Teodora Vlasic

The one sentence is basically the whole ticket. Something like:

"From the access node serving line <circuit ref>, is <destination IP> reachable, and is any filtering, scrubbing or rate limiting applied toward that prefix?"

It names a place, names a target, and can be answered yes or no by one person looking at one thing. Compare it with "our customer can't reach their office", which routes straight into the reset-your-router script and stays there for a week.

Start with the contradiction itself, because in my experience it usually isn't real.

On Windows, tracert sends ICMP echo requests with the TTL going 1, 2, 3 and so on, and builds the path out of the time-exceeded replies from routers along the way. Microsoft's own reference page for the command spells that out. The crucial part: the final line only becomes a genuine hit when the destination itself answers with an echo reply. Which means if a tracert truly completed to that address, a plain ping to the same address should also work, because it is the same message type going to the same place.

So verify two things before theorising:

1. Run tracert -d <ip> and read the last line properly. Does it print your destination address followed by "Trace complete", or does it run out at 30 hops with rows of asterisks after the last ISP router? A trace that dies immediately past the provider edge looks complete at a glance, especially in a screenshot.
2. In your HQ capture, check what you actually matched. Are those echo requests addressed to your firewall with the user's public IP as source, or something else that happens to be ICMP and happens to be near the right timestamp?

Most of the time one of those two dissolves the mystery entirely.

Second the no-rigid-filler advice. If you want to close them visually, the slivers method is the only one I've seen still look right after five years. It's slow work, figure a full weekend for a decent sized room: but it's permanent.

Also resist the advice to pull it all down and board it. It's a legitimate option and sometimes the right one, but a sound lath ceiling with two detached patches is a repair job, not a replacement job, and the acoustic and thermal behaviour of the original is better than most people expect.

Parallel cracks a metre long in a lath ceiling are usually following the joists, and what's cracking is the plaster keys - the blobs that squeeze through the gaps between laths and hold the whole thing up. Filler on the surface does nothing about that, which is exactly why it comes back in the same lines every time.

Go into the loft or floor above if you can and look at the top of the ceiling. If you see a lot of broken key material lying loose on the laths, you've got a section that's slowly detaching. The fix from above is to reattach the plaster with plaster washers and screws into the joists, or to run a bonding coat over the top of the laths.

If you can't get access above, the from-below fix is plaster washers on drywall screws driven up into the joists, spaced along the crack line, then scrim tape and a skim coat over the top. Ugly to do, permanent when done.

Not if you countersink them slightly and skim over. They're about 40mm across and dished specifically so they sit below the surface. Two coats of finish plaster and you'd never find them again.

Worth adding: firms that sell injected damp courses diagnose rising damp at a remarkable rate, because that's what they sell. An independent damp surveyor who doesn't do the remedial work costs a few hundred and is the right money to spend if you're unsure.

Check the parting bead too. On a window that's been painted a dozen times the bead often gets loose or has been replaced with something too thin, which lets the upper sash move front to back. You can pull it out and shim it or replace it for a few pounds a metre.

That's roughly the partial quote's scope. Good to hear it isn't obviously the wrong choice.