greg_23805

I've learned some things in the last 2 days. Suddenly 3 days ago signal strength would drop from 72 to 15. Adjustments to dish did no good. Called DWay, the manual params for satellite had me on G11 1350 frequency, couldn't keep a signal. DWay said they needed to send out installer because it was dish pointing issue. I refused to believe that so did not accept an appointment for technician. Went into setup and picked G11 1070 freq, voila, sig strength 63, exited and it worked overnight but this morning, sig strength 15 again. Checked setup and I'm back on 1350 frequency. Adjustments didn't help. Power cycling the modem, sig strength would be 72 and then drop to 15 almost right away. Called DWay back. Last call day before they said if I found a freq that was good, to call back and they would switch the account to that freq. Well, today they said there is no room on any other frequencies and I had to stay on 1370. hmm, then I asked, don't you mean 1350, NO, you are setup for 1370. So I switched the freq to 1370 and sig strength was 15, highest I could get it was 19. Earlier I had ohmed cables, changed out the coupling block outside, switched the xmit and receive cables on both ends to see if it was receive cable, no help. I've done a lot of adjusting of my sat dishes and knew that there was something else wrong. So I went on about con calls etc today to try and get some work done, meanwhile keeping the antenna pointing sig strength meter on the desktop. After it sat there for about an hour at 15 and bouncing to 30 and then back to 15, it suddenly went to 70 and stayed there for about 15 minutes, then dropped again. Incidentally, few if any clouds. Then about 20 minutes later it went back to 70 so I did an auto cross-pol and it passed. I then was able to re-register and now I have the connection back. Very frustrating, not sure what was going on at NOC to finally get a good signal and it stay there. We'll see how long it lasts. 1. I think DWay will sometimes change me to a different frequency without me knowing. It happened in the past and I just adjusted for the new freq and moved on. 2. Adjusting the dish is a joke if you haven't been on a frequency before or try others then try to go back to the one you were on. Anyhow, nothing about this is straight forward and I'm still not convinced that there wasn't something wrong on the NOC end. We'll see how long this signal lasts. Also, I am on the pro plan and only get download speeds of 500-600 with the HN7000s modem. It sucks but I'll be damned if I'm messing with it anytime soon. when I first got the modem, speeds were around 1k.

FWIW, I ended up reloading the DWay software after uninstalling and re-installing the USB controllers on my system. Speeds are more consistent in the 600-700 Kbps range. Previously, there were very long delays in transmits. I was able to determine using the dway diagnostics that USB was not transmitting all the packets to the tcp/ip layer. Pathping always showed 50%+ packet loss pinging the first hop/router in the dway network. Enuf time spent on this one for sure.

I have a problem I started noticing about a week ago. Web pages start to load and ie explorer says 'done' on bottom left but page is blank. I hit the 'X' buttom to stop and most of the page displays. I then went to TMN and did a download speed test. Just as another user described in another post, the download is choppy. The smartest goes right thru the smallest download and then proceeds to the next one. This next one is choppy. I'm not used to that. Used to be able to use the largest size and it cranked right thru with little pausing and I got speeds of around 1000 to 1200 Kbps. Now I only make it thru the second size test, choppy and get around 200 to 300 Kbps. At times it will hit ~600 but that's not the norm. All the usual suspects have been checked like virus scan, netstat to check what connections are being used etc. I have a network packet monitor tool to watch what packets are going back and forth. There are a lot of packets between 192.168.225.2 and 224.0.1.87, multicast involving the HPEP. There are also packets from 172.25.1.10 to 237.238.239.239. I used McAfee firewall to block those but it didn't help. I turned off McAfee firewall and used windows firewall, no help. Powered off the dw4000 modems for a long time, overnight even, no help. About a month ago, the SAT connection quit working completely. I re-aimed the dish, pain in the rump because I ended up having to go into manual pointing and re-doing the xpol test but passed it eventually. Still no connection. Then did a web setup and afterwards it started working. I noticed also that I was assigned a new IP and gateway. The satellite I'm using is G11_1370_21k. It's been in the last week or 2 that this new problem has surfaced. I'm at a loss for what the problem is. Customer Service says the minimum is 200 Kbps and since I'm getting that, no problem. Anyone got any ideas what the problem could be?

Brandon, I run dw4000 and use Cisco software vpn client on my laptop and have no problems as long as the MTU is set at 1300. I'd really like to know if you get this resolved because I'm considering upgrading from the 4000 to the 7000 and need my sw vpn to continue working. Can you have your client/customer set the MTU to 1300 and then 1200 and see if that works and let us know. It's not uncommon to have to drop the MTU for vpn to work, I've been around this block with vpn a lot. When I was running 1500 MTU on the client, I could connect to the VPN concentrator but Outlook and other things didn't work. Also make sure that windows firewall, Advanced tab, that the clients enet nic isn't selected, that is of course if they are running another firewall and I assume so since this is a corporate connection. So let us know what happens please.

