Timeout establishing PPP again (fault 97715196); reoccurrence from yesterday :(

[#1]

Hi,
Our router's PPP session dropped last night around 10pm,  and hasn't been able to reconnect since.
see: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/36f72de2377f52de71936fddf9aa7926.html

From what I can see in the logs it's unable to get a response when trying to connect.
Jan 1 00:02:13 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:03:28 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:04:43 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:05:58 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:07:13 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:08:28 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Jan 1 00:09:43 pppd[606]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
The line itself looks fine - it's sync'd and sync didn't drop when PPP dropped. We've rebooted the router since, and this morning tried an alternative router - neither can connect and seem to be logging similar stuff, eg. timeout waiting for PADO packets and are unable to establish a PPP session.
I've also tried connecting using the bt_test@startup_domain account (which also doesn't connect, logging timeouts as above) and unsurprisingly bt_test_user@plusdsl.net  can't connect either.
Seems to be a reoccurrence of a fault we've had on this connection before following exchange maintenance work - something similar broken again perhaps?
Is there anything else we can do to troubleshoot ? If not, any chance someone at PN could have a look at what was done previously to solve this, and see if we can get it done again? Question 97715196 is open..
At the moment reliability seems to be leaving much to be desired
Many thanks
Tim

[#2]

Hi there,
Still having problems? We're seeing that you reconnected at around 8.45 this morning.

[#3]

Hi Chris, thanks for replying - is indeed now sorted.
Unfortunately it also looks like I've now broken our TBB graph by resetting our router's config; will get that fixed later
Any idea what caused the problem?
Tim

[#4]

Unfortunately not! The only connection attempt that hit us was around 7am with a 'password incorrect' error.

[#5]

Bizarre - especially as we hadn't changed the router's username/password between loosing PPP last night & it successfully reconnecting this morning!
Guess this could have been some sort of exchange-level issue perhaps, somehow interrupting or blocking PPP traffic? Had something similar happen in terms of symptoms a few weeks back following a load of maintenance work so it wouldn't overly surprise me if something had been broken again.
Thanks for your help! 

[#6]

Hi Chris
The same issue we had yesterday has seemingly reoccured tonight. PPP was dropped at about 20:15, and has yet to reconnect with the router logging timeouts waiting for a response.
I've opened a new question (97771500) as it doesn't seem possible to reopen a closed ticket but all the details from 97715196 apply.
If you ignore the outage logged today (router was reconnected this morning), you can see where we re-enabled WAN pings followed by the connection dropping again.

As before, the line's sync'd fine. A little slower in terms of speed than yesterday, but I'd imagine this was probably not helped by the reboots/reconnects in the last 24h to try and reconnect PPP.
Any chance of trying to get to the bottom of what's going on?
Tim

[#7]

Once again, the router has been able to reconnect itself - this time at around 0545 or so.
Needless to say, we hadn't touched the device from late last night through to this morning - as if something was plugged back in,it presumably finally received a PPP response & reconnected.
As before, dsl sync doesn't appear to have dropped at any point.
What's going on? Are we likely to have a 3rd outage in so many days again tonight?

[#8]

So much for that.  Session's just dropped again at about 07:25, and the router isn't getting any response while trying to re-establish ppp.
Anyone have any ideas? Assuming this isn't normal behaviour where's the issue likely to sit & what can we do about it?
Still down as of 09:30. What are the chances of getting this sorted today so that we don't run into the weekend with no internet connectivity?

[#9]

Still down at 10:25 with no change in terms of the PPP requests timing out.
Can someone from PN please advise if there's anything we can do, or given that this is now the third time this seems to have happened in 2 days - get faults to pick up our ticket?

