Greetings,

I'm using PingPlotter 2.60 standard on Windows XP SP1 on an HP nx5000 laptop.

Over the last couple of weeks, sometimes I'll see significant packet loss for a second or three, then it recovers. It starts to look like a major problem in our WAN. Last week I had two managers around as I showed them the problem. As we tried to narrow the problem down to a particular router or link, it turned out that no matter what I was pinging, the problem appears the same. I asked some one next to me to use DOS ping, and they showed no packet loss to the same destinations. I opened a DOS window and tried a DOS ping. At the same instant that PingPlotter showed packet loss, the DOS ping -t showed the message "General Failure."

Has anyone seen this behavior? Rebooting clears the problem, at least for a while. If I just use DOS ping, the problem doesn't seem to crop up.

Could this be a software issue with PingPlotter? A windows network driver issue? A hardware issue? Black Magic aimed at embarrassing me in front of my boss?

Thanks,

John

Hi, John.

This is a rough one to troubleshoot. It sounds like there's some kind of issue with something running on your machine, since the error *did* occur with PING at the same time as PingPlotter.

I'd start out by switching to ICMP raw sockets and see if that changes things - maybe there's just an issue with ICMP.DLL. Then, maybe try running PingPlotter on a your neighbor's machine.

We have a couple of articles that touch on this topic a bit:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/37

and

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/22

See if that gets you an ideas.

It does seem like a local PC issue rather than a router issue, based on the "General Failure" message. Are you getting similar errors in PingPlotter (it will show up above the upper trace graph)?

- Pete