How I found my lost network packets (Ship It! #35)

Today Gerhard shares the entire story behind his lost packets. He is talking with Drew Marshall, director at Trunk Networks and No One Internet, a Cloud Services Provider & ISP based in Sussex, UK. Gerhard’s Vodafone ISP gateway was losing packets, and recording some of the previous episodes used to be challenging as his internet connection would cut out up to 10 seconds at a time, multiple times per recording session. He was convinced that his Unifi Dream Machine Pro was not the issue. Drew helped Gerhard realise that it actually was. Not only has Gerhard’s DNS latency improved by 3x, but he can now fail-over between two WAN connections. And because nothing beats a real-world experiment, you can guess what is coming in this episode 😉 You will find latency & packet loss graphs, speed test runs, and a few other interestings in the show notes. We hope that they inspire you to setup a better home network. Most importantly, may you find your humble & brilliant Drew.

Today Gerhard shares the entire story behind his lost packets. He is talking with Drew Marshall, director at Trunk Networks and No One Internet, a Cloud Services Provider & ISP based in Sussex, UK.

Gerhard’s Vodafone ISP gateway was losing packets, and recording some of the previous episodes used to be challenging as his internet connection would cut out up to 10 seconds at a time, multiple times per recording session. He was convinced that his Unifi Dream Machine Pro was not the issue. Drew helped Gerhard realise that it actually was. Not only has Gerhard’s DNS latency improved by 3x, but he can now fail-over between two WAN connections. And because nothing beats a real-world experiment, you can guess what is coming in this episode 😉

You will find latency & packet loss graphs, speed test runs, and a few other interestings in the show notes. We hope that they inspire you to setup a better home network. Most importantly, may you find your humble & brilliant Drew.

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Featuring:

Drew Marshall – Twitter, LinkedInGerhard Lazu – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website

Show Notes:

Gerhard’s issue with ISP gateway timeouts
Vodafone UK Community: Periodic 100% packet loss
Fair Internet Report: Trunk Networks
nefilim/pinger - simple network latency and packet loss monitor using Grafana and Prometheus
Grafana dashboard: Internet-QoS.json
MikroTik 5009UG text config export

ISP gateway timeouts - Unifi UDM Pro PPPoE - The initial problem in a screenshot

ISP gateway timeouts - Vodafone PPPoE - This is what the ISP-provided router experience looks like

ISP gateway timeouts - MikroTik RB2011 PPPoE

DNS latency with MikroTik RB5009 on Vodafone

Gerhard's MikroTik RB5009 setup

Gerhard's Unifi setup

Gerhard's Unifi network topology

Vodafone speedtest with MikroTik RB5009 - Primary connection

Trunk Networks speedtest with MikroTik RB5009 - Backup connection

Gerhard's MikroTik RB2011, 24 December 2012

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!