How to troubleshoot connectivity issues?

Hi,

I was hoping that some people here who have experience in support might be able to offer some opinions on how they troubleshoot tickets where customers are not able to connect to their service. We've been getting a lot of these tickets recently. Because there are so many possible causes for a lack of connectivity - like broken routers, misconfigured firewalls, an incorrect miner configuration, a 30-second loss of connectivity due to a Comcast maintenance period, and so on - it's often impossible to know where to start.

What steps have you used to troubleshoot connectivity issues in your jobs?

Thanks,

-Steve

If I have miners I can't connect, first thing is I look at the pool. If the pool is down, or no status is displaying, there is no sense me trying to reconfigure or fix something that isn't broken on my end, so I start with the pool.

If the pool is up, are other machines connected, if 9 out of 10 of my machines are connected, why isn't the 10th one working?

Next up I have the 1 non-connecting miner ping a few places...to find out if it IS on the internet or just locally on my network.

Verify the settings on the non-connecting miner, remove extras, make it empty or as empty as needed to test if settings are being the disconnect culprit.

Next I do a reboot of the miner, either via console or manually kill power wait 30 secs reboot.

If rebooted miner still won't connect to the pool I want, I point it to another pool...will it connect there?

If none of the miners are connecting, turn it all off for 30 secs...router, modem, miners, all of it. Then reboot the modem, reboot the routers, then the miners and check it all again to see if anything connects now.

Never really had to do anymore testing than that to get miners back up and running on pools. Usually the reboot does it. Or wait 5 mins and see if the ban goes away or connects.

Exactly what I would suggest. However, with the turnkey Asics, after checking connections to other pools and such, I would probably reboot first before. Ziggy's order is more thorough, but I suspect Asic owners are probably less tech savvy overall, so a reboot would probably save them time.
In any event, good methods to check.

I would ask Zig and you guys, regarding video card connections. Once in a while, my bat files have refused to work. This issue mainly cropped up with my little usb Asic, however, currently on my home computer, I could not change the bat file for CC miner to run lyra here at prohashing.
I have not tried to point it at another pool. I'm using the exact same version miner at my work computer and was able to change to mine lyra instead of equihash.
In my own troubleshooting, I ve found that downloading the miner software again and doing a fresh install often helps. My little asic however, is strange. I run 3 storage drives on my computer here at work, and after upgrading one to 8 TB this spring, I used beyond compare to copy everything over. The Asic would not start up ( something about permission or some other garbage, I forget) Copying the folder and bat file to one of my other drives however solved the problem. Prior to that, I tried unstalling and reinstalling and allowing this and that, even asked on bitcointalk, where I was just called an idiot. I'm still running win 7 here, cause i hate 10, and soon enough, I ll have to upgrade. Would love to know more about why this does work when you install, but then doesnt other times. Maybe nobody knows. /ramble off
Tom

if using windows, then in windows command prompt, tracert prohashing.com could be useful for checking for bad nodes, and ipconfig /flushdns could be useful for dns problems. you could also try to turn off a firewall if it's interfering or add a firewall rule on the router to allow all the ports used by the miner/stratum and forward them, but i've never had to do this. if it's on wifi there are a few things you can do to improve the signal, like select a channel with less traffic for the wifi router to use, adjust antennas, reduce interference from structures or other devices, and move the devices so they're closer to the wifi router.
i'm not an IT expert nor work in support, but those would be my first steps. there's probably equivalents in other operating systems for tracert and ipconfig.
sometimes people will need to contact their ISP if nothing else works when it should, and they might have updated DNS info. and it might be a good idea if they could call up their ISP first to see if they're having any network issues or maintenance.