Re: VMS and Comcast cable modem

From: John Gemignani, Jr. (john_at_nfw-invalid.cibtrikker.com)
Date: 02/16/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:53:41 -0500

"Gareth V. Williams" <graff@cfa0.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote in message
news:42139dcb@cfanews.cfa.harvard.edu...
> At home I have a broadband Comcast connection via a cable modem. The
> home machine is a PW600au running VMS V7.3-2 and TCPIP V5.4-15: it is
> connected to the cable modem via a router (the wife's PC is also
> connected to this router via a firewall router). I use my connection
> very extensively to SSH to my work machines at all hours, so I leave
> the connection on permanently. As is common with ISPs, the IP address
> of the home machine is obtained via DHCP.
>
> For the past six weeks, this connection has been uninterrupted (the last
> time it was done was when I had to shut the machine down to replace some
> faulty memory cards): until four days ago, when my sessions into the work
> machines froze. The home machine continued to function:
> TCPIP SHOW INTER WE0 showed packets being sent and received, but I could
> not type anything into the remote windows and those windows were not
> updated. This has now happened about ten times since then. The problem
> can be fixed by logging out, logging in as SYSTEM, running TCPIP$SHUTDOWN
> and TCPIP$STARTUP, and then logging back in as myself. But this is damn
> inconvenient and I'd like to understand what is going wrong before
> contacting Comcast, whose technical support staff have a very PC-centric
> view of the world.
>
> Two causes spring to mind:
>
> 1) My ethernet card is failing. This seems a tad unlikely, as I would
> expect to see errors in TCPIP SHOW INTER WE0/FULL and there aren't
> any.
>
> 2) Comcast has reconfigured something and this is causing the VMS IP
> stack to "get confused". A quick comparison of TCPIP SHOW NAME
> output on a work and home machine shows a subtle difference:
>
> a) work machine output
>
> $ tcpip show name
>
> BIND Resolver Parameters
>
> Local domain: cfa.harvard.edu
>
> System
>
> State: Started, Enabled
>
> Transport: UDP
> Domain: cfa.harvard.edu
> Retry: 4
> Timeout: 4
> Servers: 131.142.10.1, 128.103.200.101
> Path: No values defined
>
> b) home machine output
>
> $ tcpip show name
>
> BIND Resolver Parameters
>
> Local domain: hsd1.ma.comcast.net
>
> System
>
> State: Started, Enabled
>
> Transport: UDP
> Domain: hsd1.ma.comcast.net.
> Retry: 4
> Timeout: 4
> Servers: 204.127.202.19, 216.148.227.204
> Path: hsd1.ma.comcast.net.
>
> Note the full stop (periods) at the end of Domain: and Path: Is this
> punctuation valid? I note that the domain name now displayed is
> different from what I remember it being in the past.
>
> So my questions are:
>
> 1) Is the BIND output a clue to the cause?
>
> 2) Is anyone else in the Boston area with a Comcast cable modem also
> experiencing connectivity problems?
>
> Gareth
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Gareth V. Williams, MS 18, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
> Associate Director, IAU Minor Planet Center
> gwilliams@cfa.harvard.edu http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html
> OpenVMS & RISC OS: refined choices in operating systems

I was having similar problems with Adelphia when they changed their lease
times to 3 hours (and sometimes less). I would also lose telnet and ssh
sessions from my pc and/or laptop.

-John

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