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Forum Discussion
RBR20 Losing internet connection about 1-2 times / day
Until recently router has been very stable, for about the last 1.5 weeks I lose (only) the internet connection from the router. Can still connect fine to the router from devices, but all devices repo...
I believe that the lease time parameter which can be changed using telnet refers to the DHCP lease the Orbi gives to devices on the LAN. This will have no effect on the connection between Orbi and Internet Service Provider. My Orbi assigns leases of 86,400 seconds (one day). By coincidence, it gets the same lease from Spectrum.
My first diagnostic step would be to look at the Orbi web interface Advanced Tab home page. Click the blue box Connection Status,record the length of the Spectrum lease, and calculate when the lease is due to expire (i.e. right now plus the time shown there). Does the service interruption happen about when the lease is set to expire?
If it does, read on. If not, please ignore my ramblings.
The DHCP protocol is very specific about how things are supposed to work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol
When the lease is half expired, the device (Orbi) is supposed to begin asking to renew it. DHCP communications use UDP packets, which do not have guaranteed delivery. When the lease time finally expires, the device no longer has a valid IP address and may simply stop communicating until it is able to acquire an IP address again.
Orbi may deal with a lack of timely response from the ISP differently than other routers. (I have no way to know).
Proof that this is what is happening is not easy to acuire. Getting and renewing the DHCP lease from the ISP is not one of the items logged., whereas the DHCP leases the Orbi gives to LAN devices do show up in the log. Orbi's debug page has an option to "Capture WAN/LAN Traffic". When that option is turned on, it should be possible to dump the log file to the user's PC (debug.zip). Along with a huge amount of stuff, there are pcap files for the WAN interface and the LAN interface. Wireshark (free) is a program which can display pcap files. Using a display filter of "dhcp" on the wan.pcap file should reveal the Orbi's attempts to renew the lease and how Spectrum responds.
Many of the cable systems around the country have changed hands many times. (Mine was Comcast, then Adelphia, then Time Warner, and now Spectrum (Charter)). I have no idea what companies do to the electronics when they take over an existing cable system. Would seem pretty costly to throw out the entire head end and bring in new equipment. My Spectrum system may be very much different from yours.
I'm going to try the suggestions related to lease renewal from CrimpOn. Will let you know how it goes. The lease time I have left does not correlate with when outages occur, but the idea to use the WAN debug has merit, maybe I can learn something from the logs generated. I have recorded the lease times already and the IP address assigned (by Spectrum / Charter).
I had a Spectrum technician come out and he did find problems with one of the cables (it had water in it). I now have 3 cables total from the road in front of our house.
1 to the green upright pedistal in yard from road
2 from pedistal to house
3 from house to back of modem
All have been replaced and are in great condition now. Still have the same problem, so logs are the next logical step.
Thanks
Debugging logs enabled for only a short time generate huge files. Being that I don't know the exact date / time of when this is going to happen it isn't feasible to log the WAN pcap. If I could predict then I think the logs would be very helpful, but I can't just let them run for an entire day or even a few hours.
- My experience is that the log files write over themselves. My v1 Orbi has a USB port, so I inserted a 32gb USB stick with the intention of capturing 24 hours (a full day). Did not work. Got about an hour and a half. My guess is that the wan.pcap file will cover the most recent period.