[EdLUG] Diagnosing a slow Internet problem

[Edinburgh Linux Users Group]

Hi,

Here are my questions:

   1. Why did my speed tests fail in this situation?
   2. Are the ping speeds normal for this situation?
   3. What diagnostic tests can I run to isolate the slowness on this
   system?

I am volunteering for a low income housing shelter in San Francisco, CA.  I
have put in some quality legacy Lubuntu machines in the lobby for the
residents to use.  These machines all have Intel Core 2 duo chips with 2 GB
of RAM and are running Lubuntu 14.04.  I use a similar machine at home, and
have no problems with it.  This email is being written on such a machine at
one of the other two homeless shelters.  The residents routinely use these
machines to watch YouTube video and use LibreOffice, etc., all without
issue.  The machines are proven good.

This is the third shelter to which I have given machines.  They don't have
a budget for either the equipment or the tech support for these machines.

Two of the three shelters have good speed on the Internet that goes to the
machines.  (The shelters provide the Internet service).

However, the third shelter, called the Mentone, has slow Internet speeds in
the lobby.  I am not able to even do anything as basic as run sudo apt-get
update, as the machine chokes on downloading the updates.

The wiring is put in place by a company I will call the Maintenance Group
(MG).  I have called both the MG and the ISP.  Both of them claim that they
have no problems.  The ISP says that they are providing the usual 2 Mbit /
second that we expect here in the US for a configuration like this.  The MG
says that they have run a test on the wiring from the server to the lobby,
and are not seeing any problems.

The ISP is a good company that does not hate GNU-Linux.

The ISP asked me to give them a speed test directly from the switch, which
is located in the basement.  So I ran speed tests in the basement and in
the lobby, and was unable to get the speed test to work.  Speed test has
worked on this machine before.  Here are the two results:

Lobby, where the Lubuntu machine is to be located:

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...

Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 20:1a:06:04:64:42
         inet addr:172.16.2.121

basement, directly from the switch:

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...

Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$

*My first question:  *I am not sure why this speed test failed.  Does
anyone know?

Since I couldn't run speedtest, I pinged google instead.  Here are the
results from the lobby:

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com

PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
time=8.24 ms

64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
time=7.31 ms
<snip>

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---

16 packets transmitted, 12 received, 25% packet loss, time 15037ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.962/7.497/8.198/0.366 ms

Here is the test from the basement:

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com

PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
time=8.24 ms

64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
time=7.31 ms
<snip>

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---

11 packets transmitted, 11 received, 0% packet loss, time 10015ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.022/7.816/8.519/0.451 ms

cje at cje-ultralap440:~$

*My second question*: Are these ping speeds normal?

My third question: What can I do to find the problem with the system?

Thanks!




-- 
Christian Einfeldt
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