Internet question: bad server between me and where I need to get to, what to do?

Factual Questions
1

Mr. Athena works from home. He uses a VPN to get to his company every day, which is physically located many states away from us.

Lately, he’s been experiencing really bad connection rates. Today, things have come to a halt. He cannot reliably connect to what he needs to connect to.

We run a tracert between him and the IP he sets his VPN to, and it times out on the 12th hop every time. The 11th hop is to a server on Level3’s network (ae-11-53.car1.Washington1.Level3.net, 4.68.121.8)

Is there any way to see what it’s trying to connect to on #12? All we see is “12 * * * Request timed out.”

What do we do? How do we fix this? Our ISP has been no help - they say there’s not much they can do when it’s 12 hops away. Help!

2

A timeout in a traceroute doesn’t really mean anything. Many routers are configured to drop exhausted TTLs rather than bounce them back in order to obscure the structure of the network.

If there is a network problem, the host on the other end is probably aware of it and it will get fixed eventually. There’s also a chance it’s a problem with the VPN itself, in which case your employers IT department should look into it.

3

To clarify: the tracert dies at the same place every time. It’s not one time out - it’s about fifteen of them, followed by “General failure.” It never recovers. It cannot get where we need it to go.

Our ISP says it’s out of their hands. The company on the other end says it’s not their problem either. Somewhere out in the middle there’s a bad server that’s been bad for at least three weeks now, and seems to have died today.

“It’ll be fixed eventually” doesn’t hold much gas when it’s the only connection between you and your employer. If we can’t get this fixed pretty soon, we’re hosed. This is equivalent to telling your boss that you can’t come in to work because there’s no road between you and the office. It just ain’t gonna fly for much longer.

Is there anything we can do?

4

Try to connect via a proxy, such as
http://www.hrmovie.com/

5

I don’t see how going through a HTTP proxy is going to help with a VPN problem…

6

Yeah I’m wondering about that as well.

7

I had an issue a few weeks ago getting to a particular website, I was timing out on my 14th hop…using a proxy I was able to get there…

I’m guessing that the proxy site was routing to the site through a different path, which allowed me to bypass the bad hop.

8

Does his employment contract cover this kinda thing?

You could try using a different ISP (if you have a laptop - try connecting from a starbucks or something) to see how widespread the problem is. If he’s seriously going to loose his job, then changing ISP’s is a viable solution I guess.