Odd internet issues?

Networking Networking Hardware
1

So I’m trying to get my mom’s computer back up and running and now I am finding notwork problems. Ugh give me a break…

My machine is connected fine, phone is too, xbox, and my thinkpad can connect fine as well, but when I try to connect literally anything else it just says no and runs away giggling like a little bitch. I have this new laptop for my mom to use for a while set up and thunderbird can’t ping to her Juno email POP OR SMTP servers, I can’t get firefox out to google AT ALL… I thought this was just a problem with her desktop but I guess it isn’t.

???

The only thing I really know to do is reset the router and hope for the best. (mumbles peice of shit) Any help will be appreciated if reseting the router doesn’t work.

2

It should connect just fine unless you have run out of DHCP IP leases. Whats your subnet mask?

Post the content os ifconfig or ip addr

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3

Well I’ll get to that when the internet allows me to. Now nothing is connecting at all because I reset the router. Its the stock comcast pile of shit and I’ve been slowly selling my mom on a new modem and use a router we already have. She seems sold on it now since this has been a problem since monday and I’m getting sick of this shit.

4

You don’t need internet for this to work. Just at least one client connected to the DHCP.

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5

It seems my phone’s data connection won’t let me upload a picture so what am I looking for here?

6

Anyways this has been a while in the works. I think we’re going to chuck the pile of dogshit comcast gatuway back at them and do a custom setup. Its 40 to 60 bucks to do for a good enough modem and netgear isn’t shit anymore. Nothing is connecting out so I think it is safe to say the router is trashed.

7

I’ve seen inexplicable problems with the cable modem/router/wifi combos that were immediately solved by putting them in bridge mode and adding any decent consumer wifi router.

8

I’m a security fanatic and I have done the bridge thing before. It didn’t really do anything more than have it work half the time.

I have been fighting this router for years this is my tipping point I think lol. I’ll post when we have a new modem later today.

9

Is it in bridge mode now or is it doing the routing? If it’s not routing, what is?

10

No its in its standard mode. Its the modem and the router. But at the start of this year and mid last year I did bridged mode when it was pulling this shit. Last year it would randomly decide to not work for 2 or 3 days every ? Weeks. There wasn’t line service orwnothing, it just didn’t feel like it.

11

Maybe a good opportunity to get mom to fund a pfsense build

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12

I think you answered your own question. The combo units the cable companies provide are crap. I would get her a modem of her own and use that router she has. She’ll then avoid the rental fee, so as long as everything works for a long time, you’ll be saving her money.

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13

I already have 2 or 3.

Right so we got a little Arris surfboard 6183. We only seem to have wireless G routers though I swear I had an N one… Doesn’t matter though since theres at most 4 clients connected, 2 of which are an xbox and an email machine, the other 2 are a spotify box and my desktop. 54 mbps up and down will be ok for now. Still need more poking and proding.

14

Side update on top of the surfboard, apparently my mother needs to call to have the service set to a surfboard and I can’t do that for some reason…

… Yeah ok comcast. Either way by tomorrow we’ll be off of this fucking garbage. I’m on mobile rn but I’ll try and reset the router thing, gateway whatever, and do all of the things there. I’ll lose my ports but meh. I only use like 4 of them lol.

15

While I have never used a cable company’s atrocious modem/router combos, ive helped my brother troubleshoot one.

We were attempting to forward ports to get a game server working; this thing would randomly save or not save settings. In short, I can attest that they are indeed total shit. I’ve had no such issues with my DIR 825 with DDWRT. If you have a seperate router and modem, and your ISP will allow, I highly recommend you go that route.

16

I had problems with just about every single ISP provided device I’ve ever used. I’ve got a netgear and its been worlds different, along with the Linksys WRT3200 its like a different service. I definitely recommend it.

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17

wrt3200 might be overkill for someone’s mom (no disrespect, but if mom’s not handling her own internet issues she’s likely not a power user)

wrt1200ac , put LEDE on it , get an Arris 6183 / 6190 for Comcast if you’re renting, done.

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18

the subnet mask.

for example:

luke@mercury ~ $ ifconfig
enp3s0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 44:8A:5B:9A:82:62
          inet addr:172.16.1.8  Bcast:172.16.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:4539298 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3155612 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:4753929485  TX bytes:344661187
          Interrupt:18

should be something like 255.255.255.0

Your IPv4 address would look something like 192.168.1.XXX/24

/24 is the CIDR notation.

As long as you have a subnet mask with the last byte being a 0 then you have 2^8-1 connections (255) for your pool; and shouldn’t be running out of IP addresses.

The modem/router combo units on the low-end struggle sometimes with many concurrent nodes, although I’m pretty sure they can handle at least 10 devices. From my experience, when the unit starts flapping connections it means it’s starting to give up the ghost. It could be anything from an antenna going bad, to the MAC address table cache going bad, etc.

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19

Size of subnet != size of DHCP pool.

pool could, for example, be only 10 IPs out of a /24 because ISPs do weird stuff with their customer setups.

… but …

Size of subnet > size of DHCP pool, and you’re right that sometimes it’s actually a problem e.g. in hotels, at conferences, and similar…

20

Thanks for that. I forgot that sometimes they do weird stuff. shakes fist angrily in the air

OP would need to double check to make sure that the subnet is correct and that its not limited in the routers configuration; and that would eliminate that as a potential problem.