Another year, another wireless failure

Iriah

Every 30s-2mins or so, my router loses connection to the internet, then reconnects a minute later. It's intensely frustrating, obviously, and has so far resisted all my attempts to fix it.

When I refresh the router status page during these losses I see these changes:

INTERNET SETTINGS:
WAN IP NULL
SUBNET MASK NULL
DEFAULT GATEWAY NULL
DNS ADDRESS NULL

ADSL:
TYPE FAIL [or Full Initialisation, whatever that means]
STATUS FAIL


so far I've tried resetting it, resetting my wireless NIC, uninstalling my wireless NIC, restoring the router to factory defaults, changing the channel, changing the channel to auto, placing the PC in the DMZ, and much more that I forget in a haze of troubleshooting.

halp?

(the router is a Belkin RangeMax, and my NIC is part of the motherboard, an ASUS p5 wireless deluxe)

PS

It DC'd during posting. Luckily I copy pasted it before hitting new thread.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

to be clear, do you lose just your wireless connection to the router, or does your router disconnect you entirely from the internet?

if you are losing your net connection entirely, it's probably as question for your ISP

BlazeFire

Have you been downloading torrents at some point? I just replaced a Linksys WRT54G because it kept dropping connections to our laptop. I finally did a speedtest having connected the modem directly to the computer and also through the router (wired). Both tests would be okay, until I downloaded torrents. If I had started up a torrent program, let it download for a few hours, then closed it, the router would still be in trouble. It had a hard time with all the connections and closing them and such.

I got an ASUS RT-16N wireless router and without changing anything else, my internet experience is way,way better.

Psuedo-edit: I re-read what is happening to you and it seems like your computer can still connect to the router while it is disconnected. I agree with Eat it... I think you need to call up your ISP.

sumwar

I had the same problem with Rogers and i switched to Bell, Canadian here. Odds are it is your ISP, but hey maybe it is your router. If it is your ISP, probably gonna need to change ISP.

Ruckus

In your advanced settings on your router, you could try manually setting your WAN MTU to something like 1432.

MTU is Maximum Transmittable Unit, the maximum byte size of outbound packets. Your router breaks up outbound data that exceeds this value into smaller packets for transmission. Most routers have a default MTU setting of 1500, which for some reason seems to cause a few ADSL providers systems to shit themselves when they encounter such a packet. Scaling the MTU back to 1432 often stabilizes the connection.

Essee

Ruckus wrote:

In your advanced settings on your router, you could try manually setting your WAN MTU to something like 1432.

MTU is Maximum Transmittable Unit, the maximum byte size of outbound packets. Your router breaks up outbound data that exceeds this value into smaller packets for transmission. Most routers have a default MTU setting of 1500, which for some reason seems to cause a few ADSL providers systems to shit themselves when they encounter such a packet. Scaling the MTU back to 1432 often stabilizes the connection.

I'm curious as to why you would recommend 1432, since I haven't heard of that being a magic number before... I mean, that value would definitely work, but I would think it would likely solve the issue by just scaling it back to 1492 (the max MTU for PPPoE connections, which require an extra 8 bytes of overhead, and which I would assume is the "for some reason" that connections flip out in your post). In googling, I do see that for a couple providers in the past in the States wanted that value, but I think for 90% of connections your MTU should be either 1492 (PPPoE with its 8 bytes of overhead) or 1500 (other connection types) under normal circumstances. I use DSLReports as a resource for a lot of things, and here is their page on the subject. As you can see, they recommend 1492 or 1500, but give you a method to find a good MTU value if those turn out to be too high. They start out having you ping using 1472 bytes + 28 = 1500, and then your final MTU is whatever ping value worked without fragmentation + 28. I grant that this could be outdated if something has changed! I'm just curious since I hadn't heard of that value before.