Network problem advice

dragon1952

I've got a small network consisting of a cable modem, router and 2 PC's. Lately, I've been losing my internet connection about 7 or 8 times a day. At first, I followed the cable company's troubleshooting sequence of powering the cable modem off and then back on, then turning the router off and on and then rebooting the PC. This cleared the problem. After a few times I decided to just try powering the cable modem off and on and then the router to see if that alone would solve the problem, which it did. Then I tried just powering the router off and on to see if that alone worked, which it did. So now I need to figure out which device is the problem. The cable modem provides the main IP address to the router and the router provides IP's to the PC's. So is the modem causing the the router to lose connectivity to the internet and the subsequent powering off and on of the router is resetting things or is the router flaky? I noticed that even when I lose internet connectivity, I can still communicate between the 2 PC's which is handled by the router. Before I go out and buy a new router or cable modem I was looking for some opinions. Thanks.

jakelm

Cable modem.

Either connection to the modem or the modem itself. If you never loose connection between the 2 Pc's and just loose internet connection, then I say modem.

Hook one Pc directly to the modem (with no router) and let it run for a while.

Also 2 PC's using the same router can cause a problem. But hooking one of the PC's directly to the modem will see if its the modem.

This is just what I would try first.

movtarget

Could be a grounding problem with your cable service. TV service (including digital) impact may be so minimal that you wouldn't notice, but it could be putting your Internet data connection into a confused state.

Don't know how to test for that, other than bugging the cable company to check (don't know whether they would be capable of anything other than a cursory check).

I had a similar problem at my previous house, and the improper grounding was discovered by the telephone company, because they detected a problem with their ground at the street junction, and were going to cheat off the ground in the cable (all underground, so the two boxes were side-by-side). The cable companies ground had a disconnected wire, with no place to connect it.

Once the cable company fixed their grounding problem, my cable modem was up for weeks at a time, instead of 1-2 days.

Movtarget in NC

bruss

what kind of router is it? does it have a status field to see if you are indeed connected to the ISP?

It should report your public ip and such in the status field.


Also is there a sync light on the modem? Is it solid?

jakelm

Every problem I have ran accross (with internet connection problems) has either been at the sorce (cable company), hardware connection (such as cable connections, interconnects), or modem itself, routers are rarely the problem.

ben62670

LinkSys router?

jakelm

ben62670 wrote: »

LinkSys router?

Or a Linksys router..lol

Systems

My new Linksys started doing this a few weeks back. I quickly researched it and found that I had to wipe the entire thing and reconfigure. Everything worked great after that. This was the office spec wireless AP / Router with their new "n" spec. You would think that paying $250 for it would matter but that’s Linksys for you. Great devices but problematic. Problems are easy to get around if you know what your doing.

ben62670

jakelm wrote: »

Or a Linksys router..lol

Thats what I saiD

jakelm

The only thing is , that with a Linksys router, all connection s lost. He describes only an internet connection is lost, the 2 Pc's are still connecting to each other, which leads me to believe there is nothing wrong with the router.

jakelm

ben62670 wrote: »

Thats what I saiD

Thats what I said.

Bamadude

I would follow jakelm's advice and hook directly to the modem to isolate the problem. You can run a test called smokeping from dslreports.com that will monitor your connection for hours if you don't want to sit there and watch it. Gives you a good graph indicating how much your connection is dropping or slowing down.

About smokeping
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/13843

Use smokeping
http://www.dslreports.com/smokeping

Good luck

dragon1952

Thanks for all the replies. I'll try bypassing the router .... ought to make the wife real happy since she's on the wireless connection :rolleyes: )
It's a Netgear WGR614 v6 wireless router and a Motorola Surfboard SB4200.
Another thing, a few times in the past month I lost my internet connection and just assumed it was the ISP. Came back a couple hours later and it was back up. I'm wondering if it was my equipment all the time and if it's possible that it would just come back up on it's own. Also, this setup has been running fine as is for about 6 months before this started happening.

jakelm wrote: »

The only thing is , that with a Linksys router, all connection s lost. He describes only an internet connection is lost, the 2 Pc's are still connecting to each other, which leads me to believe there is nothing wrong with the router.

That's what I said!

bobman1235

I've had a router decide to lose internet connectivity but not interconnectivity between PCs before - it's actually fairly common from what I've heard. The time it happened to me, I had a spare router; swapping that out solved the exact problem described here..

dragon1952

Yeah, it's most likely a different 'layer' that takes care of the two types of communication or something. Anyway, it happened again just a few minutes ago so now I'm connected directly to the modem. Someone asked earlier about the modem status lights? It's funny because even the times the ISP has been the problem the status lights never changed. In S. Cal with Cox, when they went down you could tell because I'd lose the 'Activity' light.

dragon1952

I did some Googling on this model router and evidently this was a common problem. What the hell do I know :rolleyes: Anyway, I downloaded and installed the latest firmware version, reset the router to factory defaults and reconfigured. All is well

mark090852

If the issue reappears you might want to check and see if it is related to cordless phone usage. I think most wireless routers use a 2.4ghz frequency. We were getting disconnected a few times each day like you and discovered it correlated to our use of one of our 2.4ghz cordless phones. Whenever that phone rang or someone dialed out on it we would lose our internet connection. We switched to 5.8ghz phones and haven't had any issues with connectivity now for over two weeks.