Internet going in and out?

Uriel

Having a hard time posting this right now.

For the past three days my internet has been intermittent at best. Going in and out of a state where it I have to refresh five to ten times before I get past a generic "Can not connect" screen.

None of the other computers in the house are having this issue, just mine, it would seem.

I called the cable company last night and he had me run some stuff through the command prompt which seemed to have things running again but now today I am having problems.

THe technician said he thought it could be malware corrupting my arpcache whatever that is. apparently the commands he had me run reset this cache.

Any thoughts on how to fix my interwub without a cableman coming out here?

Sipex

Malware? Get a reputable anti-malware program (download the installer on another computer and bring it over via CD or USB key) and run it on your computer via safemode. Make sure to get the most up to date installer.

You're looking for Malware Bytes or Spybot Search and Destroy. Both are free and incredibly useful.

Uriel

Well, I'm not sure it is, because I am not having any other problems.

Also I ran spybot and all it found was tracking cookies.

Sipex

It could still be malware, just relatively new so it's not getting picked up by spy bot yet.

I know you said the other connections in the house are okay but have you tried cycling the router and modem anyways?

Uriel

Yeah I have, three times, doesn't affect it at all.

After running a few pings the tech told me I was able to ping the DNS and my Modem, but anything past that was pretty much a no go.

WildEEP

A quick way to test is to try multiple browsers. Fire up IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Try each one of them during the "Outage" and see if its all of them or just one of them.

If it is indeed the arp cache, you should wait for an outage to occur, go to the DOS prompt and type in ARP -a

It will list whats in your arp cache - if its malware it wouldnt ruin your arp cache, but you'd see some pretty weird info in there. Then if you clear it, and it works, but then the gunk returns w/ the problem then you've definately got malware. If you get some kind of error message that the arp couldn't be read or deleted . . . ehhh then you might be looking at a reinstall of windows.

Uriel

Well, it's both mozilla and IE that are doing it, as well as other internet applications like Pidgin and LAST.FM's thing.

But yeah I'll check out the arp cache when I get another outage and post it here?

Uriel

WildEEP

Thats a lot of static addresses.
Do you have a unique/custom setup for the network in your house? Or is this out of the box, straight from the Cable wall jack?

Uriel

WildEEP wrote: »

Thats a lot of static addresses.
Do you have a unique/custom setup for the network in your house? Or is this out of the box, straight from the Cable wall jack?

I'm behind my router, which is a linksys WRT54G running tomato, which I had to install to fix the damn thing a while ago.

Let me check tomato's interface.

Hmmm this is from tomato's logs:

Jul 6 07:27:54 unknown daemon.warn miniupnpd[131]: HTTP Connection closed inexpectedly

Uriel

Also I just found out this IS happening on the other computers.

Also diving into tomato's settings it seems that DDNS was not on it's recommended setting, could that affect anything?

Sipex

That makes a lot of difference, maybe the settings on your router got changed or it's just crapping out (or the modem is).

Or your internet provider is failing and you need to kick some ass.

Uriel

Well my internet hasn't "gone out" since I made that change to my DDNS settings.

It was on "use external checker every 10 minutes" or something?

I set it to it's recommended setting as "Use WAN IP Address."

WildEEP

Heres the test - lets see if its a config problem or if its a hardware problem.
Plug directly into the jack provided via the cable company (usually at the cable modem) - use any PC, since its happening on all of them. See if it still craps out. If you've bypassed your additional firewall and are still having the problem, then nothing you'll do to the firewall will help.

At that point you'll need to call the cable folks and ask them either for a new modem or have them send a tech out to check the line.

Uriel

WildEEP wrote: »

Heres the test - lets see if its a config problem or if its a hardware problem.
Plug directly into the jack provided via the cable company (usually at the cable modem) - use any PC, since its happening on all of them. See if it still craps out. If you've bypassed your additional firewall and are still having the problem, then nothing you'll do to the firewall will help.

At that point you'll need to call the cable folks and ask them either for a new modem or have them send a tech out to check the line.

I will do this next time it goes out, god willing it wont though.

Ruckus

If you look at the status page of your router, it should give you your WAN gateway and your Router IP. Note those IPs. You should also run a Ping on a common website, such as google.com, and make note of it's IP address. If you start experiencing trouble, open 3 command prompts, and arrange them so you can watch all three. In the first, ping your local router (the linksys) with a -t flag("ping 192.168.1.1 -t"), the second prompt, ping the ip for your WAN gateway also with a -t flag, and do the same with the IP for the website IP in the third prompt. By pinging the IP address we take DNS resolution out of the equation, and the -t flag makes the ping repeat forever (until you cancel it in the prompt with CTRL+C or close the prompt window).

If you are getting solid responses from your gateway and the WAN gateway, but the website ping is failing, it's most likely the problem is in the ISP's hardware or beyond. If the ping to your router works but from your router to the WAN gateway and website fail, it's most likely a problem between in the link between your router and the ISP, but it could be in either yours or their hardware. If all three of the pings start failing at the same time, the problem is either your PC or your Router. If you perform this test and never see any significant dropped pings (one or two a minute is usually fine), the problem may be DNS related, which again could be your PC, your Router, or their DNS. You can eliminate their DNS as the problem by switching your PC to use the google public DNS servers in your Network Connection Settings TCP/IP (Version 4) Properties.