topic Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error in Community Site Feedback

Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 16:30:41 GMT

For as long as I can remember while browsing this Forum, it has been noticeable that perhaps a couple of times each day the Firefox browser page gets stuck, but can be recovered with a simple page refresh, and then will continue to work for perhaps an hour or two until the next hang.
This ONLY happens while viewing this Forum, and usually no error messages appear on Firefox, but sometimes says the connection was reset.
Over the past few days, I have completely rebuilt the internet facing side of my home network, including a different modem (SNR tweaked Billion 7800 in bridged modem mode), a self built pfSense Linux router, a new 'dnsmasq' primary caching DNS server, and a 'squid3' transparent caching http proxy. The result is quite impressive, with my SamKnows whitebox reporting that my "Website Load Times" have dropped from an average 670ms to 55ms - which is pretty good for a 6.7Mbps ADSL connection with a current interleaved 40ms latency.
With this new setup, I have been trying everything that I normally do on the internet to try and break it, hammering every website on maximum settings, but so far it has all worked perfectly, no errors reported, nothing untoward in the log files, and less than five errors per day on the ADSL modem.
However, the http proxy now captures those occasional Plusnet Forum page hangs -

Clicking on the link to the problem page URL ALWAYS makes the page reload correctly, and as I said before this is ONLY happening on the Plusnet Forum, and probably less than 1% of forum page views.

Any thoughts ?, or is this just another anomaly of the Plusnet Forum website ?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

ejs — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 17:02:09 GMT

Just another anomaly of the Plusnet community forums I guess.
Do you log packets from these IPs when you're browsing the forums? It should be pretty obvious that something within Plusnet isn't setup properly.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 17:37:37 GMT

I have not seen those specific 'community' IP addresses in the firewall log.
Most of the Plusnet dropped packets seem to be from mail servers (e.g. 'mailc03.plus.net') - despite nothing being setup that would cause packets to be dropped other than unsolicited stuff bouncing off IPv4 NAT.
I will try a packet capture on the router's WAN interface (awesome feature !), and see what turns up. Is it always port 44340 ?.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

ejs — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 18:13:58 GMT

Always from port 44340 if you visit the forums over https. Otherwise from port 80.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 18:21:55 GMT

This is what I captured so far, but doesn't seem related to my original question -

17:38:44.815276 AF IPv4 (2), length 71: (tos 0x80, ttl 55, id 23886, offset 0, flags [DF], proto TCP (6), length 67)
    community04.servers.plus.net.44340 > purleigh.5799: Flags [P.], cksum 0xaabb (correct), seq 1677150141:1677150168, ack 1109273889, win 381, length 27
17:38:55.979385 AF IPv4 (2), length 71: (tos 0x80, ttl 55, id 41591, offset 0, flags [DF], proto TCP (6), length 67)
    community04.servers.plus.net.44340 > purleigh.14792: Flags [P.], cksum 0xbfa3 (correct), seq 3037186070:3037186097, ack 1871287014, win 290, length 27
17:39:13.467647 AF IPv4 (2), length 71: (tos 0x80, ttl 55, id 20417, offset 0, flags [DF], proto TCP (6), length 67)
    community04.servers.plus.net.44340 > purleigh.2434: Flags [P.], cksum 0x507c (correct), seq 3000861306:3000861333, ack 505637402, win 1002, length 27
17:39:27.820012 AF IPv4 (2), length 71: (tos 0x80, ttl 55, id 23887, offset 0, flags [DF], proto TCP (6), length 67)
    community04.servers.plus.net.44340 > purleigh.5799: Flags [P.], cksum 0xaabb (correct), seq 0:27, ack 1, win 381, length 27

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 21:22:16 GMT

I just had another instance of Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error,
and there were no corresponding 'community server' firewall entries or spurious port 44340 packets detected on the WAN.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:53:22 GMT

After five days of intensive web browsing, and testing using many different websites, I am still getting the connection error reported above every few hours, and it ONLY happens on the Plusnet Forum pages.
As I said originally, I think this problem has always existed while using a normal web browser on this forum, but because the browser would occasionally hang and usually not report an error, doing a refresh would allow browsing to continue. Since I have added a transparent http proxy server to my network, it seems less forgiving and throws up the error page and reports what went wrong.
Any ideas from the DCT staff ?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Kelly — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 11:13:37 GMT

