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Weird problem with my internet
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So out of the blue with no obvious cause my internet has started acting funky. First it wouldn't load at all so I unplugged it, ran diagnostics and all the usual shit and got it running again. Now it works, but is loading things very selectively. The forums work, but the main page doesn't. Google doesn't work, but facebook does. I'm getting "took too long to respond" errors on most webpages. The only clue I have is an error message I got only once which said "another computer on this network is using the same IP address". Any suggestions would be great.
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Are you running wireless? Is your network secure? Have you checked to see if anyone else is using it to be sure?
I'm wireless on a secure network (I'm sure it's not unhackable or whatever, but it has a password that isn't "password").
It's also, bizarrely, just cleared up at least temporarily. It might have just been a weird network glitch but I'd still appreciate any possible suggestions for if it happens again.
If that's the case it's an easy fix: unscrew the cable and touch connector against something metal to ground the wire. Plug it back in and, if that was the issue, it should be good as new.
Sounds like it could be a DNS issue in my ancient old aging knowledge of networking as well...
It may just be that particular router crapping out. They do have an operational lifetime and suffer from wear and tear.
This tells me you are having IP address collisions. Means your traffic will get sent incorrectly sometimes and cause what you are seeing with timeouts and such. Otherwise it sounds like one of the hosts file/routing hijacking deals.
Describe your connection. Wireless router? If so, pull up the connection information in it and see if they match with your hardware. If it is your gear accidentally landing on the same IP address, you can change it. If it is some neighbor leaching your internet, you can change the security, or other values. If it isn't a wireless router, check the IP addresses on all your gear, one is probably using DHCP assigned and another static IP address.
Incidentally, are you using WPA/WPA2 (ideally you should be using WPA2 if all your devices support it) or are you using WEP? Because WEP is hilariously insecure now, so that could be a problem. If you're using one of the other two, that's probably not your problem, though. In which case I would guess that one of your own devices might somehow be getting assigned to the same IP address as another (as mentioned above). It's possible to give each device a permanent (static) IP within your network, which might help. You can usually do this in the DHCP settings for your router, but you'll probably need the MAC address for each device in order to set that up. While you're looking in there, make sure your router is set up to provide enough IPs for every device you and your roommate (whom I seem to recall exists from a certain stream) own to be connected to it at once. Because if it isn't, that might be why this started happening. So, for example, you might want your router to provide IPs from 10.1.100 to 10.1.115 instead of 10.1.100 to 10.1.110. If that's an issue.
Also yeah, might as well switch your DNS over to Google's DNS while you're poking around. I did that a while ago and have had absolutely zero problems. It even feels a bit faster to load pages using it than my previous, default DNS settings.
Seriously, though. Last time this exact thing happened to me it was a local ISP problem where they were doing some wonkeyness with our entire area. Bright House never told us what was going on, but it fixed itself within the week. Maybe call your ISP just to be safe?
It's either DNS or general fuckmuppetry from the physical layer of the OSI model (IE cables down, routers not function/routing properly, etc)
DNS might be resolved by fixing it to google's DNS, if it continues with that, probably a physical layer issue.