Track Internet disconnections, provider outages with historical data, and automated speed testing.
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Trying to install on Linux
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Hi,
If you are not seeing outages in your reports, it means what ever the problems are that you are experiencing are not Internet/IP related. Or at least, they are not IP related in any way that is under your control.
The lights on the modem clearly show when its connected with the internet and when not.
I don't know which modem you have but modems are also signal based and DSL can be prone to interference and signal level issues.
When you say it shows the Internet is connected, what light are you looking at? What does the manual say about it and its meaning?
What I'm asking if we need to know very specifically what this light means on this modem. It may or may not actually be the 'Internet' that is up when this light is on. It might just mean that it has contact with the DSLAM multiplexer in your neighborhood where all of your neighbors DSL connections go to. Meaning, it might only mean an electrical connection and not specifically Internet access.
The outages website does not seem to capture it.
I would think if there is no internet connection the client can't connect with the outages host and it would record it as not being connected.
Correct, that is the purpose of OutagesIO but if there is no actual IP outage then there is nothing to report. The agent will always report an outage if there was one. An outage is specifically related to IP only. OutagesIO cannot determine anything else but not seeing outages does tell you that the problem is not necessarily IP related.
This short article might help;
The nature of TCP/IP and Internet connectivityI'll take a closer look at your reports if you've shared the agent ID in this thread. If it's not here, please share it.
You also mentioned a speed test problem but then seem to say that this is resolved now. Can you confirm.
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Hello,
I think my agent ID is 31591.
The thing is that the first (and only) 5 events recorded (in April) kind of represent what is happening. The internet connection goes of for seconds, minutes and often many hours. Nothing at all was recorded after these first events. Also the speed test is not updating.
The modem has a light for "power", "internet","DSL / WAN" and beside the LAN ports a "WPS/WLAN"
When power, internet, DSL and WLAN are on, the internet is working without trouble. The internet light indicates that the modem is able to ping/connect with the provider's site, which normally means you can connect anywhere on the internet.
When the internet light is off, the internet connection is off. In that case the DSL light comes on intermittently indicating that it's trying to establish a link.
The main reason the connection is not good is indeed signal strength. However sometimes the signal is just enough to lock on and the Internet light indicates that the modem is able to connect (ping?) successfully with the internet provider at other times it just keep blinking for hours till it catches on again. The technicians know we need new cables and an exchange box closer to our house. They just do not seem to be in a hurry to do it (since 6 months already!) If I can show how bad it really is I may get a higher priority.
As a test, if I unplug the dsl cable should outagesio record it as a disconnection? It does not. Though there are regular small interruptions visible in the heart-beat, they are also not showing with the Outages bars.
Hope this can help :-)
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I'm taking a closer look.
Can you restart the agent please. It's been running for 3 days and I see that the last speed test was on the 9th which is when it was last restarted.
I think the reason the speed tests aren't coming in is because your bandwidth is below even 1Mbps. Our test runs at 1Mbps minimum which might explain what is going on there. We have been testing code that can report speeds below 1Mbps but it's not released yet.
I can pretty confidently state that the agent would log IP related outages if that is what was going on. It typically will not show an outage if you disconnect the local router because it needs at least one hop beyond the first hop or gateway. Meaning, if you installed the agent so that there is the gateway then another hop, then it would see that next hop down if it was.
Note also that looking at your reports shows a bunch of 10.x.x.x IPs/hops. It looks like your provider's modem is your gateway and then the ISP network, all using the 10.x.x.x network. That makes it a bit hard to decipher what is what.
The setup makes me think your provider is a small one reselling the larger one. Not sure yet. Too bad you can't get a neighbor to use OutagesIO too. Then we could figure out what belongs where.
Let me stare at it some more.
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@Alex:
I'm taking a closer look.
Can you restart the agent please. It's been running for 3 days and I see that the last speed test was on the 9th which is when it was last restarted. Ok, I restarted it. Actually I saw there were two otm_linux processes running. I killed both and restarted. Now one process is running
I think the reason the speed tests aren't coming in is because your bandwidth is below even 1Mbps. Our test runs at 1Mbps minimum which might explain what is going on there. We have been testing code that can report speeds below 1Mbps but it's not released yet.
Sometimes that may be true but most of the time, when there is a connection, it works for Zoom, YouTube on HD so I would think that is more than 1Mbps.
I can pretty confidently state that the agent would log IP related outages if that is what was going on. It typically will not show an outage if you disconnect the local router because it needs at least one hop beyond the first hop or gateway. Meaning, if you installed the agent so that there is the gateway then another hop, then it would see that next hop down if it was.
