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CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Problem description: Like the title states, about once a day (time of day is totally random), my internet will start cutting out for about a minute at a time, every few minutes. Then it stops and works normally again until the next time it occurs. The other two computers in my house don't have this problem, and when the internet cuts out for me, it continues to work fine with them. The error I get varies a little between eternal loading, 'resolving host', and 'dns probe finished: no internet'. When I am disconnected, going to my network adapters and disabling/reenabling it will reconnect me for the next few minutes, and then the problem persists.

I've come to the conclusion that the problem has something to do with my PC because even physically replacing things has not helped... but I don't know where to start.

Attempted fixes: Oh lord have I tried. This has been going on for months and here comes a giant list of things I have tried, none of which have worked.

- Purchased a new modem.

- Purchased a new router.

- Changed from wireless to ethernet, then from ethernet to powerline adapter. Directly hooking up to my modem or router doesn't resolve the issue.

- Moved my modem/router to the same room as my computer.

- Changed out all of the cords (and I mean all of them).

- The usual list of cmd fixes including flushdns, winsock, et al. This occasionally temporarily works, as does physically resetting my modem and router. The problem always returns, however.

- Making sure the drivers on my PC are up to date as well as the firmware of my modem/router.

Recent changes: None to speak of, outside of the recent modem and router replacements that did not resolve the issue.

--

Operating system: Win 10 64 bit

System specs:

My computer:
MOBO - ASUS Z87-A
CPU - Intel i5 4670 (3.4 GHz)
GPU - 4GB Nvidia GTX 1070
RAM - 16 GB DDR3

The modem and router I currently have:
Modem: Netgear CMD31T
Router: Netgear N3000 WNR2000v5

Location: US

I have Googled and read the FAQ: God I sure have.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Sep 8, 2017

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Fruit Smoothies
Mar 28, 2004

The bat with a ZING
If it wouldn't take you too much effort, do a clean install of Windows 10. Obviously if you have poo poo loads of programs and settings, this may not be for you, but it would be my next step.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
I'd really rather save that as a last resort because it's not really a life-ruining issue, just real annoying especially since I stream pretty frequently and it strikes whenever it wants. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd like to hear them out first, but "nuke it all" is on my list of things to try.

edit: I should note that I don't know how to do a clean install of Windows 10, I don't have a CD for it or maybe even a key as far as I know. I took the free upgrade when it was still a thing and it never bothered me about it again. But I can look that stuff up on my own.

goxxy
May 2, 2009
Try to manually set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 instead of using whatever is provided by DHCP.

You could also do a nslookup on whatever site you are trying to access and navigate to it by IP the next time it happens to further confirm.

telcoM
Mar 21, 2009
Fallen Rib
If the problem happens only with your computer and not with the other computers in the house, are the other computers significantly older?
In particular, are they old enough not to auto-attempt using IPv6? Or manually configured to use IPv4 only?

My ISP has pretty solid IPv4, but their IPv6 is fairly new and perhaps still a bit experimental. Last Thursday they had an outage (someone with a backhoe cut a fiberoptic cable) and promptly fixed the IPv4, but IPv6 hasn't worked correctly since then. The ISP's DHCPv6 service is still working and assigns IPv6 DNS server information... but those IPv6 DNS servers are not in fact reachable right now.

Since Windows 7 and newer will by default prefer IPv6, and so will attempt to use DNS over IPv6 whenever possible. In this situation it caused slowness and DNS timeouts until I temporarily disabled the IPv6 protocol on my system. Yesterday someone at the ISP had got a clue and had switched off the IPv6 router announcements, so now my computers will see my local IPv6 segment as non-routable (which is true until the ISP fixes things) and IPv4 works with no delays caused by trying the broken IPv6 connectivity first.

Perhaps your problem is caused by something similar?

