After I moved to Connecticut, I got my high speed internet from AT&T (SBC Yahoo). The reason is more or less because I had been using SBC Yahoo DSL in Wisconsin for a few years and so I know for sure that it works pretty well with home web hosting. Also, I have my email account with them and it is such a hassle to change my email account.
For the past few days, I noticed some strange problems with my DSL connection and I am yet to identify the exact cause.
From my server at home, I can go to localhost and browse the web pages from there with no problem. But if I go to kerrywong.com, I would occasionally get a connection timed out error. My first thought was that it got to have something to do with MTU settings, since in the past I had experienced similar intermittent connection problems and in the end all had attributed to incorrect MTU settings.
So I checked my MTU settings in my 2701HG-B gateway (can be accessed at http://gateway.2wire.net/mdc, under Advanced -> Configuration Services). By default it was set to 1492. Thinking it might be too high for my DSL connection, I changed it down gradually all the way to 1300. But the intermittent connection problem still remained. I then forced Windows MTU down to roughly the same value (MTU value can be edited using regedit, My Computer -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> Tcpip -> {adapter id} -> MTU), but the problem still seemed to come and go.
The weirdest thing is that it appears that the connection issue only occurs when trying to access my server’s external URL from behind the 2701HG gateway, which made me also ponder that maybe it is not the MTU, it might just be a setting in the somewhere in the gateway that needs to be tweaked. But as of for now, I have not found it yet…
