Why would Ping Plotter show 100% packet loss, after just a few pings, to the final hop of a site when using the TCP engine but show normal pings to the final hop using ICMP?

I've seen plenty of sites blocking ICMP echo request but blocking TCP....err...????? Something is screwy here. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I thought maybe it was because I have an old beta version of WinPcap, plus, I wasn't using the latest Ping Plotter Pro version either. So, I fetched the latest of both and no change.

I don't get it. Am I just being dense? Is the reason obvious?

Here's a screen shot of Ping Plotter to the same site using the ICMP engine.

I see similar results here, Mele. I'm checking it out...

I'm waiting with baited breath.... <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I recall that I have seen at least one other site like the one I posted.

Pete, did you ever get any answers on this? I kept checking the forum for awhile and then forgot until now when I saw something odd on Ping Plotter with Google ...it looks like Google is somehow blocking tcp pings like I used to see way back with dslr and Microsoft ...anyhow, that made me remember this thread. Anyhow, I am still curious about this.

Hi, Mele.

We're making some progress on it. It looks like there is an incompatibility between the way this server handles some of the packets we send and how we expect it to handle those packets. We've got a "mostly finished" solution to that in the lab here, but it still has one outstanding oddity that we need to get nailed down before anyone tries it out.

Sorry to leave this so long with no reply. It's kind of sticky, and it's possible that we may have to go a different direction with a solution...

I'll be sure to email you when there's a pre-release for you to try out.

Thanks for staying on top of this. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

- Pete

That's cool. I'll be happy to test it.

You know that Microsoft is now blocking TCP? I don't care that much about pinging them but I sure hope that my ISP doesn't start doing whatever Microsoft has done. Actually, Ping Plotter can ping Microsoft for awhile at first and then something kicks in and blocks the pings at the final hop and that goes for several hours and then Ping Plotter can again ping the final hop at www.microsoft.com and then after awhile it can't get to the final hop again.

We've got an update that is a bit more robust on TCP. I sent you an email with a download link - if anyone else wants to try this out, please email beta@pingplotter.com

Microsoft.com actually has some kind of a firewall that blocks requests if it gets too many. They use a bunch of different IPs for load balancing, but if you go through each of them with PingPlotter, you can systematically block yourself from any access to www.microsoft.com (even when using Internet Explorer) for 10 minutes or so. We've not looked into this very much yet - if anyone has any knowledge of what conditions Microsoft (or Akamai, if that's who's doing it), please let us know if there's something we can do to be "nicer".

- Pete