Intermittent Home Network Failure

[Paul Boniol]

Both Sunday morning and this morning, I had home internet issues. 

Yesterday, wireless was very slow, wired was not functioning. I rebooted everything. Wireless was still a bit slow at first, but functional. The wired network was still not working. I saw there was a wifi router update so I applied that. Still no joy on the wired network.  Things were busy, so when I got back to it about 2 hours later, the wired network had magically started working again.  The network worked fine the rest of the day.

This morning when I woke up, wireless was working fine. Wired was again not functioning, but magically started within about 10 minutes, so I didn't have time to diagnose the problem.  (With it working, I have moved the wires in the closet all around with no ill effect.)

My first inclination is that the unmanaged switch is starting to fail.? Probably slim chance, maybe there's some misbehaving device?  (There are no new devices within the last few weeks, but I can't rule out some bad software update to some device.)

Any thoughts?  If it wasn't intermittent, it would be a lot easier to diagnose.

Paul

[Tilghman Lesher]

Any possibility that malware is on a system and is using your
connection? As soon as you start trying to use the network, it shuts
down (ostensibly to avoid being detected). Then, when the network is
idle again, it starts back up and begins consuming bandwidth. It
could explain the slow connection.

I'd suggest a network monitor port and watch the network traffic
overnight and see if anything shows up.

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Tilghman

[Paul Boniol]

Good suggestion. I've got a 20 year old who isn't overly computer savvy (despite my best efforts, he isn't interested in learning about anything under the hood), so goodness only knows... Of course it isn't entirely impossible other internet connected devices could have somehow become infected, though that's less probable.

No problem this morning, but if it learns when traffic is more likely, it could have switched off before I got up.

I'll see about monitoring overnight and see what happens.

Paul.

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[Paul Boniol]

It happened again, and it was more persistent tonight. From what I can deduce, it appears the WAN ports (all four) on the wifi router periodically fail. 

It isn't consistent, This time it magically started working as expected after about 8 hours (with multiple reboots, plugging devices directly into the router, different switch configurations, different patch cables, etc.). Oddly, it seemed to pick one (1) network device to work at reboot (normally the Roku...), though disconnecting and reconnecting it failed. Also failed to respond with a laptop, when it was the only device connected directly to the router, port light on the router lit, after a reboot.

There are no wifi problems at all, multiple devices, appearing to work at normal speed. I only got the wifi router in October 2020, but that is well past the 1 year warranty, and of course I didn't get an extended warranty because I have never had a problem with a router malfunctioning until several years after I bought it

Paul

[Csaba Toth]

I thought wifi routers have only one wan (upstream) port. Can you peek into the kernel or sys log of the router to spot error messages when this occur?

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[Paul Boniol]

I mistyped, 4 lan ports. I should have thought about looking at the log, seemed such a hardware failure I didn't think, but a good idea if it occurs again. It is a stock Netgear Nighthawk gaming router so there isn't a lot of poking under the hood.

Paul

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[Tilghman Lesher]

Paul-

Found this post, which suggests a hotfix for this exact problem:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Nighthawk-Pro-Gaming-Routers/XR500-Lan-ports-problem/td-p/1775495

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Tilghman

[Paul Boniol]

Hm, sounds exactly the same, but that was 2019 and a different router. I do see there have been additional posts through 2021 with different routers..Again another duh moment. I am so tired of the brain fog from getting the vaccine... I'll look at creating an account and posting over there later, since I'm on the clock now.

Paul

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[Gibson Prichard]

Have you considered replacing the Netgear firmware with DD-WRT? Check https://www.myopenrouter.com/download/ for you model or https://dd-wrt.com/ for a build that will work on your model. You would likely get more logging with an open-source kernel and GUI.

Gibson Prichard

Nashville, TN

gib...@prichard.tv

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[Paul Boniol]

My router is not supported by DD-WRT.  Netgear AX5200 or RAX48 depending on which name they go by.

Paul

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[Justin W Elam]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_router_software_projects

Paul 

Sorry you are having problems with the  AX5200.

Personally you have a few options depending on what you want to do.

I would recommend that you either update the firmware after resetting to factory specs.

Or two load a open source firmware to it.

If you are skittish about doing it.

I would see which wireless AP works with Tomato or Open-WRT then visit "the store" and pick up an AP one that 'works' then you can load Tomato to both and see if "it works" or not.

Cheers from Justin

[Paul Boniol]

I did what Netgear calls a factory reset. It kept the updated version of the firmware though. And no new firmware updates are available yet.

I have set up the network as largely DHCP static now, to make device tracking easier if I see something odd in the log.

On monitoring the log since the last outage: It seems to identify Windows Netbios chattiness as a DoS attack, I see a few grouped messages, and then nothing for quite a while, so it isn't continuous, but I wouldn't think that would carry anything forward after a reboot, i.e. cause of the 8 hour outage Thursday, after multiple reboots.  Some may classify Windows as a virus, but work thinks differently so gotta go with it.

I'll watch, and see if it happens again, and go from there.

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