Unexplained Router Glitch?

u109230

Hi All,


I was surfing around these forums as happy as Larry this morning when suddenly I lost my internet connection. I have a Netgear DG834G & 2 PC's connected via ethernet cable & 1 via wireless. ISP is Tiscali 8Mb broadband.

Strange I thought, router looks OK (all green lights), so I logged into the router & sure enough the Router Status page indicated I had no IP address, subnet mask, gatewayIP address nor domain name server IP's. As you might guess none of the three PC's could connect to the internet

For information, the router setup has not been edited by anyone recently, IE7 hasn't been manually tweaked on any PC & Tiscali had been paid!

I scouted around the various router setup pages & did notice that under Content Filtering/Schedule, the router thought the date was January 2002! However nothing else looked amiss.

So I phoned the useless customer support at Tiscali. She asked all the dumb questions about the browser, firewall etc & kept me waiting around for ages. (Rebooting the PC & router did not rectify the problem). She did ask me to set the primary & secondary Tiscali DNS addresses as this was set to get it automatically. No joy. She then informed me that as my account was OK it must be that all 3 PC's must have had simultaneous browser corruptions & to refer to my vendor & goodbye!! I was not a happy chappy:mad: !!

So I turned off my PC & adjourned to my local hostelry for some liquid refreshment:D .

A couple of hours later I returned home switched on one of the PC's & hey presto it works:T . The router date had also reverted to today from 2002.

I hate unexplained resolutions to problems. So what could have caused the initial failure of the connection that had been so reliable in the past? Why had the router lost it's IP address connections?

It would be good to know these things just in case it happens again & it fills me with dread knowing I will have to talk to Tiscali support again!

Thanks all.

albertross_2

Suspect a Tiscali/BT glitch, happens sometimes, usually turning off the router for 20 mins cures it.

superscaper

Agree with albert, your experience was combination of intermittent fault with Tiscali/BT and a CS monkey following a script. Very much doubt there was any problem at your end.

u109230

Thanks albertross, I'll give the router an intentional longer power down if it happens again. Any idea on the corrupt date? Could it be related?

fwor

One other possibility is a power brown-out at your end which caused the router to reset to it's defaults. I find that this happens to me occasionally - the lights dim very slightly and most things have enough power capacity to keep running, but some (in my case an ethernet hub) don't, and stop working.

If it is set up to use NTP to correct the date/time, it may only be doing that infrequently - perhaps once a day?

u109230

fwor wrote: »

One other possibility is a power brown-out at your end which caused the router to reset to it's defaults. I find that this happens to me occasionally - the lights dim very slightly and most things have enough power capacity to keep running, but some (in my case an ethernet hub) don't, and stop working.

If it is set up to use NTP to correct the date/time, it may only be doing that infrequently - perhaps once a day?

Hhhmm possible fwor - though the router did hold on to all it's wireless security settings I configured etc.

The router is set to use (an unspecified) NTP for date & time, not sure of the update frequency tho'.

Thanks anyway.

HoofeHearted

I have one of these routers. When it boots up it's default date is 2002.
After the link comes up and you logon successfully(CHAP authentication), you will then get an IP address and then it will send out an NTP request to get the correct time.
See my current log file below.

Sun, 2002-09-08 12:00:38 - Initialize LCP.
Sun, 2002-09-08 12:00:38 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Sun, 2002-09-08 12:00:46 - CHAP authentication success
Sun, 2002-09-08 12:00:57 - Send out NTP request to time-g.netgear.com
Fri, 2008-01-25 07:35:12 - Receive NTP Reply from time-g.netgear.com
Fri, 2008-01-25 07:34:16 - Router start up

u109230

Ah, good to know Hoof - thanks.

b33r

I had one of these routers too and found the connection more reliable after upgrading the firmware on it (also got a few more advanced options too), however upgrading it coincided with moving away from Tiscali so that probably helped connection reliability more!