Ok, so one upload at 46, the next at 16. We'll see how it runs on average. Download at 1275. I'm satisfied, at least things are working again. Thanks for the replies to this post, hopefully my lessons learned will help someone else. Incidentally, this is with DW4000 USB modems. I have the dish transmitter grounded and removing the ground wire made no difference in the receive strength. Later

OK, update. I'm back online transmitting. Adjusting the side to side setting did the trick but I applied a trick. So for those like me without the fancy meter you can plug in outside at the dish to get your numbers: 1. After you think you have the side to side and up/down set as good as you can get it. Boy that side to side setting sucks big time!!, use 2 way radios and have someone sitting at the computer watching while running the manual test. Don't go to ACP yet. 2. Push out on one side of the dish from the back and see if moving the dish slightly to one side pushes up the receive signal, then do the other side, you will see which way you have to go with the dish to get it just right. Then below for the trick. 3. After you figure out which way the dish has to rotate side to side, back out one of the bolts that bolts the dish to the square metal plate and size up some washers that will fit the bolt. Then, loosen the other bolt on the same side as the one you just took out, this is the side you have to kick out to get the highes signal. Put a washer between the square metal plate and the fiberglass back of the dish. Ask the person watching the screen if the signal is high like when you pushed on that side, if so, push out just a little more, if the signal goes down, you know you don't need anymore washers. Tighten up the 2 bolts and confirm you still have a high signal. This method got my receive strength high enough. Then on to the ACP manual test. 1. The numbers given to setup the cross polarization was 9.3, with that setting, I was running 44 in the ACP mode. I ended up rotating the dish to about 16.5 to get the cross-pol up in the 80 range and the test passed with flying colors. Lessons learned: 1. The regular antenna pointing mode without '/manual' at the end of the properties for the shortcut, runs about 10 units higher in strength then the manual test. So get the highest receive signal you can in manual mode before going to ACP with side/side and up/down and apply the tweak with the washers for highest receive strength. 2. The polarization number to start with is way low or is just a start, I guess this depends on how perfectly level the satellite mounting pole is. 3. After you pass the ACP test, exit and then run websetup, the transmitter will not work until you run websetup after passing the ACP. Sheeesh, I have about 8 hours in this adjustment, thank God I finally decided to use the washers for the side to side tweak. Trying to rotate the weight of the dish in a small enough increment to get the highest receive strength is just a really rough adjustment. Maybe Dway or other vendors now have a fine adjustment that can be done with a bolt or something. Now to try an upload test which is where this all started, trying to get better upload speeds. I can tell by just how pages are loading right now that it's quicker but I'll test and post results.

I thought I would maybe get better upload by checking and adjusting my cross-pol settings. I am not able to pass the test. I have tweaked the dish every which way, all 3 directions and I cannot get a cross-pol signal over 61, therefore, the test doesn't pass. The maximum signal strength I can get prior to the ACP test is 62, then when the ACP test starts, I can barely get it to read 61. Seems that if I can't get my receive signal in the 70';s, there is no hope. I checked the cables, which are about 60 feet long and they are not shorted. Resistance is 4 ohms when shorting one end out. I cleaned the satellite dish, checked all connections on both ends, made sure there weren't any wasps or anything else under the plastic cover on the end of the dish. I have no clue what to do except wait for possibly a stronger signal. I'm using dial return right now. Any suggestions? This is wearing me out going back and forth. The frequency when I was running with the transmitter was 1410, I don't see any satellites with 1410 in the name. The satellite I'm using is G11_1350_20k. Friday, I was successful in doing the ACP and getting it to pass. I thought I'd try tweaking it one more time and this time, I am having no luck. Any help appreciated.

I'm using the DW 4000 with Cisco VPN 4.05d. It works, as stated earlier. When you try vpn, make sure to try different mtu settings, lower then normal. My cisco vpn connection will set the mtu to 1300.

Do a search on the web for " https blocked" or " https won't display". There are some good pages to read about this problem. I don't think it is dway but could be wrong. I just finished going thru troubleshooting this problem because I connected my friends laptop to my network and could not ever successfully run windows update to put service pack 2 on his machine. I use ICS and DW4000 modems. This was strange because I have done this before with his computer and never had problems. I haven't done it since I updated this machine to SP2 though. Anyhow, I spent at least 12 or 14 full hours on and off over the course of a week trying to get windows update to work. WU does use https and I figured this was the problem but still not sure. Anyhow, try: 1. Internet options>>Privacy tab and select the button to 'Clear SSL state' 2. Try removing the https* stuff out of the proxy server exception list I say #2 above because another thing I've noticed is that nothing works anymore unless the proxy is on, this just started happening in the last week I think. Check this out, I found out today on my work laptop on the home network that it won't even find my companies VPN concentrator unless I have the proxy enabled in internet options, figure that out!! This is strange because VPN won't even use the proxy after it's up or it wouldn't be VPN. I'm not 100% sure about this but the person that did the ip reset command might want to check them. I think this command resets all the tcp/ip params to default. So if you had tweaks on those params, they may be gone. I did the same thing on my friends pc but it didn't help with WU problems. Incidentally, I could run WU on his laptop using dialup, also, Windows update v4 worked but not v5. I got to v4 from the windows update page>>FAQ>>other download sites.

