Steam version: Unable to connect to version checker/check firewall

[haggerty]

I am getting a message today that I can't connect to the version checker and also a message saying to disable my zone alarm if I have it, etc.  Also the webpage and bbs seems slower than normal.

[Bizman]

Ran PingPlotter and noticed there's a major packet loss at hop 9 both for the forums and the game servers. Since the previous server is Level3 Ireland and the next one Level3 USA, it seems safe to assume that the problematic connection is the Level3 sub-Atlantic line. Is there something of major interest running on Netflix right now?

Actually, Level3 seems to have issues right now:

http://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/

[haggerty]

after an hour or two it seems to have cleared up

[Bizman]

For me it looked like that, however the forum is still very laggy.

Haven't tried the game, but I hope the issue will be solved by Friday.

[Bizman]

Update: I called my ISP some six hours ago. Their tech said he can't do anything because it's not their network. However, he promised to forward the message. Which was just what I expected, knowing that an ISP will be listened much more carefully than a single end user.

I don't know what has been done, the Ping Plotter output still shows a 100% packet loss for Hop #9 but the forum now seems to work much better than it used to.

[Skuzzy]

100% packet loss in a Ping Plot normally means that particular router is configured to ignore the ICMP ECHO packet most (maybe all) ping utilities use.

In other words, you can ignore the results of that hop.

[Bizman]

Thanks! That was something new to me.

Anyhow, the issue seems to be gone for now. Another thing I just noticed is that the Level3 Outage Map I linked to in a previous post now shows correctly as well. Until now it didn't want to show Europe at all, only the orange dots over some white area on the map. So most likely it was Level3 in any case.

[Skuzzy]

Oh, it was Level3.  Absolutely.

[Pudgie]

100% packet loss in a Ping Plot normally means that particular router is configured to ignore the ICMP ECHO packet most (maybe all) ping utilities use.

In other words, you can ignore the results of that hop.

Good to know...............

Thanks for posting.

 

[Skuzzy]

The real issue is when an ISP configures a router to ignore ICMP ECHO messages, it means you cannot know what problems that router may be having as there is no good end users method of testing the patch through it.

In other words, the router could be the problem, but you have no easy way to tell if it is or is not.