It doesn’t matter how many situations and problems you’ve dealt with as an IT guy, something new and different will eventually come along to make you scratch your head.

On Friday morning I got a notice that our internet connection had dropped out for a short period of time.  After just a minute of being down, the connection came back up.  No big deal, right?

Throughout Saturday morning, I’ve received another notice stating that our connection was down, and then up again.  This happened twice on Saturday morning.  Slightly concerned, I downloaded a little utility (Uptime Scout) to constantly ping our network and log any timeouts that occurred.  At the same time, I called Time Warner Tech Support and opened a ticket with them so they at least had it on record.

When I returned later in the evening, what I found in the logs was very interesting.  Our internet connection was dropping out every 33 minutes, almost to the second.  The outage didn’t last long … a minute at the very most.  However, we use F1, and if this happens on Sunday morning things could get a little messy.

Now I’m very intrigued about our problem, and so I decide to go on-site to look at our cable modem and firewall.  I’m figuring that SURELY our modem is resetting itself or that there’s something that I’ll be able to see.  However, after sitting in the cold datacenter for 50 minutes and watching 2 more outages happen, it’s quite apparent that there’s nothing wrong with the cable modem.  It’s not flinching, and the traffic indicators are still flashing despite my inability to ping anything on the internet.

Well, that leaves you with 2 possible causes … faulty equipment directly outside our building, or a faulty network card in our pfSense box.  As unlikely as I think it is that our pfSense box would have a bad nic (I just replaced it), it’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility. 

So, for the last 40 minutes, my laptop has been connected directly to the cable modem in an attempt to rule out any faulty component on our network, and just as I started typing this paragraph, my pings began to time out and Uptime Scout started making noises at me.  From what I can see, whatever is puking every 33 minutes is not connected to our network or even in the building.

I called Time Warner back with this extra tidbit of information, and I must say that their tech support has been very nice to work with, even at 1:00am.