[#10]

.. and a spectacularly useless response from support this morning; anyone around who can intervene to move this forwards?
Thank you for getting in touch.
We are sorry to hear that you have been experiencing issues, if you want to escalate this to our faults team this can be done by using the link below:
http://faults.plus.net
I hope this clears things up for you. There is no need to reply to this ticket if the matter is resolved. This ticket will remain open with you for the next 14 days. After which It will automatically close leaving a full copy of the notes on your account.
However, if you feel the matter needs further investigation do not hesitate to get back in touch online at http://portal.plus.net/wizard/ if we can be of any further assistance.
Kind regards,
[name removed]

[#11]

Looks like the router was able to finally reconnect around 11am today.
Obviously this leads to the slight question of why... what's causing PPP sessions to drop, and perhaps most importantly, what's preventing our router from getting a response back in a timely fashion?

[#12]

This is most odd, as PPP drops (and not able to re-connect) are unusual.
Assuming your hardware is OK (I don't see how it isn't), this needs passing to BTw for deeper investigation. I've moved your ticket to the faults team for you. Hopefully, they'll have seen this happen before and know exactly what to do.

[#13]

Quote from: plusnettony

Assuming your hardware is OK (I don't see how it isn't), this needs passing to BTw for deeper investigation. I've moved your ticket to the faults team for you. Hopefully, they'll have seen this happen before and know exactly what to do.

Thank you
I can't see how it's a hardware fault with the router to be honest - it's connected fine prior to loosing its PPP session; DSL sync doesn't drop, and it clearly doesn't have an issue reestablishing PPP once it gets a response. We've also seen the same behaviour with another router - which was also unable to establish a connection, reporting timeouts waiting for PPP responses; which rather suggests the problem lies elsewhere.

[#14]

Hi @plusnettony & anyone else reading this thread!
We've just had the same problem occur on another PN connection I look after. This line's on a different cabinet, different exchange but same general area. I don't currently have any other data to support this at the moment but it sounds like this has been happening a few times in the last couple of weeks, and we're going to try and get a TBB monitor setup for this connection to track what's going on. Our own connection is currently up & stable, but I suspect if we were to drop PPP our router wouldn't be able to reconnect at the moment.
Question 97872389 is open with all the relevant account details for the second line. I haven't added anything to the first ticket for my own line (97771500) as I seem to recall this bumps them to the back of the queue?
Catching the connection while it was down tonight we were able to switch it back to an Openreach modem and try establishing a PPPoE session from my laptop gathering the following log:
17/01/2015 18:46:22.817 pppd[10065]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 786.10.1) started by timstephenson, uid 501
17/01/2015 18:46:22.817 pppd[10065]: PPPoE connecting to service '' [access concentrator '']...
17/01/2015 18:47:28.576 pppd[10065]: PPPoE connection failed, No route to host
Also tried connecting with a PN Technicolour router, which unsurprisingly couldn't establish a PPP session and reported:
Link Status: Disconnected
Last Error Message: Concentrator not reachable
Line sync seems fine and DSL sync stays up when PPP drops - exactly the same as the issues we've been experiencing on our own connection as detailed above.
I'm getting the impression there's some sort of congestion somewhere between our two routers and yourselves? No idea how the cabs/exchanges are connected but given our nearest major exchange is Norwich City, presumably they'd both be connected to there... and then onto the central pipes? Some sort of capacity / content / congestion issue affecting 01603 / 01508 area codes perhaps?
Any chance we can get faults onto the case to try and find out what's going on? There's clearly a problem somewhere here. It isn't an individual line fault, nor presumably is it isolated to the cabs or our individual exchanges.. Over to BTw ?

[#15]

Have a look here at BT1738 http://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/outages.aspx?number=01603
" Root cause has been proven to be a capacity issue, and there will be a noticeable decrease in broadband performance during peak times. This may impact services such as online gaming, video conferencing, VoIP services, online streaming services for TV ?On Demand?. Additional capacity has now been provided, and customers will be migrated over to the new links week commencing 19th January. Next update will be issued upon service restoration or sooner should there be a change in impact."