Sorry this is a bit too technical for me. I only know that when I first installed it last month it did record 5 outages in the first day. The same keeps going on but now not recorded.
Note also that looking at your reports shows a bunch of 10.x.x.x IPs/hops. It looks like your provider's modem is your gateway and then the ISP network, all using the 10.x.x.x network. That makes it a bit hard to decipher what is what.
I am connected with Private Internet Access VPN. But while initially is was recording the outages (with or without the VPN) Now it has not been recording again with or without the VPN running.
The setup makes me think your provider is a small one reselling the larger one. Not sure yet.
I am using Telmex which is the main provider for the whole of Mexico.
Too bad you can't get a neighbor to use OutagesIO too. Then we could figure out what belongs where.
That will be difficult. I don't know who has internet here and my Spanish is not enough to be able to explain…
Let me stare at it some more.
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Two processes? Yes, you definitely only want one running.
The speed test runs every hour for example. When I looked at your reports, I saw results that were below 1Mbps.
In terms of the provider, I am making assumptions, trying to guess, to try and understand your setup and situation. Even if this is a large provider, it 'appears' as if there might be a smaller in-between because of the range of IPs I'm seeing. Again, all assumptions.
VPN or no VPN, you are still connecting using IP and that is what the agent is testing. It cannot test or know anything but IP. It does not monitor packets or DNS or how you use your Internet, it only tests the connection from source to a destination. If you are not seeing outages, it is because there are no IP outages causing your problems.
That said, anything is possible. Without neighbors monitoring, it is very difficult to go deep into your situation because there is just not enough information. Maybe you have a friend that is technical and understands IP a little more that could help you? With that persons input, it might give me more information to help you with.
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I've been keeping an eye out on this and there isn't enough information to know anything yet.
Maybe you can share a little more info.
For example, the providers router/modem, this is the only device on your network that you connect to? Meaning, you do not have a switch or another router before theirs? Your Internet connections are directly from their device?
I ask because I see that your hop one which appears to be your gateway has used four different private network segments.
10.60.10.1, 10.31.1.1, 10.34.10.1 and 10.38.1.1. After that, it goes to a public IP.
In this case, things are not obvious and this happens now and then. I'm sorry it's happening to you and I wish OutagesIO could help you but there is just not enough information and some things are not quite usual.
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Finally, a light just went off and it was right in front of my face all the time.
Looking at your reports again, I just noticed that your pings are no longer coming in. Then I remembered you mentioned being on a VPN connection.
I assume you are running your VPN client on your PC and not on your router? Meaning, your entire network becomes part of the VPN.
I think something, probably your VPN settings are filtering ICMP which is preventing outages from coming in.
When you connect to your VPN, it changes the route which explains partly why I'm seeing odd things with your hops.
So what seems to be happening is that as you establish a VPN connection, the agent can no longer communicate with our network in a way that tests your connectivity because one of its tests are the pings that you can see are missing in your reports. Also, once you set up a VPN, you aren't networking to a remote destination in the usual TCP/IP way, all of your traffic is flowing through your VPN provider.
This would also explain why your speed tests aren't coming in. It's probably because your VPN provider blocks those tests. If all of their customers were speed testing, the VPN provider would have zero bandwidth to offer their services.
Assuming you are not using your router/modem to VPN, the solution for you to monitor your Internet connection would be our hardware agent. It would run independently of your VPN.
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I've been keeping an eye out on this and there isn't enough information to know anything yet.
Maybe you can share a little more info.
For example, the providers router/modem, this is the only device on your network that you connect to? Meaning, you do not have a switch or another router before theirs? Your Internet connections are directly from their device?
The phone(DSL) cable comes from the filter directly into the modem/router. Just one box providing Wifi and 4 unused LAN ports. Both my computer and phone are directly connected to the Wifi of the modem. I have turned off the VPN and will keep it off to see if that makes a difference.
I ask because I see that your hop one which appears to be your gateway has used four different private network segments.
10.60.10.1, 10.31.1.1, 10.34.10.1 and 10.38.1.1. After that, it goes to a public IP.
Could that be when the VPN switches servers?
In this case, things are not obvious and this happens now and then. I'm sorry it's happening to you and I wish OutagesIO could help you but there is just not enough information and some things are not quite usual.
Lets see. I hope this also helps you in some way!
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10.60.10.1, 10.31.1.1, 10.34.10.1 and 10.38.1.1. After that, it goes to a public IP.
Could that be when the VPN switches servers?
It's your router/modem changing IPs.
In this case, things are not obvious and this happens now and then. I'm sorry it's happening to you and I wish OutagesIO
could help you but there is just not enough information and some things are not quite usual.
Lets see. I hope this also helps you in some way!
