[ale] Network sanity check

[James P. Kinney III]

I have a friend who, like me, uses Earthlink DSL. I am supporting his
home network. I routinely will ssh into his linux gateway box and vnc to
his windows machines when he needs help. 

Until 2 days ago, that was all fine. Suddenly, I can't access his box
and he can't see mine. Not ssh, ping, web or traceroute.

But wait! There's more!

If I ssh to an account outside Earthlink space, I can ssh back in to his
box. He can see all of the web (port 80) that he looks for except me.

A traceroute to me from his box shows:
 traceroute -v castle.localnetsolutions.com
traceroute to castle.localnetsolutions.com (66.149.133.143), 30 hops
max, 38 byte packets
 1  user-vcaug01.dsl.mindspring.com (216.175.64.1) 36 bytes to
66.32.81.188  11.253 ms  10.812 ms  17.861 ms
 2  user-vcaug01.dsl.mindspring.com (216.175.64.1) 36 bytes to
66.32.81.188  16.281 ms !N *  10.636 ms !N

Looks like no network access. But I ssh'ed into the box from the outside
Earthlink space account.

A traceroute from me to him goes two hops then nothing but stars and no
final destination is found (goes the full 30 hops attempt).

Earthlink is claiming my stuff is the problem. I run no DNS server.
Nothing changed from when it worked to when it didn't other than the
dynamic IP on his machine. Using that numeric address for ssh and
traceroute I get identical results.

I think Earthlink has a router with broken logic. It drops traffic
between two subnets. I'm on one and he's on the other.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to do some more diagnostics on
this problem?  

Earthlink won't talk to me about this with out the credit card number
that the account is billed to. That is a number I refused to have when I
helped him get this stuff setup. He knows nothing about networking, and
little about computing in general, so couldn't explain the problem to
Earthlink if he had to. Plus he's out of town for a few days.

Why do _I_ get all the weird ones. 
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 




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