Need Some People to Do a Ping Test

Originally Posted by JustinH
Can the OP just use google public DNS and be done with it?

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

You don't need to use your ISP's DNS servers.


I'd be far more inclined to use Cisco's OpenDNS or CloudFlare than Google.
 
+1 on that DNS Bench program. It will tell you the best DNS servers for you to use and the ones that even if have better ping is dropping packets. You can point your router to any DNS servers you like
 
Yeah the DNS bench program may be good, but are those DNS servers reliable?

Or will they go down, and you are left troubleshooting..

Also where is your DNS information going to?

I wouldn't just enter random DNS servers into my system without figuring out who the company is and what their policy is.

Unless you are the type that likes to mess with DNS, I would think that the average user isn't going to see a huge increase in speed between most of the major DNS providers.
 
Originally Posted by wwillson
Very flaky hosts. Many ISP DNS servers are unreliable. use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8

[root@debian ~]# ping 205.171.2.25
PING 205.171.2.25 (205.171.2.25) 56(84) bytes of data.


Shouldn't you exit to a normal user terminal and "sudo ping"?
lol.gif
 
Originally Posted by JustinH
Yeah the DNS bench program may be good, but are those DNS servers reliable?

Or will they go down, and you are left troubleshooting..

Also where is your DNS information going to?

I wouldn't just enter random DNS servers into my system without figuring out who the company is and what their policy is.

Unless you are the type that likes to mess with DNS, I would think that the average user isn't going to see a huge increase in speed between most of the major DNS providers.


Typically you put in the DNS servers you are considering using, like OpenDNS, Cloudflare, Google and your ISP's and see which one yields the best performance. The pre-populated ones aren't a suggestion as much as they are simply a reference point.
 
Having used that DNS Bench before a few times USUALLY the ISP has the best servers because they are inside their network. But if they are small and off the wall outfit you can set the primary to a fast high availability server and put your slower ISP DNS ans secondary or Tertiary for failover.

Also take note if using that tool if you notice lost packets to more DNS servers it can indicate that your network or ISP is dropping packets. This lock-down and everybody at home may be overloading you local pipe and the guy down she street using bit torrent isn't helping
 
ZeeOSix -

One thing providers do with DNS is host the same IP at different geographic locations on separate servers (or load balance it across many, many servers in a geographic location - across multiple locations). This reduces latency when performing DNS lookups. So when you have folks ping the IPs listed (205.171.2.25 and 205.171.3.25), they may not be communicating with the same server you are. Your test results may vary and may not indicate anything of note in regards to your situation.

OpenDNS had a nice paper on how they implemented this, if you're interested. *edit - here's the OpenDNS paper - https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/high-availability-with-anycast-routing

So, going back to your call with the CenturyLink agent, they may not have been aware of this. So, the server they were querying may have been different than the one you were querying, causing conflicting results and them to say "everything's fine". The only way to determine if there is an issue is to get someone higher up the support chain who understands this.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted by uc50ic4more
Originally Posted by wwillson
Very flaky hosts. Many ISP DNS servers are unreliable. use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8

[root@debian ~]# ping 205.171.2.25
PING 205.171.2.25 (205.171.2.25) 56(84) bytes of data.


Shouldn't you exit to a normal user terminal and "sudo ping"?
lol.gif



[Linked Image]
 
Originally Posted by cpayne5
ZeeOSix -

One thing providers do with DNS is host the same IP at different geographic locations on separate servers (or load balance it across many, many servers in a geographic location - across multiple locations). This reduces latency when performing DNS lookups. So when you have folks ping the IPs listed (205.171.2.25 and 205.171.3.25), they may not be communicating with the same server you are. Your test results may vary and may not indicate anything of note in regards to your situation.

OpenDNS had a nice paper on how they implemented this, if you're interested. *edit - here's the OpenDNS paper - https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/high-availability-with-anycast-routing

So, going back to your call with the CenturyLink agent, they may not have been aware of this. So, the server they were querying may have been different than the one you were querying, causing conflicting results and them to say "everything's fine". The only way to determine if there is an issue is to get someone higher up the support chain who understands this.


Very easy to check with a few traceroutes typically. It's usually only large ISP's and providers like Cisco, Cloudflare, Google...etc somebody that provides DNS over a vast geographic or even global region that will invest the money in doing a large-scale distributed setup.

