I’ve been using this ASUS access point, and for a super long time, probably a year or two (honestly can’t remember). I’d get to my office and connect to wifi and it would say “no internet”. If I try to log into the router it would time out, and I couldn’t connect. If I turned it off and on again, everything would work as it should. It’s a simple enough work around, but obviously I just shouldn’t have to do this.
I finally had enough and I bought a replacement ap, set it up Friday the 7th, and everything seems fine. Then I come in the office this morning and I’m seeing the same thing on my phone “no internet”!
Logging into the ap fails like it did when I experienced the same issue with asus ap.
PF Sense shows the device “offline”
Now I’m thinking that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my asus AP, and I’m 99% going to return this new AP.
Any ideas on how I can troubleshoot this? I’m not really sure, I guess I’ve become so numb to the situation I’m not exactly tracking, but it feels like an every day occurance.
PFSense Router
Some hand me down cisco switch (managed but not actually configured), and a tplink poe switch as well.
sounds like your internet is flaking out at the provider
you could do a trace route to determine where the fault is
If it’s a cable modem, there is a line filter that can go bad, it’s a 2 dollar part but depending on where it’s located you might need a tech to replace it.
You can find those in lots of places, they are called a MoCA filter
Sometimes the config of these consumer AP’s can get corrupted during firmware upgrades or power failure. Its rare but it can happen.
One thing I would try is doing what’s called a hard reset on the AP. Each model has its own sequence but usually its a 30-30-30 reset procedure (30 seconds pressing the reset button with power on, 30secs powered off, and then 30seconds powered on again).
That’ll clear the cache and reset your configuration back to factory default where you could try to log in directly through an Ethernet cord and browser or ssh.
Only do the 30-30-30 if your AP specifies it though, you risk bricking it otherwise.
You can’t test nearly as well with Wi-Fi. Stick with wired.
Set up some ping tests. Can you ping the router from the internet side? Can you ping it from the local network side? Set-up something automated to ping it all night, and note when it stops responding.
I know from experience that consumer AP/routers act very unreliable when the internet connection is poor. Probably exhausting their limited memory tracking all the failed connections, where the same device is rock solid on a good connection.
How about the environment? Is the router (or the power adapter) somewhere it’s getting very warm or very cold? Is the utility power good and reliable?
@jdfthetech and anyone else. Just so we’re clear. It’s not a problem with my internet. Wired connections work fine, it’s the access point not getting it from my router.
@risk Asus RT-AC68U. The new one was a TP Link something… but I already returned it since it seems reasonable to assume that the problem is one of the other devices on my end.
@DastardlyMuffin there’s a hard reset button, but I’ve only ever done the 303030 type of routine when flashing custom firmware, ie ddwrt
This might just be something I’ll have to keep living with. But since I’m the only wifi user, I’ll definitely just do a factory reset for the time being and see if that helps at all.
I was figuring that. A MoCA filter shouldn’t cause an issue with throughput, its just a way to prevent the backflow of data put on the line from inside a building. So unless the contacts go completely bad (then it shouldn’t pass anything, at all) then all it would do is permit data to backfeed back into the cable system. MoCA operates on frequencies above those used by the cable system, so the MoCA filter prohibits those frequencies from crossing through the filter.
My only thoughts are bad cable or bad port on router?
As @rcxb mentions, since you have a pfsense box, you could leave something running overnight, like:
ping -i 5 www.google.com | while read -r line; do printf '[%s] %s\n' "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" "$line"; done | tee pinglog.txt
while sleep 5; do mtr --show-ips --tcp --port 443 www.google.com --report -c1; done | tee tracelog.txt
If you end up with some kind of low level outage you’ll be able to tell.
I’m betting on DNS being wonky and captive portal probes not making it back in time. Keyword to get details on the web would be NCSI (Microsoft), generate_204 (Google), captive.apple.com (Apple)