Hi all,
In April this month I decided to switch my ISP. This change also affected the way out LAN is structured, since we switched from DSL to Cable.
Find a structture of my current setup below:
Router 1 is a cable modem and router in one (Ubee EVW 3226) which emmits a WiFi network.
Repeater 1 (FRITZ!WLAN Repeater 1750E) connects to Router 1 via WiFi and to Router 2 via 802.3.
Router 2 (Speedport W700V) was our old DSL modem and is now turned into a switch by disabling DHCP.
Same goes for Router 3 (O2 DSL Router Premium) and 4 (devolo DSL 1100+ WLAN), they are turned into a switch by turning of DHCP.
Random side fact which migth be the key to this problem: my connection uses DSlite. (not too sure what it does but as far as i got it it is used to help switch from IPv4 to IPv6 by doing some weird magic to the packets.
Now the problem:
I have random connection drops when connected via 802.3 to Router 4. Router 1 isn't accessible via Win7 ping.exe. This cannot be reproduced, but it will happen in random intervals ranging from 2mins to 6hrs. Easy fix to regain connection is to unplug the ethernet cable that connects router 4 with my PC. (I guess the PC does another ARP request which makes the line valid again?).
Another fun thing that i've noticed was, that it doesn't happen to both the IPv4 and IPv6 packages. Sometimes IPv4 drops, so i can't access router 1, but I'm still able to ping to WAN IPv6 addresses and get a response. ???
Same things happen when connecting via 802.3 or 802.11 directly to Repeater 1.
Sad thing is, that all the above mentioned hardware is super simple and doesn't provide any logs :( which makes debugging a nightmare.
Do you guys have any suggestion on what to try next / what to change in the configs?
Have you had similar problems with DSlite or any experience with it at all?
Have I forgotten anything?
Please let me know!
I'm getting pretty desperate about this.
Replacing the 802.11 connection between Router 1 and Repeater 1 with 802.3 is NOT an option, sadly :(
Thanks for your help!
P.S: Don't judge my mad paint skills :)
This is quite the interesting problem.
Networking wizards?
@Dexter_Kane @DeusQain
When you say you can't ping router 1 do you mean you can't ping the actual router or you can't ping something external on the internet?
I cannot ping the LAN adress of router 1: 192.168.0.1 (occasionally, as mentioned)
Are you using the WAN port on the other routers to connect to other parts of your network? Is everything on the same subnet? Can you still ping stuff on the internet when you can't ping the router?
All other routers are plugged together using their LAN ports since each of them have switch built in.
All are on subnet 192.168.0.0 with 255 adresses (sry not used to the bit annotation anymore :P )
Router 2, 3 and 4 have been set with static IPs starting from the back ...254 ...253 ...252
Router 1 has been told to only have a DHCP adress quantity of max. 100 clients so it doesn't conflict with the static IPs of the other routers.
Repeater 1 gets an DHCP assigned IP
When losing connection to router 1, i can ping stuff with IPv6 on WAN. google, youtube etc.... WAN IPv4 do not work. twitter teksyndicate...
Have you tried disabling IPv6?
Sadly not an option since
1. It's a DSlite line my isp provides,
2. Cable modem is bullcrap with nearly no settings
You think the router passes some kind of ipv6 to its Lan and the other hardware don't know what to do with it?
Edit: or did I deep completely and I can tell my computer to not use ipv6?
You could try disabling IPv6 on your computer, but I'm thinking the problem may be with the ipv6 connection on the router, but if you can't change that then we can't test that. The issue could also be with the wireless repeater, you could test that of you had a cable you could use temporarily. Otherwise I'm not really sure.