Run "ipconfig /all" and see if your computer is getting and IPv6 address and possibly IPv6 DNS servers. If so, try disabling IPv6 from your router: disabling it from the OS side might disable some OS features, e.g. the Windows HomeGroup.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Just an update, I've done both goxxy and telcoM's, solutions, we'll see if either of 'em helps.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
No dice unfortunately, they were good ideas though. Any other suggestions before I figure out how to nuke it from orbit and start fresh? :shobon:

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Bumping this thread to say that I am at the end of my rope here. I have tried everything I can possibly think of to solve the problem. I even made a video on my YouTube channel about it to see if any of my subscribers can help me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEGO1aBqcJE

Here is the video, but I'll just paste the description here so you don't have to watch it. It's much more verbose than text though so you may wanna watch it anyway. This is as detailed as I can get about the problem because I have completely ruled out it being a problem with my computer now:

quote:

For the past month or so, every single day at a random time of day, my internet will completely cut out. It will stop working for every device in my home and none of them acknowledge there is any problem. They all claim to still be connected and troubleshooting shows nothing out of the ordinary. But obviously, that's not the case.

Going to any website while this is happening either hangs forever or gives me a DNS_PROBE_FINISHED error. It is interrupting my video making and I'm sure you have seen it interrupt my livestreams in the past. I have legendarily bad connection problems with streaming.

The only thing I have found that fixes this issue is completely disconnecting everything, waiting, and then plugging it back in. And even then, sometimes that doesn't work.

I have spent hundreds of dollars trying to fix this issue because my grandparents can't be bothered. I have bought new cables for everything involved in the process. I have bought a new router and a new modem. I switched my own computer from wireless to wired, and then to powerline, and nothing has changed. I even tried to fix problems internally on my and their computers, and I found absolutely nothing.

Even the technician who came out said that it was fine and our connection strength was great. When he came out here, though, it was working- and it stopped again shortly after he left.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Oct 5, 2017

telcoM
Mar 21, 2009
Fallen Rib
Intermittent issues are always trickiest to troubleshoot.

Now, since your ISP does not seem to have a clue about the problem, it might be best for you to gather as much useful information as possible.
For example, start running something like this program: https://netuptimemonitor.com/
to monitor your network connection and the times it goes down. The log of exact downtimes can be useful for the ISP: they will be able to check the times and see if they match with any maintenance operations at their end. Also, if the time between the network cutoffs turns out to be regular, that can be a big clue.

Also it might be useful for you to note the Internet-side network parameters your router has when the connection is working normally, and when the connection fails, check them again to see if they are different.

You'll want to note down:
- the current external IP address (this may vary from time to time, but the rest of the parameters should stay the same)
- the external netmask and default gateway
- the DNS server addresses given by the ISP to the router (as the router will either be acting a DNS proxy for your computers, or just passing the DNS server information on to them)
- and if your ISP provides IPv6 and your router has IPv6 enabled, the IPv6 versions of those parameters too.

Your router usually gets its Internet-side (or WAN) network parameters from a DHCP server somewhere in the ISP's network. Typically, DHCP gives out the IP address (and the associated other parameters) as a time-limited lease, that will normally get renewed when half of the specified lease time is gone.

On an ISP, such a DHCP server should be multiply redundant or otherwise made fault-tolerant. But perhaps someone has goofed and one of the DHCP servers in the failover group sends out bad network parameters? Then each time your router automatically renews its DHCP lease on your external IP address, it has a chance of getting bad information from the one "bad" DHCP server.

If the bad information is DNS server addresses, and your router just passes on the DNS server addresses to your computers, then that might explain why the problem appears on one computer at a time only: your computers are probably also getting their IP addresses by DHCP from the router. So the sequence of events leading to the failure would be something like this:
1.) your router has good network parameters.
2.) you start up (some of) your computer(s): each of them will get their IP address and other network parameters by DHCP from the router, and their DHCP lease time starts ticking away.
3.) at some point in time, your router gets to renewing its DHCP lease with the ISP, and then gets a set of bad DNS server addresses from ISP. But because your computers already have the good set of DNS server addresses, everything still works.
4.) when one of your computers gets to renewing its DHCP lease with the router, it also gets the bad DNS server addresses. Now that computer starts seeing DNS errors, but the other ones which still have the good information will work just fine... until it's time to renew their DHCP leases too.
5.) you restart the router and then the computer, in this order, and everything works again.

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CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
That's all very helpful, thanks. And it's in line with what some other people have been saying. I will look into all that, give it a few days, and then call my ISP back. I'm hoping it's something easy to fix, because the technician speculated that it was a problem with the main cable line, which would suck because all of the houses in my neighborhood are connected to it and figuring out what the problem is from there would be a giant pain.

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