Living in Austria and having a fixed network connection through the provider A1 can have disadvantages. For example the connection has a maximum of 2.9Mbit/s, because of long lines. But the price is the same as like a 8Mbit/s connection, which is, errm… , unfair.

I can live with the slow connection, when it is stable, which it luckily is.

Then there’s the A1modem, this little white plastic case with a black front. The Wifi of this box is the utterest crap you can find, but that’s not the only thing I encountered: This box has other problems with the packet delivery. I can’t really tell, what’s the exact problem, the only thing I can tell for sure is the fact, that I had problems connecting to several servers. For example I could not connect to the steam network, only after almost 20 tries a connection could be made. An other example is my own server at netcup.de, interestingly my standard ssh connection was not a problem, but since I’ve installed docker with gitlab and had to open a second ssh port only for gitlab, I could not connect to it. I thought there were problems with the open ports on my server, but everything looked more than correct, then I just had the idea to try it with a script, and there it was: in 50 tries I got a connection with ssh on the specific port TWICE! Soo, the problem had to be somewhere else. So I came to the A1modem, after restarting and checking the configuration of every router I had in between and I had the force to command over. After a restart of the A1modem everything runs fine again. Funny, isn’t it?

Here some REALLY funny bits of that problem, traceroutes.

Here the traceroute before the restart of the modem:

traceroute to gitlab.mmo.to (46.38.251.107), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1 router.asus.com (10.10.10.254) 0.245 ms 0.333 ms 0.418 ms
 2 a1modem.home (10.0.0.138) 1.712 ms 1.738 ms 1.759 ms
 3 iridium.mmo.to (46.38.251.107) 1.776 ms 1.939 ms 1.959 ms

And the traceroute after:

traceroute to gitlab.mmo.to (46.38.251.107), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1 router.asus.com (10.10.10.254) 0.285 ms 0.510 ms 0.582 ms
 2 a1modem.home (10.0.0.138) 1.661 ms 1.656 ms 1.668 ms
 3 178-189-143-254.adsl.highway.telekom.at (178.189.143.254) 8.516 ms 9.113 ms 10.233 ms
 4 195.3.65.213 (195.3.65.213) 18.357 ms 18.356 ms 18.901 ms
 5 195.3.70.86 (195.3.70.86) 21.620 ms 195.3.70.82 (195.3.70.82) 22.680 ms IIX11-AUX11.highway.telekom.at (195.3.70.222) 24.036 ms
 6 xe-3-1-0-0.vie10.core-backbone.com (193.203.0.154) 27.388 ms 25.470 ms 14.945 ms
 7 ae7-2055.nbg30.core-backbone.com (80.255.15.113) 24.701 ms 26.723 ms 27.989 ms
 8 corebackbone.netcup.net (80.255.14.22) 34.185 ms 19.505 ms 21.602 ms
 9 iridium.mmo.to (46.38.251.107) 23.647 ms 21.292 ms 22.401 ms

So, what the fuq went wrong here?!