I recognized this last night. Figured out the problem. I use McAfee firewall and when watching inbound events, there were many attempts at port 1030 udp from a347dnsxx.direcpc.com. Where xx = numerals. No doubt this is the cause of the problem for me. I have been noticing events for a long time on port 1026 w/udp for a347dnsxx.direcpc.com. The ip's of these machiness are 66.82.4.22 and up, there are about 8 of them that keep trying to send udp packets. Notice these machines have the name dns in them and they are also on the same subnet as the dns server configured on the dway modem. DNS uses port 53 for communication and the dns server at dway should also use that port when replying back. Also, from what I glean off the internet, a dns server should not solicit any client, it should only respond to a client request. So from that description, I decided they were not legit accesses and never have allowed them. You can consider this a denial of service attack of sorts. So when I saw this happening last night, I changed the dns server on the dway modem to 198.77.116.8. After doing that, I had no more problems with attempts at port 1030/udp. I then started getting attempts at port 1026/udp for ns0x.direcpc.com and there were many different machines trying to communicate with my system. I called dway support today about this. I didn't dial the regular number, I called information and got the number for hughes network in Germantown, MD and was transferred to "Executive Customer Service" whippee. I was then told they would transfer me to a technical person, I said thanks but I did not want to talk to anyone in India because they couldn't help me. They put me thru to someone in Florida. I had a conversation with this network tech there about this issue with attempts at my firewall.. I explained that I would think that dway would want to do something about this because it was causing their servers unnecessary work and taking up bandwidth. This tech told me that dway often communicates with the modem to ensure the signal is at it's best and this is what was happening. I explained that it was certain that the dos on port 1030/udp was keeping me from loading web pages. It took several submits in a row before a page would come up. He tried telling me that I should allow direcpc.com but I know better then that because every dway customer out there is in the direcpc.com domain and no way I'm opening my machine up to that. He also told me that I don't even need a firewall because they have 3 layers of nat and encryption of the satellite stream. That comment went in one ear and out the other also. Anyhow, the conversation ended with this person not admitting to anything and I have considered trusting a couple of the a347 ip addresses. I also let this tech know that they ought to snoop the traffic on their servers to see if there is anything going out to dway customers that is not legit. So here is the really interesting thing. Since I had the conversation with this person, I have not seen one single attempt at my computer by a347...direcpc.com or ns0x.direcpc.com. hmmm, I'm thinking they must have done something because I have rebooted and typically several minutes after the modem is rx and tx, I start seeing the a347 attempts. So far so good, I hope they did do something. I'll keep watching and if others can feed back what they see on their firewalls, that would be good too. Hope this helps!!

I use the same VPN client. Set your MTU to 1300. Check your device manager under Network adapters and make sure you are using the deterministic network enhancer, ie, make sure it is enabled for your lan card that is connected to the dw6000. Before you change the mtu, do this: 1. The following ping command will tell you what the mtu should be set to: ping -f -l 1432 <ip address for your vpn concentrator you connect to> If the ping works without seeing a message about the packet needing fragmented, then add 28 to the 1432 above and this means your mtu should be set to 1460. Keep increasing the number after the '-l' switch in the command until you see the packet needs fragmented message then back off 1. Once you find the mtu that won't get fragmented, then add 28 and that is where your mtu should be set. This is the mtu for any internet connection when you are not using vpn. If using vpn, the deterministic network enhancer will change yoru mtu. If you are not using the dne, just set your mtu to 1300 and see if it works. If not, try 1200. VPN needs a lower mtu to work reliably. Hope this helps.

Those versions you have are only the downloaded update packages. I have both on my computer also. It doesn't matter if you leave them there, but to be safe, just delete the _005 version. When you right click the blue DW icon, select about and then system information, under service pack you should see 'Service Pack C1' if you upgraded to the P15 version.

Van, I''m running the DW4000. I used cablenut and loaded your latest SP2 vanburen.test.ccs file and it worked real good. :::.. Download Stats ..::: Connection is:: 1596 Kbps about 1.6 Mbps (tested with 2992 KB) Download Speed is:: 195 KB/s Tested From:: http://www.testmy.net/ Test Time:: Tue Feb 22 23:52:04 CST 2005 Bottom Line:: 29X faster than 56K 1MB download in 5.25 sec Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 95.35 % faster than the average for host (direcpc.com) Validation Link:: https://testmy.net/id-L1S58Z7V4 :::.. Upload Stats ..::: Connection is:: 44 Kbps about 0 Mbps (tested with 97 KB) Upload Speed is:: 5 KB/s Tested From:: http://www.testmy.net/ Test Time:: Tue Feb 22 23:51:26 CST 2005 Bottom Line:: 1X faster than 56K 1MB upload in 204.8 sec Diagnosis: Looks Great : 4.76 % faster than the average for host (direcpc.com) Validation Link:: https://testmy.net/id-HKD27VW5M I tried your ccs file with the AFD tweaks and it was very slow: 109 down and 51 up. I'll stick with the test.ccs settings. Thanks much, great forum!!