Too Much Information, by: David Haskell, Book Review

When I saw this book was available to be reviewed I was very excited. It looked very intriguing and I was looking forward to trying out a new genre. The book is very well written, but as I was reading it I slowly became aware that the techno thriller genre doesn't really capture my interest. It has great mystery and suspense but the subject just couldn't hold my attention.

I've started a new position at work so it may just be the fact that I have to much on my mind right now. I will be giving this book another go in the future, maybe in a few months. If you love techno thriller books then you should give this one a try. If you don't then this is probably not the book for you.

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

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VERIZON... What did you change?

For two years now, Digital Operatives has hosted some systems on Verizon FIOS.   Largely it has been trouble free.  That is until about a week ago.

About a week ago,  two employees (eventually 3) described an issue that they were having connecting to the mail server and ssh server residing on this network.

When connected via their home FIOS connection, they would be able to establish a TCP connection,  and then the connection would timeout before any meaningful data could be communicated.

This happened to several of our employees,  but not all employees that had FIOS,  who connected from their home Verizon FIOS networks.

Those same employees,  could connect with the same system and establish strong connections, while connected via Comcast, or AT&T phone tether.

What makes this weirder,  is we have another chat server that those same employees could connect to and maintain connections despite the problems with SSH and mail.

What accounted for the difference?  Why would this happen?  

It took a few days for us to not just cough it up to something strange or intermittent.  Anybody that has ever dealt with an ISP's tech support, knows it is not going to be a terribly enjoyable experience.

Nevertheless,  after several days of troubleshooting (getting through the stages of Verizon help) they insisted on sending us a "new" Modem/Router.  This was tremendously frustrating as we are not "run of the mill" users,  and couldn't logically explain why it wasn't something inside Verizon's internal network as opposed to the router that we've had for two years.  

Before waiting for the router,  we decided to do some old school Internet troubleshooting.

Using the ping command with the -s option,  you can send packets with different sizes.

(From Server side)
ping <employee ip>      100% connectivity

ping -s 500 <employee ip>      100% connectivity

ping -s 1500 <employee ip>     0% connectivity    ???????   Strange

ping -s 1499 <employee ip>    100% connectivity

What in the hell?  Are you telling me that some router on Verizon's network can't handle 1500 byte packets?

Sure enough,  we changed the MTU size on the SSH server and mail server.   Connections were established and maintained just fine.  No more issues....

Somewhere inside Verizon's network is likely to be a misconfigured router or switch.   Not sure I know how to tell the right person.   Even if they are using a protocol or format that doesn't support 1500 byte MTU,  shouldn't they at least support fragmentation on those links?

The world may never know.   Good luck playing Call of Duty GHOSTS with your Verizon peers when the PS4 comes out.

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