It would seem that the OP, who is on the network where those DNS server are located, and those of us who have tested from abroad, are getting similar results, so if it is distributed, then we have distributed garbage
lol.gif
Because the responses are not consistent regardless of where the ICMP traffic comes from.
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by cpayne5
ZeeOSix -

One thing providers do with DNS is host the same IP at different geographic locations on separate servers (or load balance it across many, many servers in a geographic location - across multiple locations). This reduces latency when performing DNS lookups. So when you have folks ping the IPs listed (205.171.2.25 and 205.171.3.25), they may not be communicating with the same server you are. Your test results may vary and may not indicate anything of note in regards to your situation.

OpenDNS had a nice paper on how they implemented this, if you're interested. *edit - here's the OpenDNS paper - https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/high-availability-with-anycast-routing

So, going back to your call with the CenturyLink agent, they may not have been aware of this. So, the server they were querying may have been different than the one you were querying, causing conflicting results and them to say "everything's fine". The only way to determine if there is an issue is to get someone higher up the support chain who understands this.


Very easy to check with a few traceroutes typically. It's usually only large ISP's and providers like Cisco, Cloudflare, Google...etc somebody that provides DNS over a vast geographic or even global region that will invest the money in doing a large-scale distributed setup.

It would seem that the OP, who is on the network where those DNS server are located, and those of us who have tested from abroad, are getting similar results, so if it is distributed, then we have distributed garbage
lol.gif
Because the responses are not consistent regardless of where the ICMP traffic comes from.


Yeah, it may very well be distributed garbage. But, the CL agent wasn't seeing the same results (whether they knew what they were doing or not), which makes it a variable in the equation that's worth mentioning.

CL has service areas across the US, so I'm sure they've deployed anycast dns. I would hope any provider that's anything more than a regional would do so.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted by cpayne5
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by cpayne5
ZeeOSix -

One thing providers do with DNS is host the same IP at different geographic locations on separate servers (or load balance it across many, many servers in a geographic location - across multiple locations). This reduces latency when performing DNS lookups. So when you have folks ping the IPs listed (205.171.2.25 and 205.171.3.25), they may not be communicating with the same server you are. Your test results may vary and may not indicate anything of note in regards to your situation.

OpenDNS had a nice paper on how they implemented this, if you're interested. *edit - here's the OpenDNS paper - https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/high-availability-with-anycast-routing

So, going back to your call with the CenturyLink agent, they may not have been aware of this. So, the server they were querying may have been different than the one you were querying, causing conflicting results and them to say "everything's fine". The only way to determine if there is an issue is to get someone higher up the support chain who understands this.


Very easy to check with a few traceroutes typically. It's usually only large ISP's and providers like Cisco, Cloudflare, Google...etc somebody that provides DNS over a vast geographic or even global region that will invest the money in doing a large-scale distributed setup.

It would seem that the OP, who is on the network where those DNS server are located, and those of us who have tested from abroad, are getting similar results, so if it is distributed, then we have distributed garbage
lol.gif
Because the responses are not consistent regardless of where the ICMP traffic comes from.


Yeah, it may very well be distributed garbage. But, the CL agent wasn't seeing the same results (whether they knew what they were doing or not), which makes it a variable in the equation that's worth mentioning.

CL has service areas across the US, so I'm sure they've deployed anycast dns. I would hope any provider that's anything more than a regional would do so.


Yup, it may very well be that the actual distributed setup is the common thread, and source of the issue. Some ISP's spend a depressingly small amount of money on things like DNS.

Interesting side note: My enterprise fiber provider doesn't do DNS at all. Customers are expected to either use their own or a 3rd party.
 
BTW, despite the craptacular ICMP responses, not surprisingly, responses to actual DNS queries appear to be reasonably decent:

[Linked Image]
 
Same as others, 2.25 times out every time (tried 8 times), 3.25 is fine (also done 8 times).

I set my router to cloudfare's 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 and then google's 8.8.8.8.

I had been using Opendns's Family Shield (208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123) for quite a while to help keep the house "clean" from accidental surfing/searching when the kids were younger, but now that they are older and we have had several talks, I don't use it anymore.
 
