PureFibre / T3200M gateway - periodically router seems to disappear

[donzo]

Hi all, I'm trying to work this through Telus support but they haven't given me any joy yet.

The issue has been going on for about a week.  The problem is sporadic but seems to be most common in the evening between 9pm and 11pm.  

What happens the TV and internet goes down.  The TV struggles along with a "melting" image that looks like the wrong updates of mpeg being applies to key frames.  Also the subtitles are garbled.  It is super super slow, no sound.  PVR recordings that try to happen during this time also are affected.  In the mean time the internet to the outside world disappears.  What I find is when this problem happens, the router "disappears".  I cannot ping 192.168.1.254 on our LAN, and obviously I cannot connect to the router by going to that location in my browser.

Since the problem is sporadic, the support guys can't track it down.  I've talked to 3 different support people and they are all on different pages.  They sent a technician out and he replaced the fibre-box and gateway, but that evening the problem showed up again.

Seems very strange.  I'm starting to grasp at straws such as trying to see if I can find some LAN traffic analysis software that can give me a clue whether this is really a problem on the LAN rather than from the outside.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thx Don

[donzo · Accepted solution]

Ok, I don't know why this was happening but it seems to be fixed.

It was weird - it was a problem that happened every late evening and usually was triggered by the PVR starting to record a show.  I set up a laptop directly attached to the modem with an ethernet cable and ran a script that pinged the modem every minute and recorded the result.  I got 100% packet loss whenever the problem showed up and the shows recorded by the PVR at that time would be corrupted.

When I was having the problem, I had everything (wifi APs, LAN computers, Optik TVs) plugged into a 48-port Netgear switch which was then connected to the modem.  What fixed it is I plugged each of the Optik TV's (I only have 2 out of 4 boxes currently active) directly into the modem.  So I had port 1 for my laptop, port 2 for my LAN, port 3 and 4 for the optik TV boxes.  Voila.  The problem disappeared and was verified to be gone by the ping script.

Go figure, I don't understand why that should be a problem...  the solution was suggested to me by a friend, not Telus support.  Telus support was pretty useless.  Each time I called them it was just "ok, I changed a few settings/reset your modem to defaults/something else, now reboot your modem and see if it happens again"... I went through that same thing 3-4 times.  I was just about to demand to talk to someone in the next tier of support when my friend's suggestion solved the problem.  Yay!

Don

[RonAKA]

Are you connecting your TV and computer with ethernet or wireless?

[donzo]

We have a very extensive network cabling in our house that all go through a 48-port netgear switch/hub.  The Optik TV box is plugged into the LAN with ethernet.  We also have 5 linksys velop "mesh" wifi devices that are scattered through our sprawling house (with thick wifi-unfriendly walls) and they are all in "bridge mode" so they act as access points and are not acting as routers or dhcp servers.

When the problem happens, the modem disappears off the network (can't ping it) but I can ping other devices that are on the wired network.  However, all the linksys velops go "red" and so all wifi devices are just dropped.  I presume its because they don't see the dhcp server on the modem anymore so they feel then can't do their job. 

Thanks

[xray]

Connect your computer directly to the T3200M Ethernet port when this happens to see if it's the issue is with the router or with your other network devices.

[donzo · Accepted solution]

Ok, I don't know why this was happening but it seems to be fixed.

It was weird - it was a problem that happened every late evening and usually was triggered by the PVR starting to record a show.  I set up a laptop directly attached to the modem with an ethernet cable and ran a script that pinged the modem every minute and recorded the result.  I got 100% packet loss whenever the problem showed up and the shows recorded by the PVR at that time would be corrupted.

When I was having the problem, I had everything (wifi APs, LAN computers, Optik TVs) plugged into a 48-port Netgear switch which was then connected to the modem.  What fixed it is I plugged each of the Optik TV's (I only have 2 out of 4 boxes currently active) directly into the modem.  So I had port 1 for my laptop, port 2 for my LAN, port 3 and 4 for the optik TV boxes.  Voila.  The problem disappeared and was verified to be gone by the ping script.

Go figure, I don't understand why that should be a problem...  the solution was suggested to me by a friend, not Telus support.  Telus support was pretty useless.  Each time I called them it was just "ok, I changed a few settings/reset your modem to defaults/something else, now reboot your modem and see if it happens again"... I went through that same thing 3-4 times.  I was just about to demand to talk to someone in the next tier of support when my friend's suggestion solved the problem.  Yay!

Don

[xray]

So the problem was with your own equipment which is what I suspected when i recommend you test directly to the router.

When you called Telus support did you tell them that you had your own equipment in between the Optik boxes and the Telus router?