SUBSIM server issue? USING "TRACEROUTE"

[Ships-R-Us]

At 10:04gmt 1/18 or 2:04am PST it appeared that Subsim.com had a problem. I could not log on. I was previously logged on prior to that time and after 90 minutes gave up. During that time I was able to go to the SUBSIM.com store and nowhere else. The problem occured imediately after sending Jimbuna a "pm", as he had just logged on for the day a brief time before the time mentioned above.
AH?... Jimbuna tumbled the site?.....Maybe Europe was coming alive and all the new logins slowed things down, If so that is good to see that people enjoy SUBSIM with morning coffee or whatever they drink over there.

Anyway, for fun I did a traceroute to the home of SUBSIM, and everything was fine, right to Pearland, TX to Neals ip of 174.133.66.250.

The road from my home goes to my local server, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, ant to Neals place.

I am interested in two things. 1. Did anyone experience problems at the time mentioned?..........2. I am interested in viewing traceroute logs from several places in Europe to see if most of Europe jumps off the continent at the same location before entering the US, as well as the US entry point. Is their a "common" European hub that traffic passes through? I won't get into "MAN IN THE MIDDLE" stuff at this time, but I believe that
in certain third world countrys and perhaps the US for outgoing and incoming traffic it is possible to determine by a time delay in the routing that the traffic is being examined. That is another subject and not the intent of this thread.

I have posted my tracelog and instructions for assistance. If people from all the various countrys post a tracelog here we may see some interesting patterns........Ships...

[SteamWake]

Wouldent it be easier to let someone know?

Really so much fuss about a brief outage.

[Ships-R-Us]

Sir I did not know for sure that there was an outage. It did not bother me. When and who should I have let know?? You hoprfully are not suggesting I telephone Neal. That is a bad thing to do.

You missed the most important aspect of this thread. It can be very interesting......

[Raptor1]

Well, Subsim was out for quite a while today (Yesterday), it's common occurance by now. I do believe Neal killed off the larger threads in an attempt to stop it too.

[Ships-R-Us]

Raptor1, Thank-you very much for the reply. I really do not understand the computer stuff on Neals end. I am ignorant. Is that something like "his" big computer got bogged down with clutter, similiar to the game slowing down? Thanks for the reply...........Looking more like Jimbuna overloaded it, Hi Hi.
Anyway, I hope to see some tracelogs. The routing paths are very interesting to certain groups of people

[Ships-R-Us]

If you send me the ip of your server from various countries, and hopefully from more than one in each country, I will trace the routes and post the interesting results......

[Raptor1]

What is so interesting about traceroutes?

[CaptainHaplo]

Ships - I strongly would advise anyone with any privacy concerns NOT to post a traceroute. For one - it tells a knowledgeable person where the main net hub you use is - which is like basically saying what is the closest major city to where you live. For some, that isn't something they choose to share.

Traceroutes just show you the path your data took to get to its location. Most competent engineers that are not responsible for major hub routers will stealth their info - meaning you will get to your location, but you won't get any data from the router as it passes on the packets.

If you have any questions about networking, traceroutes, pings, etc - feel free to PM me and I will answer as I can.

As for the downtime - it could be any number of things. The main page as well as the forums were down, so it could have been a number of things. If the whole site is run off one machine, the web service may have hiccupped, or the connection to the machine was unavailable, a db process may have locked the pc, etc. When you have something like this site, there are alot of pieces that work together. One fails, and it can cascade. If anything, Neal and anyone that works with him to keep the site up does rather well on the shoestring they have.

[Ships-R-Us]

CaptainHaplo, Thank you much for the excellent information reference to "stealth" etc. You bring up an excellent point regarding privacy.

It would have been interesting if nothing else to see how many jump off points there in Europe as well as how many incoming point there are in the US.

You have much more knowledge than myself. I suggest people heed the Captains advice for privacy reasons. .Shipsrus

[CaptainHaplo]

A decade ago, most global traffic went through the US. European to Far Eastern traffic for example. Nowadays, that has changed somewhat, though we are a pass through for alot of the data. As for how many entry/exit nodes exist - its ALOT in today's world. Because over the ocean data in both directions goes by satellite, the number of nodes with "orbital" capability has jumped by orders of magnitudes. Theoretically, every person that gets their internet by satellite is such a node, because the satellite itself does no routing, but instead is simply a "signal repeater" in a sense. I don't know about Europe, but alot of US citizens access the internet via satellite (though the overall percentage would be small).

You can't use traceroute to find how many nodes, because different routers may use different routing protocols. Without getting technical, some use the "least # of hops" to the destination to figure out the path, while others use "fastest path" (which in theory are the same but in reality are not), while still others may use a static route - meaning data can only go to a limited number of other routers. It gets really convoluted once you start thinking that each router you hit may change the path your data takes because the next router may be set to pass that data in a different manner.

If your really interested in this stuff, look up the following:

Rip / Rip II
OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol)
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
EGP (External Gateway Protocol)

Don't be suprised if most of what you find is technical in nature. If you really want to dig and learn in the networking field, the best thing I could suggest without spending a ton of money would be looking into openly available network training documents.