I’m having… odd network problems. I’ve determined that through my router I get “Destination Net Unreachable” when pinging or tracing anything down the path farther than the gateway. Here’s the long version:
Around about 8 AM this morning my internet got sluggish, it merrily chugged along however, until about 1 where webpages started refusing to load, or at least load in a timely fashion (lots of timeout errors, or errors that the host never sent any data back). I decided to do the sane thing and power cycle everything. Now I had a huge problem, I couldn’t access any website.
So I tried slowly working my way through thing I’d encountered. I checked my hosts file, it was fine. Disabled all services and startup programs and restarted, fine. Ping google.com… destination net unreachable. Ping the Google public DNS, same error. Then I tried to ping myself and my router, fine, got responses. I can log into my router just fine too. I try to ping my modem, Destination Net Unreachable.
Now, I’ve had issues with Windows 7 Home Ultimate doing weird stuff before, so I opened up my Mac laptop, same issue. I can get to the router, ping the router and ping myself, but not the modem or later. Here’s the weird thing, despite the fact that both of them can ping internally, neither could ping each other. And I’m not talking about dropping icmp packets due to firewalls, it was the same error, the router reported Destination Net Unreachable.
Then I connected the desktop directly to the modem. No dice, couldn’t connect, though this time it just couldn’t get an IP address. So I decide to power cycle to modem. No dice. I power cycle my computer AND the modem. Suddenly I get perfect internet. Cool, connect it to the router, same problem.
So here’s the rundown:
If I connect through the router to the modem, I get Destination Net Unreachable on anything past the gateway, including other computers I know are connected successfully.
If I connect a computer directly to the modem without rebooting, I can’t get an IP and connect to the internet. Rebooting the computer and the modem (both must be done) will allow me to connect perfectly. Previously I could just plug and play with the cable modem if I had to so this is odd behaviour.
If I reconnect through the router, and then switch back to the modem within one boot, I must do a full power cycle to recognize it again.
I tried resetting the router to factory settings because it was the only thing I could think of. No dice, exact same problems.
Doing a full all-network power cycle (meaning disconnecting all internet capable devices from the router, shutting down and restarting my modem, computer, and router) still yields no results, same error.
I’m certain it’s not my local machines. I’ve changed absolutely everything, from preferred DNS, to preferred local IP to default settings. I’ve tried it on multiple machines and multiple OSs (I even booted into Ubuntu on my desktop, same problem), if it’s anywhere, it’s not on the local machine level.
My problem is that I have no idea if the problem lies with the router or the modem, and they can be rather expensive and I don’t have any (working) routers just lying around, not to mention if it’s my router I don’t want to wait 3 days for them to get a service guy over here because I’m trying to replace the modem just for it to be the router. My inkling right now is that it’s the router, but the strange behaviour with the modem makes me wonder if the router is only having trouble because the modem is having IP configuration problems.
What do you guys think? Does this sound like a router issue or a modem issue? My bet is router (especially since I can’t even ping local network machines), but I want a little validation before I drop 100 bucks on another router for it to not be the problem.