Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-110.159.130.178-20150914090037/@comment-26091666-20150916063322

Nice to see someone reading :v

Yeah normally if you were to do a ping on a more local IP address there wouldn't be that many nodes the packet needs to traverse through before getting a response, etc.

A ping to your the kancolle server would be a lot longer because it has to run through various nodes scattered all over the web but are pre-defined but whatever is the shortest and "cheapest" route to traverse through.

The real problem with ping is really due to its simplicity. It is only designed to see if you can reach to a defined destination or not. It isn't terse enough to show you what routes it took. Hence that is why (and which is a good thing for one to use) traceroute for instance to get a more terse output.

I don't know enough German but it could also mean "ping timeout" or "response timed out", but there could also be similar messages such as "TTL over" (which means time-to-live over). Presumably it would be the former case. However that isn't useful enough to know what is really happening in your update (last paragraph) - that it could be a firewall or something.

This is where I bring in the tools such as layer four traceroute (or lft) to see if it is really a firewall blocking a packet (as that is something that can easily be done by anyone. Traceroute and ping basically works on ICMP which can be blocked but the likes of a proper lft tool with the right configuration can bypass such blocks because it doesn't use ICMP to test/probe.

The problem with timeouts in scenarios like this and hence cat bombs is really when there is no response from the server. The use of viewers for instance such as KC3 Kai could also tell you what sort of error it is facing (except in slightly more technical terms). Cat bombs in cases like this could be intermittent issues with connectivity, specifically latency where there is network congestion. More often than not, these issues maybe resolved quickly unless say for instance a natural disaster occurred on one of the nodes on the route hence breaking the connection but then you won't get cat bomb.

My advice is that it is best to try a few servers listed on especially for the ones in your country and/or at least around it to see if there are certain nodes that are definitely blocked by firewalls or at least be actually down. Again cat errors are hard to diagnose because they're not permanent issues. A more permanent issue would be something like a blank screen where the flash game was to be shown within the DMM frame.