5/27/20 155100 hrs

>> VFYTCPCNN RMTSYS('205.171.2.25')
Verifying connection to host system 205.171.2.25.
No response from host within 1 seconds for connection verification 1.
No response from host within 1 seconds for connection verification 2.
No response from host within 1 seconds for connection verification 3.
No response from host within 1 seconds for connection verification 4.
No response from host within 1 seconds for connection verification 5.
Connection verification statistics: 0 of 5 successful (0 %).

>> VFYTCPCNN RMTSYS('205.171.3.25')
Verifying connection to host system 205.171.3.25.
PING reply 1 from 205.171.3.25 took 14 ms. 256 bytes. TTL 51.
PING reply 2 from 205.171.3.25 took 14 ms. 256 bytes. TTL 51.
PING reply 3 from 205.171.3.25 took 14 ms. 256 bytes. TTL 51.
PING reply 4 from 205.171.3.25 took 14 ms. 256 bytes. TTL 51.
PING reply 5 from 205.171.3.25 took 14 ms. 256 bytes. TTL 51.
Round-trip (in milliseconds) min/avg/max = 14/14/14.
Connection verification statistics: 5 of 5 successful (100 %).
 
So for some reason the CenturyLink tech I was live chatting on-line with yesterday must have passed on my concerns yesterday. I woke up this morning to a text from CenturyLink that they "reset" my modem (!), and that they can "ping" my modem. I never ask them or gave them permission to reset my modem. None of my WiFi devices were working tthis morning of course, so I had to spend an hour tweaking and testing everything to make sure they worked again. The good news is the unknown mystery MAC address I discussed in my other thread was gone - strange.

And when I went to change my log-in username from the default it would never take the change, no matter what I tried (like a dozen different sequences using 3 different browsers). I finally dug up a old configuration file I had saved about 5 months ago and uploaded it to the modem and it restored my custom username that way. What a mess, lol. A suggestion to others reading this - if your modem can save and download a configuration file, save one every time you make setting changes you want to keep.

Originally Posted by irad
Try this website. www.speedtest.net/ Do this from a computer as close to the provider modem. Either plug into the modem or use the router just off the modem. Hardwired connections eliminate wifi problems. You can use this site as a way of diagnosing your house internet delivery versus provider modem.


I've done probably 20 speed tests in the last couple days, and they all look good, and show the speeds my download and upload speeds should be. My internet seems to work fine, it's just that the modern's self diagnostics keeps showing "Fail" on the CenturyLink DNS servers. DNS 205.171.2.25 always fails, just like all the people doing ping tests shows, so I'm pretty sure the diagnostics test is seeing ping time outs and reports a "Fail" test status. DNS 205.171.3.25 fails about half the time in the diagnostics test.

I'll probably setup OpenDNS on this modem and see if it makes any difference, but since my internet and all WiFi devices work good I might leave it as is. This modem is getting long in the tooth, so I might just buy a new one sometime soon.

So a question I have is, does a flakey DNS server actually impact the results of a speed test besides the initial connection steps to the server doing the speed test. Doesn't all the DNS do is allow the computer to find it's way to connect to the webpage server you're interested in. Once you're connected, like to speedtest.net, then the speed of your connection has nothing to do with the DNS. If I wrong on that, can someone clarify?
 
For a speed test, no not really. It will only impact the initial loading of the site, in my case with Comcast's default DNS servers it would sometimes hang for a second before loading the page.

For example, I'd go to Speedtest.net, it would hang for a second or 2 (at least that's what it felt like), and then load and act normal giving me the speeds I should be seeing. Since changingw my DNS servers, that initial "lag" is gone, which makes browsing the web feel a little snappier.

As for them changing/pinging your modem, Comcast has us completely locked out, even if we own our modem. All I can do is view signal levels, read the logs, and restart my modem. If I contact tech support they can remotely "ping" the modem and see what it's trying to do, as well as see the signal levels on their end and the logs. They cannot change anything on the router though.
 
Originally Posted by ZeeOSix
So a question I have is, does a flakey DNS server actually impact the results of a speed test besides the initial connection steps to the server doing the speed test. Doesn't all the DNS do is allow the computer to find it's way to connect to the webpage server you're interested in. Once you're connected, like to speedtest.net, then the speed of your connection has nothing to do with the DNS. If I wrong on that, can someone clarify?


Yes, that's a proper take.
 
Thanks to all who did ping tests ... pretty much shows that the CenturyLink DNS servers are unstable. Maybe with all the people I talked to at CenturyLink it will get someone there to look into their DNS performance.
 
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