The mystery is already solved :).
I didn't take into account that you are using a VPN.
Your agent is on the same PC that you change networks on which is the reason you are not seeing problems with your connection. You won't be able to monitor your connection in a normal way because when you are using a VPN, you are using a remote network and therefore, bypassing the normal hops your connection would take from source to destination. When your traffic goes into the VPN providers network, it gets mixed in with everyone else's traffic.
Think of it as using your Internet to make a direct connection to something. While the tunnel still uses various networks to get to the VPN, your PC/device doesn't know about those because it's establishing what amounts to a direct encrypted connection.
In terms of speed testing, VPN providers would not survive if people were doing speed tests over the VPN so they have to block those or do what ever they do to prevent those from taking up all their bandwidth.
If you want to monitor your connection and the provider, you need to let the PC run without the VPN or buy a super cheap PC that you can use to run the agent on 24/7 preferably or the very best option is ordering our hardware agent. The hardware agent will be independent of your PC so you could use your VPN all you want and if there are other problems with your connection, the agent would pick those up.
As I write this, your agent is now in disconnected status.
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It is still a mystery. As of Thu May 14, 2020 11:46 pm (my last message) The VPN has been off. Still no outings are showing and no speed checks are done. It shows 21:10 uptime and 2:50 down time since I restarted the client. This is about correct as today the internet worked most of the time. The last outing recorded is still 29 April.
I have to turn it on for a little while but will turn it off again after. Rather I will kill the vpn thread in case it's somehow still interfering while disconnected.
Dada
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Hi,
It's all clear now, there is no more mystery. Something on your network or the PC you are using is blocking ICMP.
The agent needs to do multiple tests which helps it to confirm when there are outages or no outages and for one of those tests, it needs ICMP.
You'll notice in your reports that no pings are coming in, those are ICMP based.
You'll also notice the last time it sent hops was: 2020-04-29 19:19:43: Agent is sending updated hops to the OutagesIO network.
Hops are ICMP based.
As I mentioned earlier, I assume that you are running Ubuntu as your PC desktop and that you have your agent on the same PC.
Check your firewall rules, they are probably blocking ICMP communications.
Maybe when you installed your VPN, it made some changes to your firewall.
You might have to ask in forums where you get Ubuntu support from but that seems to be the only problem. Fix that and outages will start showing if there are any and assuming the VPN is not turned on and/or potentially blocking.
Here is how you'll know when your agent is communicating correctly.
Go to the Standard dashboard view.
You'll see a current date for this message: Agent is sending updated hops to the OutagesIO network.
In your Pings graph, you'll see the pings coming in and they will show up. Right now, none are showing.
Until you see those, the agent is being prevented from communicating correctly.
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I"ll have to do some reading to see how to solve that.
But I recently, possibly the end of April, updated my Neon Installation to the next ubuntu base. It could be that at that time a basic firewall was installed or rules updated. I never looked at my firewall. And yes, also the VPN client could have changed settings. I'll look at it and let you know :-)
Dada
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That's the problem with upgrades, adding software, it's hard to know 100% for sure what was done to the environment. In some cases, authors will just force changes on us because it is easier to make some small changes than to support countless people complaining that something doesn't work or because it solved installation issues.
I still don't see pings coming in but I do see your agent is active. As soon as you allow ICMP, I think you'll start seeing pings and that hop update will be current. It's also possible that ICMP is blocked on your router/modem so be sure to check that.
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When I run: cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all it responds with 0 which means icmp is not blocked. Doing ping google.com gives a stream of pings. So it looks ping is allowed on the computer as well as on the router as pinging google works.
What do you think. Is there an other way to check?
I thought I try:
dadak@dadak-Inspiron-15-7569:~$ ping www.outagesio.com
PING www.outagesio.com (184.164.141.218) 56(84) bytes of data.
^Z
[3]+ Stopped ping www.outagesio.com
dadak@dadak-Inspiron-15-7569:~$ ping www.outagesio.com
PING www.outagesio.com (184.164.141.218) 56(84) bytes of data.
*No response from outagesio
dadak@dadak-Inspiron-15-7569:~$ ping app.outagesio.com
PING app.outagesio.com (184.164.141.220) 56(84) bytes of data.
^Z
[5]+ Stopped ping app.outagesio.com
dadak@dadak-Inspiron-15-7569:~$
- No response from app.outagesio.com either.
dadak@dadak-Inspiron-15-7569:~$ sudo ufw status
[sudo] password for dadak:
Status: inactive
- Firewall is off
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Try pinging tpw.outages.io.
The other domains that you tried to ping to have pings blocked for networking reasons.