Repeater has been tested already, atleast as far as to have seen the exact same issues as with all the infrastructure behind the repeater.
one other thing to mention is the weird fact, that when connection drops, the repeaters table of connected devices shows a client, which ahs the ip of the device which lost connection with a MAC address of AA:33:00:00:00:00 which is wrong in so many levels.... that was why i came up with the idea of reconnecting the device to refresh the ARP.... i came up with a shitty batch to do that for my laptop, which simply reconnects to the WiFi when connection drops, but for my Win 7 PC i couldn't find a solution which does the same...
As I said i'm pretty desperate at the moment since that problem seems to be in a weird detail noone ever heard of... of course my ISP says that it's not in his responsibility... ISP's are the same all over the planet :(
How about getting something proper set up instead of this layout.
trash that wireless modem get a standard modem with a wireless router. and replace the other routers with proper hardware, IE a switch or a access point.
It is not the ISP's job to troubleshoot your network, they are only responsible for the modem's connection to the internet.
You are correct of course! It's enterily MY problem what I do with the signal once it enters my flat, not the ISP's.
Sadly enough tho, my ISP does NOT allow for an other cablemodem, so I'm stuck on that part.
I know the wireless bridge is very shabby indeed, but the other option was to transmit it over powerline.
I already tried, to have the Router 1 only be the cable modem, and have another wifi router attached to it. After some time, the whole system was dead, the Router 1 just killed all connections on the port the wifi router was on.... I wasn't even able to connect via 802.3 to the router which was daisychained to router 1...
I'd happily do that if I had some kind of clue if it would perform well when I do so. But by now, I don't even know what the issue is.
Is there some sort of magic going on with IPv6 in my LAN? Do I need hardware that can handle that?
I struggle :P
Why not just create a wireless mesh network instead? Use a few medium priced AP's and bridge them all together with your ISP supplied modem?
Seems like a good idea!
But since i already have a medium tech Repeater (~100$) and it doesn't work, I tend to not want to spend too much money on a solution that might struggle aswell...
Since I haven't found out what the exact problem is, i cannot look for hardware which doesn't run into the same problems again.
On the other hand, decent hardware might help debugging.... I wished for dd-wrt on my routers :(
Are you paying extra for wireless? do they have just a modem option? I used to install cable before and those combo units are complete shit, they are so bad i would just instantly replace any that i saw and THEN see what else was wrong. My company even went to the modem and router separate devices finally after so many customers were fucked up with the wireless modems.
Are you able to just use IPv6 across your whole network? Does the wireless modem have an IPv6 and an IPv4 address does it just have an IPv6 and then internally uses IPv4 effectively nating the IPv4 packets inside of v6 ones??
if i was you, i would have router 1 be the router. all other routers would become essentially switches
Sorry for the late response.
No I am not paying extra for wireless. The ISP provided me with the modem/router/wifi access point and force me to use it.
I do see aswell that nearly all the hardware I am using are low tech hardware which don't have too much features and even less settings. I wished for better hardware, but I have no reason to assume that other hardware will change the problem, since i haven't been able to isolate the problem, yet. :(
I don't think that I am able to switch for IPv6 in the LAN since:
1. the hardware wont support it
2. IPv6 has never been designed for use in such a small scale
I could try to setup the LAN with IPv6 and have every client have it's own public address, but I am too much of a noob when it comes to such projects that I would take the risk without professional guidance.
The router1 has a public IPv4 which is marked as CM-Adress, which i suppose means cablemodem and it has 2?! IPv6 addresses which both donot look like IPv6 addresses but like subnetmasks, since the are marked with /64 or /128 in the end.
I do not know how the router handles the Packet transfer between IPv4 and IPv6. Does anyone know how routers accomplish such things?
As far as I understood, DSlite (which this router uses) makes it, so my router shares a IPv4 address with others from my ISP, they only distinguish from each other by their IPv6 address.
Could it be possible, that the router has a 'secret' routing table, which it combines with its DHCP table to give LAN clients a IPv6 address? How to find out? Maybe the other hardware isn't capable of the internal use of IPv6 and therefor struggles to handle the packets properly sometimes?!
