[PLUG] naive question about the internet, etc.

[gilmanhunt at attbi.com]

Bear with me, it's been probably about 12 months or more since I've used the
tool "mtr." It's "Matt's TraceRoute" and what it does is do a traceroute and
then sit back and ping each host returned, and shows you over time what the ping
counts are. It can be used as a tool to test network reliability.

Work has a website at (www.craftpizazz.com) Not a plug, just a point of
reference. We (web guys) have been having an issue with FTPing to and from the
site, and I've installed Snort and seen some interesting results, but need more
quantification before I make a determination. Anyway, on to my question.

I've got a (relatively new) firewall located at the server location, and I
installed MTR and ran the MTR back to our firewall here at the company: 
I get back about 12 rows of hosts, each with between 1 and 5 percent packet loss.

If I go to another server I have access to, and do MTR from it to the webserver,
I have similar numbers with different servers in the list.

If I stay on that other server and go from there to a friend's server at
RackSpace, I get 0s and 1s.

Twelve to Eighteen months ago, 0s and 1s were acceptable; but up to 5% was not,
really, and I'd be calling the ISP. 

Naive question of the day?
Has the Internet been mangled enough that the 5% is an acceptable number, or
should I keep looking for a problem with the network layer? 

-Russ