On 11/12/13 11:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 9 December 2013 20:50, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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Use 144Mbps or perhaps 54Mbps not 300.
Virgin's engineer knocked it down to 54Mbps (or at least that's what he said he did, I haven't looked at the settings).
Er, look at the settings if you have a problem with the router! :-)
Greenfield mode: Off
Never heard of this one, will check but what is it?
Explained here better than I could: http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-30Mb-Setup-Equipment/Greenfield-mo...
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Firewall on at Low if you run any internet facing servers, higher if not. Only firewall is whatever the router has (generally relying on NAT apart from that).
Well if your router is like mine, it has a firewall which can be enabled or disabled. Seriously, if you're having problems with your router, I'd check everything/all settings on the router. There's also diagnostic pages there somewhere, so if you get there during an outage, you may be able to see what's up - and/or you may be able to see from the router's lights if it's lost connection.
Ping returns an error code, so if it doesn't work, you can run a command, or vice versa
Good point, I didn't think about using ping itself.
I'd be tempted to try some tracerts with both a URL and an IP address when the problem exists, and see if you get a complete routing failure with both indicating a wifi or network failure, or only with the URL indicating an internal DNS problem. Also it could reveal if the internal network is OK by tracing as far only as the router and no further.
I always test using ping to 8.8.8.8 so I'm pretty sure DNS isn't relevant. Last time it happened my desktop (cabled connection) was still able to access the Internet through the router ruling out a lost Internet connection, and I have now had one occasion where my wife's laptop lost connection (Win8) but my Linux laptop was still connected fine. The wife's laptop is brand new (arrived yesterday) so its the first time I've been able to test from two laptops simultaneously. Worth noting that the only way to get it to work again on the Win8 laptop was disconnect from the wifi network and re-connect.
OK, so that suggests it's just the wireless. Still Tracert might be worth a go as it may give an indication of how far the it can get - I suspect it would fail at the first hurdle, but it may be that it can get as far as the router.
It could be that the IP address leases have expired from the router's DHCP server and are not renewed, or a taking a while to renew. If so and if you come round to suspecting DHCP, if you have a server, try turning off DHCP on the router and running DNSMASQ on the server. Did you connect/pair the laptops to the router using WPS? I've tried that to have it work for a while and then fail completely. However, with manually set up connections I've not had problems. Are you doing any sort of IP address or Mac address filtering? If so, that could be failing and blocking the wireless for a while. Are you broadcasting the SSID? Some of my devices only work reliably if I do.
Can you check the IP addresses of the machines before and during a failure? Windows might initially connect, then decide it can't see the original network and decide to allocate a new IP address in a different sub-net.
HTH!
Steve