Unable to access donegal.ie

[Sean]

At work, we originally started with Digiweb satellite and while the satellite service often performed worse than a 56k modem in many cases, at least we were able to access the county council site www.donegal.ie Then when broadband came to Killybegs, we got the dreadful satellite service replaced by Digiweb's DSL 3 service, which is the package that offers 3Mbps down & 256k up. While we are very happy with the performance, unfortunately, we cannot access either the county council site www.donegal.ie or the Donegal library www.donegallibrary.ie In fact, the only way we can access either site is by using a dial-up modem connection, which defeats the purpose of having broadband! :?

I called up Digiweb support and as expected, they put the blame on my PC and then on our firewall. I found another company who uses Digiweb DSL which is seriously dependant on the Donegal Library website and they have the same issue. So, I got onto Digiweb support again and this time they claim that it is the council's fault as their firewalls must be blocking Digiweb from accessing their website. Finally, we got onto the council and they say that the fault is not at their end.

After no success in getting the issue resolved, we have decided to stick with the issue for now by using a dial-up modem to access the council site. However I do know that the other company has gotten fed up and plan to switch to someone else once their contract expires.

Speed-wise, I am happy with Digiweb's uplink and downlink throughput, but a bit disappointed with their round trip time. While 90ms may not seem like a lot, it seems to make a huge impact on page loading performance as I find that webpages load up a lot quicker on my home BT 1Mbps connection (typical ping of 55ms), especially with websites that have a lot of small images.

At this time of writing, I get the following performance at work using irishisptest.com:

Download speed: 2.58Mbps
Upload speed: 206kbps
Quality of Service: 98%
Round Trip Time: 90ms
Max Pause: 63ms

Can someone else reading this who use Digiweb DSL try browsing to www.donegal.ie and mention if they can access the site here? It would be really nice if they could resolve this issue. So far, I have not had any issue accessing the Donegal.ie site using several other broadband providers, including BT and Eircom.

It sounds like digiweb's DNS may be fecked up or there is a problem with your browser or your system.

I presume your using windows so open a dos prompt or a cmd window and see if you can ping either site or run a tracert.

On WinXP press start, then run, type in cmd.
In the terminal window that opens type:
ping www.donegal.ie
OR
ping donegal.ie

and post the results.
Also try:
tracert donegal.ie OR tracert www.donegal.ie
and post the results from that.

Luck
Mick
If both ping and tracert can find the sites, then the problem is on your end. If they can't the problem may well be with Digiweb's DNS servers.

Also, see if you can access donegal.ie using the IP address which for me is: 213.190.147.82. Just copy and paste it into your browser.

[Sean]

Thanks for your reply

I can confirm this issue exists with at least the place I work at (all PCs) and at an Internet Café, which I came out to have a look at, who also use Digiweb. I tried both the website name as well as their IP address in the browser URL bar, both without success.

At home, if I ping www.donegal.ie, I get an IP of 213.190.147.82 and always get ping replies.

At work as well as the Internet Café, I get that same IP address and continuous request time-outs, no matter which PC I try. However, I get ping replies for other sites such as www.google.ie, etc. :? I can confirm there is no other router or firewall between the PC and ISP apart from their provided ZyXEL router. I even tried a factory reset, using no more than the provided settings, username & password to connect, but with the same issue.

The following is a trace route result:
C:\>tracert www.donegal.ie

Tracing route to www.donegal.ie [213.190.147.82]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 192.168.0.10
2 * 72 ms 147 ms ip-83-147-130-254.dsl.digiweb.ie [83.147.130.254]
3 * 66 ms 69 ms gi-0-2-45.dub-deg-br1.net.digiweb.ie [83.147.163.38]
4 * 69 ms 68 ms ge0-1.peering1.inex.dublin.eircom.net [193.242.111.18]
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
(repeats)

At home, the trace route also cuts out at "ge0-1.peering1.inex.dublin.eircom.net", yet I can ping and access the site, unlike at work. :roll:

Looks like the problems isn't Digiweb's DNS as it's returning the correct IP address. The output from the tracert looks like the issue is where Digiweb's & Eircom's networks meet.

One other thing, have you tried different browsers in case it's an issue with IE?

[Sean]

I have tried Firefox also, but without success either. At home, that website appears fine in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

On the other hand, I can confirm that I can access the website if I make a dial-up connection at work and the same with the Internet Café. However this also defeats the purpose of having broadband! The Internet café was also able to access www.donegal.ie before they changed from Digiweb satellite broadband to ADSL broadband and the only thing different is the router. I also have a ZyXEL ADSL router at home (lower spec. model), so I doubt it is the router at fault either.

In the end, the Internet Café has given up on the issue and is in the process of changing to Eircom broadband. I'm not that keen on Eircom broadband myself due to terrible experience with their support staff, however it is essential that they can access the website.

I'd try and escalate the problem further up Digiweb Tech Support channel. The problem is a routing problem with them or with their connection to Eircom's network.

The only other thing I can think of, is I had a similar problem with some Linux systems once. It ended up that the problem was the server I was trying to connect to was did not properly accept some TCP settings (fecking windows). Which meant that I wasn't able to connect to them.

I think the problem was with either TCP window scaling, or TCP congestion notification. I'm not sure how you'd check these on your window's boxes, might be worth checking your router settings to see if there any settings you can change?

Luck
Mick