NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
RBRE960 keeps dropping internet connection
hi there, after almost a year of working flawlessly, my RBRE960 started dropping internet a couple of months ago. - the status on the orbi dashboard changes to WAITING - the fibre modem ligh...
Can you please identify the Internet Service Provider (ISP)?
It would be interesting to know if this phenomenon appears to happen at specific times.
On the web interface,Advanced Tab, the blue box "Connection Status" should display information about the ISP lease:
A common lease is for 86,400 seconds (one day). If the problem appears when the lease is due to expire, that can signal a problem with the ISP lease renewal process. Typical behavior is for the router to ask to renew the lease when 50% of the time remains, which would be when 12 hours remains. This would result in a pattern of renewals every 12 hours. I have captured the actual DHCP conversation between my Orbi router and Spectrum (my ISP) and verified that this is exactly what happens for the IPv4 lease***. The IPv6 lease is for one week (604,800 seconds) and the router renews the IPv6 lease at 3 1/2 days (half of one week).
***It is not trivial to capture this conversation between the router and the ISP. If this happens sporadically, (not regularly) it may be difficult to prove to the ISP that the lease renewal is at fault. What I did was place a managed Ethernet switch between the router and the ISP device (for Spectrum a cable modem. In your case an Optical Network Terminator (ONT))
and have the connection mirrored to one of the other ports which was connected to an Ethernet port on a computer that was monitored with Wireshark. By displaying only the dhcp traffic, Wireshark displayed every lease renewal for both IPv4 and IPv6. As an OCD computer nerd, this is the sort of thing that I do. A first step would be to notice how long the original lease was and when it is scheduled to expire. Calculating when half of the lease will remain will predict when the lease should renew for the same time. If your ISP follows a similar pattern, then the problem would be expected to occur when the lease fully expires. Search the Wikipedia article for reliability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol
ahh interesting! thanks for that! it doesn't _seem_ to happen at specific times - sometimes during the night, sometimes during the morning.. tho it does seem have a habit of happening when i'm on a work zoom call 🙂 (but that may be a conscious bias on my part)
looking at the connection status, the lease obtained and lease expires values seem.. weird? i could be misunderstanding what they mean, but the lease obtained just stays on 5 mins, while the lease expires oscillates between 3 and 5 mins. is that... normal?
the next time it drops the connection, if i click release or renew then if the ipv4 lease is the problem, should it reconnect?
malachi1 wrote:
looking at the connection status, the lease obtained and lease expires values seem.. weird? i could be misunderstanding what they mean, but the lease obtained just stays on 5 mins, while the lease expires oscillates between 3 and 5 mins. is that... normal?
Legitimate value, certainly. Normal.... I think not. Providing a lease of 5 minutes (300 seconds) means that every customer device will renew the lease every 150 seconds. That will generate a huge amount of activity for their DHCP servers.
There is a tradeoff with any sort of "time to live" mechanism. (Networking has many, including DNS records, for example, employ a similar mechanism:
The tradeoff is:
- When the time to live value is very short, a change will take effect very quickly. But this can place substantial load on the servers.
- When the time to live value is very long, there is little load on the servers, but a change cannot fully take effect until every server that has cached that value gets around to updating it.
When I worked in networking, our practice was to set DHCP lease times to one day. When a new building was coming on line and we planned to rework the network IP map, we would set the lease to a shorter time, such as five minutes. Then, right before the change, we'd set it to 30 seconds. Update the DHCP servers with new values. Every device would get a new IP address in less than a minute, and we could set the time value back to a full day.
I would be tempted to call the ISP technical support line and ask, "What's up with having a DHCP lease of five minutes? Are you getting calls from customers about their routers dropping internet?"
malachi1 wrote:
lease expires oscillates between 3 and 5 mins. is that... normal?
This part totally makes sense. Netgear is reporting the lease expiration in minutes. It starts at 5 minutes. After it hits 3 minutes (180 seconds), the lease should get renewed and the expiration time will go back to 5 minutes. 2 minutes and 1 minute will never be displayed because the lease renewed before the time got that short.
By my calculations, the Orbi router is renewing the IP lease 576 times every day. (as is every other customer router). Not surprising that it could fail now and again.
malachi1 wrote:
the next time it drops the connection, if i click release or renew then if the ipv4 lease is the problem, should it reconnect?
It would be interesting to try.