Calling all Network Wizards!

the FOC house is (still) experiencing network issues. I say network issues because I don't think there's anything wrong with the Virgin connection. Most of the time we're getting our correct download and upload speeds (although I shall do some checks over the next few days and add them to the post just for completeness) and more importantly it's possible to recreate the problem.

the problem is with torrenting or peer to peer file stuff. After my last round of trying to sort stuff out I worked out that unplugging Al's pc from the network stopped the problem. After some discussion it transpired he generally had torrents going but had the download speed throttled. Headscratching. Turns out he didn't have the upload speed throttled. Breakthrough. Apart from it wasn't. The downloads and uploads are now throttledand the problem still occurs. So Al now has his torrents scheduled to run after we go to bed and during the day midweek.

I've taken to having a cmd window open most of the time pinging the bbc website on loop to keep an eye on response times. generally it'll be around 20-40ms - during one of the problem times it will be 1000-2000ms. Sometimes its a bit lower and I can play wow but get disconnected frequently. Last night it was slow - well over 1400 average but Al wasn't torrenting - so I rebooted some stuff and it turned out Fuzzy was - same thing though - download and upload were suitably throttled. So we thought we'd experiment a bit.

Firstly here's our set up - we have the virgin broadband modemy thing which has one output. that goes directly into the netgear modem they supplied. this does the dhcp and stuff. from this the wii and xbox are connected (but are generally switched off) and a line runs to the upstairs router. the upstairs one is the same make of netgear (but vx.x.7 where as downstairs is vx.x.9 I believe) - it has a fixed IP address and dhcp turned off. the range for dhcp on the downstairs router is set to start 1 higher than the IP of the upstairs one so there are no clashes with things in the house. we have the 2 routers as one router isn't enough ports and the signal from the downstairs one doesn't cover our tall victorian house. originally we had just the new router upstairs and still had this problem so it may not be specifically related to the second router. I've downloaded wireshark but frankly that shit baffles me...

anyhoo. as an experiment last night fuzzy took his pc downstairs to see if starting his torrent down there had the same effect as from the upstairs router. it did. interestingly when he started the torrent up his ping stayed ok for a minute or so before gradually getting worse. this made me think that my idea that the problem may be somehow connected to broadcast storms or something had some validity. as another check I made sure that all the pcs in the house were experiencing the latency - not just mine.

so there you have it - I'm going to have a look through both routers tonight and add the settings onto this entry as I forgot to write them down last night (hey al was out and fuzzy stopped torrenting so I got to enjoy 20-40ms latency on WoW which, suprisingly, doesn't appear to increase the ping times by any noticable amount (maybe it's increasing it to 25-45 but that's it...)) I've also noticed that WoW patch updates cause the problem too (as they are torrented peer to peer) and it took me nearly an hour longer to install one than D the other night :(

anyone that could provide us with suggestions and tips and explainations will be rewarded by much gratitude!
there may even be boozes in it ;)

feel free to comment anonymously if you're not on LJ - it'll screen it but I can relase them - put your name on so I know who to squee at :D