Astraweb: Here we go again (BOTH US and EU plants)

[Beck38]

Something has to have 'gone off the rails' for at least 6+ hours before I 'send up a flare' anymore, but here we go again on something that is affecting BOTH plants, and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

Started at around 8am San Jose (US Server Plant time), and I noticed almost right away that the EU (Amsterdam) plant was acting 'dodgy' as well. Checked out the high end spread (Giganews) no problems whatsoever so it's not me or any transmission problems (at least not the usual kinds, although I did get hit weeks ago with the Cicso router problems around SF/SJ that seem to have been first routed around and then fixed 2-3 weeks ago).

At some point, I think I'm going to give up on these folks and 'pay the man' (Giganews) completely and forget about these folks.

NEW INFO: you may (or may not) believe this, but about 15min after submitting a ticket, both plants started working (at least in the minimal tests I did). Either they have my account on 'rapid response' or ...

I'll do some more bulk checking in a bit.

[myself12345]

Its been like this for over a month now more so the EU server

Its was typical for them to have hiccups now and then but lately been ridiculous

Waiting for the day they just implode because they're incompetent when it comes to fixing things properly.

[Beck38]

They (US plant) seem to fall out of the tree about once a week on average, but actually the latest really big screw-up was with Level3 in SF (and actually Cisco) with bad router programming that had existed for several years but didn't rear it's head until the route tables got to a certain (high) point; it took them (Level3) almost two weeks to route things around (actually took the traffic down to LA then back up to SF to get around the particular Cisco router causing the problem).

So it really wasn't Astra's problem per se., but they should have been a bit more proactive in beating on Level3 since that is their most major Tier1 provider; so perhaps they should have noticed it and yanked their traffic off of L3 and plopped it onto one of their other providers (like SprintNet for one). But I've got the sneaking thinking that they really don't have a transmission engineer at the San Jose facility who can yank their providers chain well enough to get some action when things like this occur.

But the SJ plant is the closest to me, although switching to Giganews in LA wouldn't be that much of a problem. Just triple the cost.

[Hypatia]

although switching to Giganews in LA wouldn't be that much of a problem. Just triple the cost.

Switch to Supernews then. It's giganews in disguise )

Although personally I wouldn't pay them even a cent. They ban usenet accounts (DMCA issues), their VPN is a useless pile of crap ( can't use for torrents and stuff) and their attitude towards their customers is despicable (no, no, it's not just lots and lots of missing articles, it's DMCA! Yeah, right. As if we don't know that nowadays releases get taken down completely if they are DMCAed. It seems they have found a perfect scapegoat ..). I'd rather bear with AW problems than support this company.

[Beck38]

All of which is (probably) why I only keep a very low cost (not available any more but I'm 'grandfathered') GN account that I'll 'switch' to when AW gets really really bad.

A plus in using them is that my VPN provider is located in the same 'telco hotel' building in LA that GN is in, so that may be a bit of a plus if I ever get really disgusted with AW and switch. Right now, AW/US/SJ is running straight and normal, so I calm down a bit, will have to hope that it will last more than a week or two.

[Beck38]

I could start 'yet another bad Astraweb' thread, but I'm too tired.

Astra/US 'flat line' for going on 4 hours today; yes, it's Sunday, but it's early Sunday and usually don't get stalls and such until around 6pm San Jose (US Pacific Time) or so. Today, it ground to a complete halt just before noon (12PM).

But 'flat line', I really mean FLAT LINE, virtually no activity at all from the plant, pinging the 'front end' is perfectly normal. Simply no throughput whatsoever.

[myself12345]

It was shit for like 5 hours last night also and just got home checked a couple group and they show 3 hours worth on incomplete and still messed up


edit
going on 7 hours now this is ridiculous

http://i.imgur.com/mAvyvpD.png

[Beck38]

It seems to have finally cleared up around 7-8pm (some 7-8 hours into it), and ran perfectly normal for about 24 hours, then started getting wacky (but not 'flat line') again around 8pm Monday evening (San Jose time).

As long as a plant has good propagation (which Astra/US has always had, I've never seen any gaps in that performance over at least a decade and a half of monitoring them), and the same with both Giga and Supernews (in the years before Astra, say a decade ago, I used Supernews for a long time before that, way back into the analog modem/56K days.

Well, I guess just 'let it run' and see if it cures itself.

[myself12345]

They replied back to me *We are not aware of any server issues at this moment* this was after they fixed the problem.
They blamed my setup i replied back and said if it was my setup it wouldn't mysteriously fix it self and countless others reporting the same problem...once i membership is up im done.