WebAfrica and local Google server...

midkemia

midkemia

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Location
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So ive been having issues on Web Africa with accessing Google, and in the process WA have sent me this response, and I quote:
Hi mark ,


Thank you for your query.

At this current moment the local google server is not going though the local IS server reason to this is if you search for something on the google server it gets all the information even from a international source.

Hope this answers your query.

Have a great day.



Should you have any other queries or need any further assistance please let us know.

Regards, mujeeb brey

Telephone (frontdesk): 0861 555 222
Facsimile: 0861 555 223
Web Africa - Internet Business Solutions - http://www.webafrica.co.za
Click to expand...

So what I dont get, is people have confirmed that Google works on local only bandwidth... Why are Web Africa not willing to make it work?
 
Technically it should work. Do a traceroute for us. Also mention which DNS servers you are using, as this should automatically be on local already.

Code: 
C:\Users\Tinuva>tracert www.google.co.za

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [155.232.240.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     5 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.heaven.za.net [10.0.0.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    35 ms    11 ms    10 ms  vl108.cr.gw.cpt.za.wa.co.za [196.220.59.238]
  4    30 ms    40 ms    52 ms  vl40.er.gw.cpt.za.wa.co.za [41.185.0.98]
  5    26 ms    27 ms    29 ms  tenet.cinx.net.za [198.32.214.33]
  6    28 ms    33 ms    13 ms  gc-cpt-bree-g21-23-19.uni.net.za [155.232.240.19]

Trace complete.
 
The ticket was logged with WA originally because I could not access Google. If I created a new account and used PPPoE on my local machine it would work, and then if changed the username in my router to another account it would work.

So basically Google now has more than one local server in South Africa?!

ping google.co.za

Pinging google.co.za [155.232.240.19] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 155.232.240.19:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
 
midkemia said:
The ticket was logged with WA originally because I could not access Google. If I created a new account and used PPPoE on my local machine it would work, and then if changed the username in my router to another account it would work.

So basically Google now has more than one local server in South Africa?!

ping google.co.za

Pinging google.co.za [155.232.240.19] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 155.232.240.19:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
Click to expand...
Great, now can you also do a traceroute please.
 
Ill be infront of my machine later : ) im afraid im a working man, and I havnt "yet" setup remote access to my router and enabled wake on lan on my PC... although it would be nice to be able to login to my router and turn on my pc, and then RPD to my pc... all in good time : )

I will post all pings and trace routes later : )

HavocXphere - I did edit my host file to add the 196. google address, and it works fine... the only issue is that my gtalk doesnt work, and the other machines in my house, im not really allowed to go an play with... So basically I need a solution that I can put into the router and it will just work !
 
Yeah, I haven't been able to get Gtalk working on local. However, you can get the Google Talk's chat working within Gmail on local cap!
 
If the ip starts with 155. it is also local, not just the 196. ip. However there is more in store for later, just patience and all these things will work on local.
 
So I have moved back to my normal account on my router, and setup my IP like it was before. It seems to be working fine now... weird that before it wasnt working in the router, but working as a pppoe connection.

Just happy that all is working again : ) thx WA !
 
Steam isn't local. There are 2 local Steam content servers though: IS Gaming (for the public) and WebAfrica one (for WA users only). Unfortunately there is no way of fixating your Steam to download from a specific server :( I've tried blocking the other servers, like the one with the 193.x.x.x IP address, but then most of the time steam won't even open.
 
Pada said:
Unfortunately there is no way of fixating your Steam to download from a specific server :(
Click to expand...
Steamwatch. Works...though not perfectly. It has a tendency to stop d/l after 15mins.

