues (also verified by other people), albeit not perfect. The fact that using a VPN gets around the issues for the most part is why I think it's DNS/routing, but I'm not a network engineer so I'm happy to be better educated on the subject. Dozens - if not hundreds - of people are complaining about these issues on social media and the Virgin Media forums, but the complaints are falling on deaf ears. Customer service reps try to connect to our Virgin hubs and see them offline when they are actually very much online - but this is because of the aforementioned issues. They did put out an incident number for the area on Tuesday, but I was told that an "engineer" went out to investigate and couldn't see any problems, so they lifted the incident status... I continue bashing my head against a wall trying to get these issues properly escalated to a team that can actually troubleshoot DNS and networking problems, but no one seems interested in hearing what I'm saying. I sincerely apologise for the ranty nature of my email, but it's been an extremely frustrating experience, especially while trying to work from home in these times. I'm just reaching out to see if there's anyone here who works for Virgin Media, or knows someone who does, and if they'd be kind enough to look into these issues on behalf of myself and several post code's worth of people in North London. I'm happy to be contacted off list if anyone fancies reaching out. Thank you for reading. Matt Carlin -- Paul Bone Network Consultant PMB Technology
