How to troubleshoot autohost intermittent connectivity

[Jools]

As many know, the semprini autohost(spads) has some connectivity problems. There is a periodical lapse in the connection. ISP says the connectivity to the router, to which the autohost is connected, works just fine. So how to troubleshoot this on windows?

What I've done so far:

* ping to www.springrts.com: average 43 ms

* nslookup www.springrts.com: resolves just fine to 94.23.170.70

* tracert to www.springrts.com: sometimes a * instead of ping in node 8 of 11 (amsix.routers.ovh.net). Same results if using ip instead of domain name.

Somehow I think the problem still could be in the dns service. Would it help to make a script that does these steps each second for like 10 hrs?

[dansan]

Connectivity problem where to? From the autohost to players or the lobby server?

Use MTR (autohost: http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/) if you're on *nix from the autohost. If your autohost runs on Windows... look for something similar. :)

[Jools]

Both. There are connection issues both between the autohost and server and players and autohost.

[dansan]

Both. There are connection issues both between the autohost and server and players and autohost.

Most likely a network driver or hardware problem. Check the logs, and if it is possible reboot the server.

[abma]

output of ifconfig is maybe useful, too:

RX packets:32219 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:21271 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

only the first numbers should be > 0.

what machine is it running on? dedicated? virtual server? which os/version?

maybe a kernel update fixes the bug if its a driver bug. you could also try to set ethernet speed to 10MBit for testing.

[Jools]

The problem seems to be gone now. Either it was solved when I rebooted the router, or else it was some 'inherent network problem' that has gone away now.

It's a win 7 machine, so hard to update the kernel. Spring-dedicated yes.

Thanks for the help from you all.