[conspire] Comcast Business (ISP/Internet) and "their" equipment (3 and a half "nines" of availability?)

[Al]

The Comcast Business router has their own mods to the firmware. They 
probably didn't do it themselves,
they undoubtedly asked the vendor to do it.  However it took me a long 
time to learn to coexist with their firmware.
However now that I have the hang of it, it has been exceedingly 
reliable.  I am surprised that you had trouble pinging,
as normally I don't see those problems.  I test the Comcast router with 
a set of pings (to and through the router) every 60 seconds and keep a 
(very crude via email) record of failures.  They have become 
increasingly rare.  None this week.
The complete failures you are listing just shouldn't be happening. From 
my own encounters with their router, I would suggest using tcpdump or 
wireshark and making sure that what is happening is what you think it is.
Knowing you, you probably started there....

My 2c.

On 12/20/2019 03:24, Michael Paoli wrote:
> Well, got Comcast Business (ISP/Internet) installed 2019-12-12.
>
> start and end of errors:
> GW PING: ping 8.8.8.8 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:35:31+00:00
> BALUG PING: ping -6 2001:470:1f05:19e::2 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:36:29+00:00
> GW PING: ping 8.8.8.8 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:37:05+00:00
> BALUG PING: ping -6 2001:470:1f05:19e::2 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:38:02+00:00
> GW PING: ping 8.8.8.8 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:38:31+00:00
> BALUG PING: ping -6 2001:470:1f05:19e::2 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:39:29+00:00
> GW PING: ping 96.86.170.230 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:39:51+00:00
> GW PING: ping 8.8.8.8 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:40:06+00:00
> BALUG PING: ping -6 2001:470:1f05:19e::2 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:41:04+00:00
> GW PING: ping 96.86.170.230 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:41:29+00:00
> GW PING: ping 8.8.8.8 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:41:52+00:00
> BALUG PING: ping -6 2001:470:1f05:19e::2 FAILED 2019-12-19T18:42:50+00:00
>
> At present I'm using "their" equipment (fairly likely I'll change
> that in future, but for the shorter term it was the quicker easier path
> to get stuff up and running, and avoid any potential "finger pointing" as
> to where any issues might be).
>
> When the technician did the install, I asked him when rebooting the
> cable "modem" ("their" equipment), about how long it took to get fully
> back up and online.  He said (up to) about 5 minutes.
> At the very first power-up and check out, initially all seemed fine, ...
> then things stopped working for several (approximately 5?) minutes ...
> he soon realized what it was doing - had downloaded fresh firmware, 
> updated
> and was rebooting (resumed functioning after that) - that was 2019-12-12.
> And, as shown again, I see ... looks like (most) connectivity was
> lost for a bit over 5 minutes.  Also, my Raw Bandwidth ADSL service
> hasn't dropped yet ... but that's coming *real soon* (any time now).
> So, yes, my program also still monitors my Raw Bandwidth connectivity,
> most notably the associated gateway (GW) - didn't lose connectivity to
> that, and that's at the remote end of the ADSL link.  As far as I can
> tell - and guestimated by very low latency ping times, the Comcast 
> Business
> GW is, I believe, on the cable "modem" device.
> The ping check of 8.8.8.8 in my wee 'lil monitoring program - at present
> that just checks via default route (and default source IP) ... which at
> present is via Comcast Business.  If I explicitly set source to
> that of Raw Bandwidth (and likewise any return traffic from such), then
> that (thus far still) goes via Raw Bandwidth.
>
> So, in less than 10 days, already seem Raw Bandwidth has much higher
> uptime/reliability, than Comcast Business.
> If these "modem" reboots happen, uh, "automagically", and, oh, gee, maybe
> about weekly (guestimating frequency from behavior thus far), that means
> approximately 5 minutes of outage per week with Comcast Business ... on
> "their" (bloated, overfeatured, and for better and/or worse very highly
> capable cable "modem" device) device.  In over 16 years of service
> with Raw Bandwidth, outages were exceedingly rare, and generally very 
> short.
>
> "Just sayin'".
>
> Anyway, if/presuming I replace the Comcast Business provided hardware 
> with
> my own - not only will that save approximately $15.00/mo. (about 
> $20.00/mo.
> starting next year), with a much more minimalistic simplistic device,
> and me controlling if/when any firmware updates are done, that would 
> probably
> significantly increase net ISP uptime performance over Comcast Business.
> Oh, and ROI would be rather short too.  On 2019-12-12, I did quick
> peek/search on-line.  Between used, and brand spankin' new, street prices
> of *same* hardware (make & model) of what Comcast Business provides, as I
> (approximately) recall, seemed to range from about $25.00 to about
> $150.00.  So, not only short ROI, but even keepin' around a purchased
> in-warranty spare for redundancy, would be cheaper than Comcast 
> Business's
> rental, and cost could probably be further reduced with a much less
> feature bloated but sufficiently (minimalistic) capable device.
> "Of course", with "their" device, they (also) support it, with
> (my) "own equipment", their support ends at the end of the
> cable (but I'd be fine with that).  And, too, could always
> overlap for a short bit, to check and switch back and forth,
> and make sure all the relevant setup/configure bits for "own equipment"
> were fully determined and vetted and tested.
> Anyway, somethin' for me to investigate further 2020Q1 (already more than
> enough other stuff to keep me busy before then).
>
> About 5 minutes per week (guestimated frequency) outages ...
> $ echo '100-(5/(60*24*7)*100)' | bc -l
> 99.95039682539682539700
> $
> About 3 and a half "nines" of reliability/availability.
> (Hey, if I really wanted to bother, could actually gather and count
> up and measure the stats ... but not exactly all that high availability
> of site and virtual machine (BALUG(/SF-LUG/BerkeleyLUG)) ... there are
> also many other single points of failure (even if most of 'em don't
> fail all that regularly).
>
>
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