Post by Tennant StuartPost by Nick RobertsPost by Tennant StuartOne explanation of this is that there are four servers, except
two of them have the same Inet$RemoteIP number, and one of those
goes wrong.
If there are two servers with the same IP address, it's likely that
everybody would notice problems, not just a subset. And the
same-numbered servers would rarely, if ever, work.
How else do you explain the addresses are 25% 202, 25% 203, 50% 204?
I don't have any definitive suggestions - but if your suggestion were
accurate, everybody would be suffering the 25% failure rate, and I am
experiencing nothing like that severe.
I have recent experience of what happens to an intranet when two
machines have the same IP, because it occurred at work a fortnight ago:
one switch crashed, and when it rebooted for some reason it insisted on
using the same IP as another switch. The end result was that the two
involved subnets absolutely crawled (file copies that should have taken
seconds took minutes and often failed), and the more time-sensitive
parts of the rest of the network showed considerable unreliability.
The point is the entire IP protocol is built around uniqueness of
addresses. If that principle is breached, the protocol can't ensure
that the right packets get to the right servers in the right order, and
Bad Things Happen (TM).
Post by Tennant StuartPost by Nick RobertsI was hit by a pseudo-freeze last night, which is the first time it
has ever happened to me when accessing Orpheus from home. Resolver
IPs are as above, as is the remote IP.
I call it a "pseudo"-freeze, because (as I am using POPstar &
NewsHound), my machine didn't freeze; however, POPstar and
NewsHound both refused to resolve the server names to IP addresses,
while FreeTime got hung up on "Connecting to server", so I would
guess that this was also a resolver issue.
I think it unlikely that it is the resolver module at fault, as I'm
not using the Internet stack inside Voyager, but the RISC OS 4 ROM
version.
And your experience shows this is nothing to do with Voyager.
I wasn't trying to suggest that it was anything to do with Voyager. The
nearest I've ever come to this is the suggestion that it may be the
auto-upgrader trying to find a non-existent site.
The reason I posted the above was to counter Paul's suggestion that it
may be a problem with the Voyager resolver or one of the Voyager
fetchers (or indeed, anything to do with Voyager at all other than the
dialler - and if it where the dialler at fault it would be persistant).
Post by Tennant StuartPost by Nick RobertsEventually it all worked (with the same remote IP address each
time), but it took 3 or 4 tries.
You will find that when it works with the same remote IP address,
that was the mysterious 204 pair, going from the bad one to the good
one.
I'm sorry, but I reiterate - it cannot be anything this obvious. Having
two machines with the same IP address acting as internet gateways would
have obvious and measurable characteristics:
1) Both servers would be unreliable due to IP clashes, not just one;
& 2) it would affect everybody at the roughly the same rate.
Item 2 is observably not the case; and item 1 is incompatible with your
suggestion.
--
Nick Roberts tigger @ orpheusinternet.co.uk
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which
can be adequately explained by stupidity.