if a clued engineer at caribbean cable happens to read this message, i would be thankful if they contacted me privately. thank you. randy -- From: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> Subject: very strange internet behavior To: customersupport@caribcable.com Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 04:14:08 -0400 [ this needs to be escalated to an internet engineer ] hi, i am an old senior internet geek vacationing on nevis's nesbit beach. the cottage has your tv and internet service. during what i suspect are the busy hours of the day, your internet service borders on useless. it is as if an overloaded NAT is in the middle. one can reach very few web sites. one can reach (ping, ssh, ...) some hosts and not others. and the hosts are in the same rack and same ip address space in a stateside colo. one can ping a host but not ssh to it. or i can be sshed into a host and yet not be able to ping it. very twisty stuff. if i turn on the tv, the cable seems to be working. i can run an openvpn tunnel to a stateside or japan-based host and then everything is reachable. of course i have to try three or four of my openvpn serving hosts before i find one which is reachable. this is not a great solution, and certainly not one available to the vast majority of your customers. from an engineer's point of view, i would love to understand what the cause of all this really is. randy