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Frobozz Has The Right Connection

Staus Dump, SDSL

A Business Style SDSL Connection

This status dump (right) from my Cisco 678 DSL modem/router shows the connection speed and a few other interesting pieces of information.

The downstream data rate and the upstream data rate are both are 640 kbps. For server operation the upstream data rate is critical, which is just the opposite of what home users typically need. As a point of reference; a T1 line is 1,544 Kbps for both upstream and downstream.

Another interesting piece of information is the local SNR margin. This is a measure of the quality of the connection, higher is better. The phone company tells me that 12 dB is minimum necessary to have a workable signal. 38.5 dB looks like an exceptionally clean wire, in two years I have never had any trouble with the wire itself.

Backbone, Router Hops, And Ping Times

You can learn quite a lot about the status of chunks of the Internet using a traceroute tool. On April 6th, 2003 I did four traceroutes. Two from a remote website that features many web-enabled network tools, Sam Spade . And two from my PC using a tool downloaded from Sam Spade, called Sam Spade for Windows . There are several different possible techniques for doing a traceroute and the Sam Spade tool seems to give more consistant results than the command line tool built into Windows 2000 (called tracert).

Here is a rather fanciful description of how traceroute works courtesy of Sam Spade. this description features pirates (packets) with parrots (ICMP Time Exceeded packets) on their shoulders and hunters with shotguns (router configuration). This last part explains the final result of trying to trace from my PC to Sam Spade.

From Sam Spade (www.samspade.org), I traced back to my main Internet server, Gobo (who's canonical name is gobo.skunkwks.net). I also traced from Sam Spade to auth.activeworlds.com which is the machine ActiveWorlds Corporation is using as their Uniserver. Then I traced from my PC to www.samspade.org and finally, from my PC to auth.activeworlds.com. Results are shown as screen captures in the commented popups below...

from Sam Spade to Frobozz

from Sam Spade to ActiveWorlds

from Frobozz to Sam Spade

from Frobozz to ActiveWorlds

The bottom line is that I've got a pretty good connection, with my servers only two router hops from a major Internet backbone. The slowest link (about a 50 ms delay, which is 1/20th of a second) is the SDSL connection between Corbett Systems and myself. Which is under my control, all I need to do is get that T1 line...

Other Frobozz Network Resources

I have the address range 208.216.106.144 through 208.216.106.159. As with normal IP operation, the first and last addresses are unusable. Also Corbett uses my .145 address on their router (my Cisco 678 is set to bridging mode). My SonicWall firewall is using address .146. My currently assigned server addresses are .147 and up. While my HP smart switch has address .158, and our personal machines use addresses .157 and down. There are a few unused addresses in the middle. Useful for future expansion and a tiny DHCP pool for house guests who bring their own computer.

My "base" domain name (if you want to call it that) is skunkwks.net. I have ns1.skunkwks.net (.147) and ns2.skunkwks.net (.148) registered with Verisign as name servers. All my IP addresses resolve to names in the skunkwks.net domain space. However at the time of this writing, Corbett has "lost" all their reverse DNS records (I think the story was they tried to move them from Microsoft DNS to BIND, and they've not put a priority on fixing them). For forward name resolution, all other "host.domain.tld" names are aliased (using CNAME records) and resolve to hosts in the skunkwks.net name space.

nslookup

For example, the screen shot to the left shows the results of using the Windows 2000 command-line tool nslookup to do a forward lookup of www.frobozz.ws. Since this domain name is an alias of gobo.skunkwks.net. You get two answers (in the same packet), gobo.skunkwks.net as the canonical name and 208.216.106.148 as the address.

Get Your Own Network Tools And Have Some Fun

If you are running Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux, or something like *BSD, then you already have a nice set of command-line network tools. If you're using Windows 95/98/SE/ME you won't have much of anything useful for network debugging and exploration beyond ping or using the whois web site. Never fear, Steve at SamSpade.org has created a really nice all-in-one tool for any version of 32-bit Windows (Windows 95 and above) that is much easier to use than the aforementioned collection of command-line tools. It's freeware, so if you're curious, go ahead and get the tool and have some fun. He calls it Sam Spade for Windows .