Slow web browsing

[timbo343]

Today, we seem to be having a "slow internet day" where pages take ages to load and im thinking it's a DNS error on the Smoothwall but i'm not 100% sure.

 

On Friday i did the upgrade to Kenilworth without any problems however we've come in today to find browsing the net is really slow.

 

I've been trying to find the cause of this and not found anything as of yet though we have some forwarders set up on the On Prem DNS servers and they have 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 listed. Usually these IPs resolve in a matter of minutes but today they seem to be taking up to 30 seconds to resolve.

 

On further testing, i've found the net is a lot quicker if we by pass the Smoothwall Proxy, it would seem the Proxy is slowing things down.

 

I've done a reset of the smoothwall at 11am but it hasn't made much difference.

 

Sometimes 8.8.8.8 times out, othertimes, it goes through without any issues.

 

I was wondering if anyone else could shed a bit of light on to this?

[MK-Jester]

We are also experiencing problems following an update to Smoothwall. It was not the Kenilworth upgrade, but the Inverness 8 fixes.

 

I have traced the problem down to the connection between the smoothwall and the core switch dropping out. Investigation on the switch indicated that it could be caused by one or both ends renegotiating settings.

 

Both Inverness 8 and Kenilworth contain improvements to Ethernet controller.

 

Just a thought.

[timbo343]

Apologies for not updating this, it turned out to be the PPPoE tunnel having issues on all DNS servers including 8.8.4.4. Our LA with help from Smoothwall forced the PPPoE connection to reload and that resolved the issue.

 

Here's the story:

 

After hitting a brick wall at every avenue and various restarts, i decided to ring our LA to see if they could check over the Smoothwall, they couldn't see anything untowards - i even switched on IDS and IPS to see if we are been attacked. IDS has detected some kind of event from inside the network but unsure what it is at the moment as its using random ports to talk to the external DNS servers. The ticket got passed up to Smoothwall.

 

I reckon it was either a DNS or a routing problem from talktalk's end - even after thinking it was firewall rules so i've rearranged those and going to have a tidy up in there as there seems to be duplicated entries since moving to Inverness.

 

As for the DNS servers, our LA mentioned using OpenDNS too but im now using Level3, OpenDNS and google DNS servers which seem to be really quick - here's the list https://www.lifewire.com/free-and-pu...ervers-2626062.

 

The internal DNS forwarders are the same as on the Smoothwall and everything seems to be a lot quicker.

 

I was a bit confused at how i couldn't ping to 8.8.8.8 but managed to ping to 8.8.4.4. Even on the Smoothwall, i couldn't ping google DNS servers and a traceroute gave a random error too.

 

tracert 8.8.8.8

 

Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms firewall.shs.com [172.16.24.8]

2 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms gig-14-3-4004-rtr002.bre.opaltelecom.net [62.24.254.201]

3 * * * Request timed out.

4 * * * Request timed out.

5 * * * Request timed out.

6 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms 72.14.218.90

7 * * * Request timed out.

8 * * * Request timed out.

9 * * * Request timed out.

10 * * * Request timed out.

11 * * * Request timed out.

12 * * * Request timed out.

13 * * * Request timed out.

14 * * * Request timed out.

15 * * * Request timed out.

16 * * * Request timed out.

17 * * * Request timed out.

18 * * * Request timed out.

19 * * * Request timed out.

20 * * * Request timed out.

21 * * * Request timed out.

22 * * * Request timed out.

23 * * * Request timed out.

24 * * * Request timed out.

25 * * * Request timed out.

26 * * * Request timed out.

27 * * * Request timed out.

28 * * * Request timed out.

29 * * * Request timed out.

30 * * * Request timed out.

 

Trace complete.

 

tracert 8.8.4.4

 

Tracing route to google-public-dns-b.google.com [8.8.4.4]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms firewall.shs.com [172.16.24.8]

2 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms gig-14-3-4004-rtr002.bre.opaltelecom.net [62.24.254.201]

3 * * * Request timed out.

4 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms host-78-151-228-50.as13285.net [78.151.228.50]

5 * * * Request timed out.

6 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms 72.14.218.90

7 * * * Request timed out.

8 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms 216.239.57.81

9 15 ms 15 ms 16 ms google-public-dns-b.google.com [8.8.4.4]

 

Trace complete.

 

This would suggest to me there was a routing issue at TalkTalk's end.

 

After 16:30 everything was back to normal...

 

tracert 8.8.8.8

 

Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms smoothwall.local [172.16.24.8]

2 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms host-62-24-254-203.as13285.net [62.24.254.203]

3 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms host-78-151-228-53.as13285.net [78.151.228.53]

4 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms host-78-151-228-54.as13285.net [78.151.228.54]

5 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms host-78-144-9-63.as13285.net [78.144.9.63]

6 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms 72.14.218.90

7 * * * Request timed out.

8 14 ms 13 ms 16 ms 216.239.57.153

9 14 ms 14 ms 13 ms google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]

 

Trace complete.

 

tracert 8.8.4.4

 

Tracing route to google-public-dns-b.google.com [8.8.4.4]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms smoothwall.local [172.16.24.8]

2 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms host-62-24-254-203.as13285.net [62.24.254.203]

3 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms host-78-151-228-53.as13285.net [78.151.228.53]

4 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms host-78-151-228-50.as13285.net [78.151.228.50]

5 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms host-78-144-9-63.as13285.net [78.144.9.63]

6 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms 72.14.218.90

7 * * * Request timed out.

8 14 ms 14 ms 13 ms 216.239.57.69

9 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms google-public-dns-b.google.com [8.8.4.4]

 

Trace complete.

[MK-Jester]

And an update on my problem...... we rolled back the Inverness 8 update and as if by magic our problem went away.