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I am unable to keep several types of long running connections open from my office LAN (ADSL) and I need to convince the service provider that there is a real problem. Standard pings and traceroutes do not indicate any issues, I need something more advanced.

Whenever I launch a long running MySQL query from my box (PHP or MySQL Workbench) over the ADSL line to a server on the Internet, the driver seems to disconnect. MySQL Workbench freezes and requires a force quit. PHP never returns any results and must be killed. The same query from my home works just fine, always.

Remote desktop connections over the ADSL line get dropped often and I need to reconnect 15 times a day. This does not happen from home. SSH connections also drop.

I am using a Mac but my colleague with Windows has the same problem. How can I diagnose and prove the problem?

GGGforce
  • 809

3 Answers3

4

You should try your route to the host, one tool to do that is mtr, a traceroute that shows you latency to each hop on the route.

In mac you can install with homebrew 

brew install mtr

then 

mtr example.com

And you would be able to see witch host is dropping packets.

Jorge Buchmann
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2

Pings should show the issue if you craft the ping request well enough, and leave it running in the background pointing it at a log file, for example;

ping -t -w 250 -4 -l 1024 google.com >> log.txt

will ping google.com with a 1k packet and a 250ms timeout. Some hosts will not accept packets larger than 32/64 bytes, but the larger the packet the better ping will simulate actual usage, and give you dropped packets if that is what is occurring. Don't worry about the size of the reply.

IceMage
  • 1,346
0

You could use a bandwidth monitor software, and run it over the course of 24hrs. This should give you a pretty precise reading of your bandwidth status.

Alternatively you could also copy the log for your ssh connections. As these disconnect upon every microcut, it should prove you are actually experiencing highly recurring connection loss.

The information form your ssh sessions will be in /var/log/system.log

and in Lion and earlier versions of OS X, the file would be in /var/log/secure.log

Hope that helps

BootFracture
  • 53