I see the same problem when using Opera from home.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

avatastic — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 13:38:55 GMT

It'll be related to the 'No data received' messages I get in Chrome from time to time.
The forum, its database back end, probably PHP too are most likely in need of a major update/overhaul but who has time to do that?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 22:49:08 GMT

This error seemed less frequent today, so far I have counted eight occurrences since this morning.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

ejs — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 07:17:41 GMT

Have you tried adding an entry to /etc/hosts or similar so that community.plus.net only resolves to 212.159.9.110 or 212.159.8.110?
[tt]traceroute to 212.159.9.110 (212.159.9.110), 30 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 1.453 ms
2 lo0-central10.pcl-ag08.plus.net (195.166.128.189) 26.201 ms
3 link-b-central10.pcl-gw02.plus.net (212.159.2.190) 20.452 ms
4 xe-9-1-0.pcl-cr02.plus.net (212.159.0.222) 20.524 ms
5 ae2.pcl-cr01.plus.net (195.166.129.6) 20.244 ms
6 po2.pcl-gw01.plus.net (195.166.129.41) 20.549 ms
7 gi5-8.ptp-cr01.plus.net (84.93.224.48) 28.498 ms
8 vlan2658.ptp-elb02.plus.net (84.93.224.45) 28.892 ms
9 community.plus.net (212.159.9.110) 29.077 ms
10 community.plus.net (212.159.9.110) 28.371 ms[/tt]
[tt]traceroute to 212.159.8.110 (212.159.8.110), 30 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 1.446 ms
2 lo0-central10.pcl-ag08.plus.net (195.166.128.189) 21.870 ms
3 link-b-central10.pcl-gw02.plus.net (212.159.2.190) 21.114 ms
4 xe-9-1-0.pcl-cr02.plus.net (212.159.0.222) 19.965 ms
5 ae1.ptw-cr02.plus.net (195.166.129.2) 21.066 ms
6 ae2.ptw-cr01.plus.net (195.166.129.4) 20.265 ms
7 te9-4.ptn-gw01.plus.net (195.166.129.33) 21.067 ms
8 gi5-1.peh-cr02.plus.net (84.93.232.61) 38.378 ms
9 po5.peh-cr01.plus.net (84.93.232.16) 28.922 ms
10 vlan2658.peh-elb02.plus.net (84.93.232.53) 28.744 ms
11 community.plus.net (212.159.8.110) 28.427 ms
12 community.plus.net (212.159.8.110) 30.054 ms[/tt]
Based on those traceroutes, I've currently set mine to only go to 212.159.9.110, which I'll probably should change once I end up on a PTN / PTW gateway. I'm not sure if it's made any improvement, because I just tend to write off any minor or occasional issues as being due to my line.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Kelly — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 09:25:59 GMT

Purleigh: Still seeing it?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 12:38:20 GMT

Yes it is still happening (latest @ 15:40 16-Dec), just less frequently than a week ago.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 03:31:45 GMT

I just managed to get the same "Connection reset by peer" error using http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/
Still never seen this problem on a non-Plusnet website.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Kelly — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 08:32:52 GMT

I suspect it's a load balancer problem. I wonder if mbs and community are behind the same load balancers.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

jelv — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 08:45:19 GMT

Don't think so. Had you not seen http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,103382.msg1053872.html#msg1053872 ?
Isn't community hosted in Sheffield (mbs is in London)?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Kelly — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 15:35:42 GMT

Same type of loadbalancers, I was meaning.

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Midnight_Caller — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 17:37:58 GMT

@Kelly, What type of loadbalancers are you using?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 15:26:11 GMT

This error didn't happen too frequently over the Christmas break,
but since the new year it now happens so often that it is becoming a real nuisance !
Is Chris Coates still looking into the causes of this error ?

Re: Plusnet Forum "Connection reset by peer" error

Kelly — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 17:37:56 GMT

I believe so. Problem ID for this is 79043.