My sister and I live in the same town, we both have cable internet (RoadRunner), and we both have the same 4 port routers on our home networks that we bought at the same time two years ago.
Her internet service has been sporadic in the last few months while mine has mostly been fine. RoadRunner claims that the problem is that her router isn’t compatible with their service and that she needs to buy a new router.
So I have a couple of questions:
If the router is incompatible, it wouldn’t be a sporadic outage just occuring in the past few months, right?
If the router is incompatible, I’d be having the same problems, right?
Can the router actually be incompatible? What is it that a router does that could make it incompatible?
Could there be something wrong in the firewall of the router (it has one built in) that is actually causing this sporadic outage?
The first thing she should probably do is lose the router and see if the connection still drops, or possibly wating for it to drop and then bypassing the router and seeing if there is still a live connection. Also, what does she do to get it back up, reset the computer? router? modem? If she can get the service back up my resetting the computer or router but not the modem, then the problem is most likely on her side of the modem. One more thing, what is the make/model of the router? I’ve had problems galore with linksys routers where they’ll lock up until they are power cycled.
For a device with no moving parts, some routers are just crap. Some work fine and then flake out for no apparent reason.
When I worked tech support for cable modems, if the CM diagnostics indicated that the customer’s CM was working, and the answer to “Is your cable modem connected to a router or directly to your PC” was the router option, 95% of the time power cycling the router would fix the problem.
Try upgrading the firmware of the router, if that’s an option.
The outages are so inconsistent that she hasn’t been able to tell if disconnecting the router works. She can say that the network works even when the internet doesn’t.
She isn’t doing anything to get it back up, though she has tried reseting the modem, router, and rebooting the computers.
The router is a Lynksys, but I don’t know the model.
If you’re both open to the idea, try swapping routers with her. If the problem follows the router, and YOU start having problems, then she can buy a new router.
The most likely explanation is simply that the support department at the cable company doesn’t want to spend the time and money troubleshooting an unfamiliar router, so their official position is that it’s “not supported”. The tech may have incorrectly interpreted “not supported” as “not compatible” or may just be telling you that because it’s an easy answer that gets him off the hook for doing anything else. Both are reasonably likely scenarios, unfortunately.
What I do in order to combat this situation is take the router out of the picture, prove that the problem exists independent of it, then call them up while you’re sure you’re in a “supported” configuration. They’ll be forced to troubleshoot the problem, then when (if) they fix it, you can go back to your “unsupported” configuration. Sometimes, the problem actually turns out to be the unsupported hardware.
If you have an intermittent problem, though, this can be slightly painful because it might mean going router-less for a couple of days until you reproduce the problem without it. If you’re sharing your internet connection among multiple computers or if you’re relying on the router to run your LAN, that can be a hassle.
To answer your questions more directly, it is possible that a specific router can be incompatible with your service. It’s pretty unlikely, though, and I would expect them to have a fairly short list of specific routers which are known to be incompatible, as opposed to what they probably have, which is a short list of specific routers which are known to be compatible and the assumption that anything not on the list is unsupported.
Further, it’s possible that a specific incompatible router only exhibits its incompatibilities when certain types of packets are sent (e.g. ICMP “destination unreachable” error packets, which you might not see very often), leading to sporadic problems. And any sporadic problem might be one that your sister sees but you don’t at any given time. (e.g. you and your sister are connected to seperate routers in the cable company, and one of them is having some routing trouble and is generating the ICMP “destination unreachable” packets in question).
And finally, “something wrong with the firewall” is pretty vague, and we’d need to know more about the problem in order to make a guess about that. But in general, web-browsing and email checking should work fine through the firewall unless some “parental controls” settings in the firewall are goofed up. If the problem is related to doing more advanced things like playing network games, VOIP, or other things that require bidirectional TCP connections, then the firewall becomes a suspect.
Oh yeah, and on preview, I agree with Quartz wholeheartedly. Make sure all your OS patches are up-to-date and turn on the windows firewall at the very least before connecting directly to the internet.
That command will prompt your PC to re-request an IP address from your provider’s DHCP server, something that gets done on startup, and every X hours after.
I’d believe it could temporarily fix an intermittant problem, but not much more.
I also have a linksys router, and one thing that helps me when my cable modem connection is flaky is to go to the router’s config page and request that it release and renew its IP address from the ISP. If you have your own router, doing an “ipconfig /release” and “ipconfig /renew” on your computer just releases and renews the DHCP address on your local network, which generally won’t have any effect on your internet connection at all.
But yeah, this is kind of like smacking the TV on its side when it’s acting up. It might make the problem go away for a little while, but it doesn’t fix it.
Going without the network might have to wait until my niece graduates. Both computers are online a lot right now.
My interest in getting it fixed is so I’ll stop getting phone calls at 8 am that ask me if my internet connection is working. Hers has gone down as long as three days, but mostly it’s been more the one or two hour type outage.
In this case, your PC was requesting a new IP address from the Linksys box, that is acting as your LOCAL DHCP host. It is getting a local side IP address, a privately assigned, unroutable address, which is translated by your router.
The Linksys box’s other side (the one that faces towards the Internet) is getting a public address, and in all the cases I’ve seen, the only way for you as a user to key this renewal manually, would be to cycle power on your router.
I 2nd the “swap” router suggestion made to the OP, if it follows, it’s hardware related.
Thanks. I am now less ignorant of how the IP addresses are assigned on my local network. Interestingly enough, it did fix the problem for me permanently, something that rebooting PC’s, the router, and the modem did not do. At this point, I surmise that my PC was not properly requesting an IP address from the router on startup.
How is the coaxial cabling run at her place? Is the incoming signal split among the modem and multiple TV sets? It’s possible one or more of the splitters is creating the problem. The cheap dollar-store cable splitters can suddenly start creating problems, in my experience. Replace with splitters rated up to 1 gigahertz, or higher if you have some extra folding money.
Hers has gone down as long as three days, but mostly it’s been more the one or two hour type outage.