I looked at your dashboard and at one point, you must have done something that worked but for only under one minute.
If you look, you'll see that one single ping came in. However, hops did not.
However, hops are only sent when the agent is restarted, every hour and when the agent algorithm sees something out of its averages.
What ever is going on it's unusual. The agent only needs port 80, 443 and ICMP to do its work. We decided to test the Linux agent as soon as I reported your post but everything checked out. We ran the tests on Centos however because we don't have a Ubuntu handy.
I'll fire up a Ubuntu and try to find some leads. I'm not understanding what is going on and why this is not working.
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Here is my test so far.
I created a new Linux agent and copied the starter code.
I create the starter_linux_ocp.sh file and pasted the code found in the install notes.
I made the path /agent.
I chmod the file to 755.
I created the /etc/agentid file with the credentials displayed in the install notes.
I then ran the starter file. No other changes on Ubuntu.
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1931 May 17 17:07 starter_linux_ocp.sh*
root@buntsrv:/agent# ./starter_linux_ocp.sh
Make sure to create /etc/agentid with credentials before starting this script
Make sure your starter file points to the same directory that you have it in - Edit this starter file accordingly
You could add this to /etc/rc.local to start it or build a service for it. Please search Google for more.
Receiving binary location
Getting the OTM Package
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 150k 0 0 0 0 0 0 –:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
Downloading OTM
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 150k 100 150k 0 0 324k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 324k
OTM show be downloaded and if so, we're starting it and exiting this script
I can see that it is running.
root@buntsrv:/agent# ps aux | grep otm
root 1965 0.0 0.0 768176 3836 pts/0 Sl 17:09 0:00 /agent/otm_linux
root 2049 0.0 0.0 13136 1052 pts/0 S+ 17:09 0:00 grep --color=auto otm
I checked the dashboard.
Agent was restarted on 2020-05-17 10:09:36 and active for 3 minutes 39 seconds .
The agent sent hops
2020-05-17 10:09:41: Agent is sending updated hops to the OutagesIO network.
The pings graph is filling up.
Again, no changes what so ever to the firewall. Totally default Ubuntu server.root@buntsrv:/agent# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
0
Your situation has me stumped at the moment. I do not know why your agent is not able to communicate but I'm using the exact same agent that would would have downloaded. Are you able to ping the target I gave you?
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hello,
It seems it is working now!
And I think I know why. Something must have happened during the system upgrade to the new LTS base of Ubuntu so it ended up running as user. Once I started it up as root it worked. Now I have to figure out why it changed from starting as root, to starting as user during the upgrade. Though maybe it's not really relevant anymore and I should just find a new place to insert the line to have it auto-start on system boot. It is still strange as I was able to ping Google and the address you gave me as user. But maybe the client needs other functions that unlike "ping" have to be done as root.
Again thank you so much and I really hope this did not completely waste your time!
Sincerely,
Dada
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No waste of time what so ever. Challenges are how one learns and more importantly, you stuck to it also which makes it worth the time to help.
The forum is quite new and it takes time to see people sign up but I think eventually, we'll find some great people that can offer their own suggestions and help.
Unfortunately, we cannot know every piece of software and hardware and combinations ever made but we can make some educated guesses as we try to find ideas and leads to problems.
Noticing the user level is an important find on your find.
User level simply didn't dawn on me. I focused more on what was not happening than user level since everything I test is usually as root.
I suppose the best way would be a limited user that has access to ICMP on the server since that's the only thing that seemed missing.
Now that you have it working at least, we'd love your input on how it works with and without VPN.
We suspect that without VPN, it will work as expected but with VPN, the network becomes the remote and a shared one with limited access at that.
We further suspect that speed testing and ICMP will not be possible but we've not tested this.
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Glad it's useful learning for us all!
Regarding the VPN I needed it yesterday and forgot to turn it off. I still see speed checks, hops and all the other information. So I guess the client works fine with or without VPN. At least the way my VPN is configured. Maybe that would also affect.
If there is anything you like me to test let me know.
Dada
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When you enable the VPN, your local network effectively becomes part of the remote network, subject to the remote networks permissions, policies, limitations etc. Different VPN providers would differ in how they have things configured.
I'm surprised to hear that you speed testing works because that would be using the VPN providers network. so, from your PC, through the VPN provider to the speed testing site, back to the VPN and on back to your PC. That's using the VPN providers bandwidth. Either they aren't worried about it or they aren't blocking/configured right. I really don't know as I've never tested such an idea.
You should be able to tell when you are using your provider or VPN by looking at the standard dashboard where you'll see your gateway and probably DNS servers change too.
Any input you can provide on how the agent works over a VPN would be helpful and appreciated.
