Hi all, amongst other things I am a network administrator for a number of companies in NZ.

Like everyone else they send email, look at websites etc every day, nothing unusual about that. Most of them have their own MTA which performs faultlessly almost all of the time...

... however over the past few weeks I've had some problems with one site in particular, they've been trying to send email to another NZ company without success. After some messing around (traceroutes, pings, telnet etc) I determined that the problem occurred after their router.

Now these guys use Xtra as their ISP so you know the drill, call the helldesk & after several weeks (or days if you're lucky) you'll finally get to someone who knows something. It helps if you have an account manager as many of my clients do...

So after a lengthy discussion with an Xtra person (more telnets, traceroutes etc etc) and me logging into other clients to check things we determined that (1) Some Xtra customers had no route to the site, others did (2) No-one (that I checked) on other ISP's had a problem. There was a suggestion that the destination site could be blocking a range of IP numbers, or that there was a problem within Xtra... so I figured it'd be sorted in a few hours. Yeah right!

Subsequently they wanted logs from mail servers etc (like that was going to tell anyone a lot - 'no route to host', but we already knew that) & then topped it off with a suggestion that the fault could be within my client's server. Hmmmm. Incidentally before even calling I tried different DNS's etc in case there was a problem there but that made no difference.

Anyway a couple of days ago I tried accessing Ecan (http://www.ecan.govt.nz) to find the site was down. Never thought any more of it at the time as I figured they were doing something & it would be back up shortly. However I've now been contacted by my client who tells me they can't access Ecan either & I've checked again to find that's still the case for me - yeah I'm on Xtra too (long story!). A traceroute shows.... no route! Now for other reasons I'd be happy if Ecan were to drop off the face of the earth but for the present I'm thinking there's something dubious going on within Xtra.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has a similar problem - it's clear that it's not all Xtra customers, just some, but around 50% of my Xtra clients exhibit this issue & as it's been several weeks (although the Ecan thing could be more recent) I'm starting to get a bit grumpy, particularly as they keep suggesting to my client that it's possibly something up with them >:-(

Call me overly sensitive & inclined to see fire where there isn't but I'm wondering if there's a big experiment going on with this bl**dy net filtering sh1te & we've been caught up with it somehow or is it just some other stupid thing going on within Xtra (you may imagine I've had dealings with them before over some other issues in the past!)? I'm getting nowhere with Xtra & am more and more disinclined to believe things that are said - particularly if some $#%^@!! govt experiment is involved - so hence a call to fellow network Geeks to see if you've got problems or any ideas.

Ciao, P.