Pada said:
I've tried blocking the other servers, like the one with the 193.x.x.x IP address, but then most of the time steam won't even open.
Click to expand...
You need to block all connection attempts to other IPs...on a certain port. That way steam traffic & steam data download traffic is separated. Forgot which port....just grab steamwatch and look for the steps to set up WA steam freezone. Works fine except for above mentioned issue w/ it going flakey after a while....though even the flakiness isn't consistent. ;)
 
It's usually TCP port 27030, but I have seen Steam use different ports. SteamWatch is a piece of crap, since its polling for the TCP connections and then trying to terminate them, which fails sometimes. The idiot that wrote it's E-mail address doesn't exist any more and neither did he know much about subnet masks. I've already modified the source code of SteamWatch to support IP address ranges in CIDR format (eg. 192.168.1.0/24).
Perhaps I should try blocking the ports (again) on my MikroTik RB750.

I wish the ISP's and Google would just organise something to get all the local services working on local cap, instead of having people like us force everything to operate on a single IP address :)
 
I have had google and gmail working perfectly using local ip on WA. Up until last night. Something broke and now i keep getting "connection has been reset". Google search works, but gmail does not
 
And now it works again, and here is what i did.

I have a mikrotik router dialing up my pppoe and doing dns and dhcp.

I changed my dns last night to use 168.210.2.2 and 172.16.250.250(local wug dns). That is when it stopped working.

The moment i told the router to use Web africa's dns only and setup the pc's to use the router for dns, then it worked again.

I dont understand how that is possible since i have added static dns entries onto my router so it shouldnt even use an external dns server for get the ips.
 
The way DNS works on the internet, it usually is best to use the ISP's DNS servers you are on. Reason for this is how DNS on the internet work and how it determines your location and network. For remote DNS servers like Akamai and Google and other content distribution networks (CNDs for short) to give you the IP that will deliver the content the fastest to you, they look at the DNS caching server's IP and determine from that what the best would be for you.

Now if you use another ISP, or even international DNS servers, you can just imagine that they will give you completely different information. Its not that the ISPs do anything different to their DNS servers, its actually that their DNS servers automatically get fed different information based on how their network connects to the rest of the world.
 
I tried using the 168 DNS, and I couldnt even ping it!! so dont use that DNS if you using WA... it doesnt work!

Steam in South Africa is a FARCE!!! they expect us to buy games from them, but they cant even provide a local dl cache for us to grab it from...

I strictly adhere to one single fact while buying games... I WILL NOT BUY A GAME IF THEY DO NOT PROVIDE A LOCAL SERVER!

Why should I have to run a special firewall to be able to download my game on freezone or on local bandwidth? This functionality should be provided to us, the end users...
 
Last edited:
Yeah, I have asked on the Steam forums for them to give us the option of selecting South Africa and not just Africa, but I haven't received any responses yet ;(

Anyway, I've downloaded like 30GB of Steam games this past weekend, most of which were downloaded from the IS server and my max download speed (according to the Steam interface) was 1.5MB/s :D
 
I have tried using steam watcher on windows 7 x64. I had the top guru from WA - Wage, Reinhard try and help me over MSN, and we just couldnt get it right. Stopping starting, deleting files... it just wouldnt work...

As an alternative I have suggested to the Wage guys when I was at OC, that they provide a "backup" of the game on the FTP site. We could then browse all these game backups and then download the ones we have bought. We can then "restore" the backup within steam. I realise this is a long way around, but at least then we can download the game at 420KB/s and be sure where we are downloading it from.
 
midkemia said:
As an alternative I have suggested to the Wage guys when I was at OC, that they provide a "backup" of the game on the FTP site. We could then browse all these game backups and then download the ones we have bought. We can then "restore" the backup within steam. I realise this is a long way around, but at least then we can download the game at 420KB/s and be sure where we are downloading it from.
Click to expand...
That would be awesome if IS/WA would provide a service like that! The only problem would be that you can then download a copy of the game even if your account doesn't allow you to have it. Of course you won't be able to do anything with it either :)

I can check if the Windows 7 firewall can block all the international Steam servers and then I'll let you know. I won't be able to do this before 20:00 tonight though, since I'm still at work.
 
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