[mythtv-users] Zap2it - What's going on

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 09:57:16PM -0700, Jim Gifford wrote:
> Thanx for the responses.
> 
> 1 - Account is good to 11/03/2006
> 2 - The time that I had on this was a test run to see what's going on, 
> the original failure was at 2am PDT.
> 3 - Verified my network connection no issues there
> 4 - Did a traceroute to zap2it, looks like some routers are down.
> 
> Tracing route to 206.18.98.160.tms-idc.com [206.18.98.160]
> over a maximum of 30 hops:

I get a slightly different address (206.18.98.152), but that's not 
unusual.  It's probably just their DNS doing load-balancing.

It's not unusual for traceroute to fail.  A lot of routers ignore 
traceroute packets entirely or else they don't reset the TTL for 
the return packet and it gets killed on the way back.  You get 
better results with the tcptraceroute package because instead of 
requesting an ICMP ECHO they just send out "real" TCP packets with 
a low TTL and wait for the failure message to come back when the 
packet dies.  From where I'm sitting the last few hops look like 
this:

12  tbr1-cl1.cgcil.ip.att.net (12.122.10.5)  95.315 ms
13  gar3-p360.cgcil.ip.att.net (12.123.6.1)  92.537 ms
14  mdf1-gsr12-2-pos-7-0.chi1.attens.net (12.122.255.194)  93.782 ms
15  mdf1-bi8k-1-eth-2-2.chi1.attens.net (63.240.128.186)  95.636 ms
16  *
17  206.18.98.152.tms-idc.com (206.18.98.152) [open]  134.115 ms

This doesn't mean that the router at #16 is "down".  It just means 
that it didn't send back a message.  As you can see, though, the 
next hop worked just fine.

Try accessing labs.zap2it.com in your web browser.  If you get a 
"forbidden" page or an HTML "object does not exist" page then your 
route is OK.  A failed route would result in your browser saying 
that the host was unreachable.