Router can't connect to the internet

Hello all,

I have a WinXP HOME computer with an MSI kt4 ultra motherboard.
Onboard Via Lan connection.

I used to have a belkin DSL router but it was extremely slow.
I upgraded to a DLink DI-604 and got everything to work great.
Fast internet browsing, no problems on-line gaming. Until...last night. I was playing AC2 (online rpg), which worked fine for 2 days straight on the router, and lag city hit. I restarted the game and couldn't connect to the servers so I tried the internet nothing. I did a hard reset of the modem and the router set up the router via the web based interface and could serf the internet but when I tried to connect to AC2 again the connection went down. This kept going on for hours.
Any ideas?


xtra network info. I set up the connection to the router with the win network setup wizard connecting through a gateway. I have Client, file sharing and TCP/IP set up and the NIC speed is 10mb half duplex.

~btw connecting straight to the router works fine for both

 

Ramdisk - the fact that your game site got slower and slower and then failed sounds like a problem with the site or with some piece of internet equipment between you and it.

First you should clear your local DNS cache since your XP system will cache a bad address as well as good ones and if you have a bad one on your PC, you won't see the site. Start~run~cmd and then
ipconfig /flushdns and <ENTER>.

Try doing a trace route (either tracert from a DOS window or a GUI trace route like the one from Sam Spade) to see if the problem is with your packets reaching the site or just a connection issue for you.

 

I'm pretty sure it is a problem with the router. If I am just surfing the connection is good for about an hour then it degrades to a halt. But this does not happen when connected directly to the DSL modem. I can get the router to reconnect if I unplug the modem and router then plug them both back in.
I used to have a belkin router with a different gateway but I have uninstalled all of the programs that came with it.

 

Are you using a USB connection or a Network card connection ?

If USB, I would try a NIC. They seem to be much more soild and reliable.

BillyBob

 

both computers are using NIC

 

Have you tried doing a trace route to a site that won't allow you to connect? You should be able to see exactly where the failure occurs and tell pretty quickly if it is a local problem (so the trace never gets past your router) or if it occurs somewhere along the route.

It is possible that a router glitch is fragmenting packets badly and causing your speed issues. Not likely but possible. The problem could be either with outbound traffic or with inbound. See This excellent article for more detail. Reassembly failures would certainly account for the behavior you are seeing.

If there is a firmware update for your device, get it and load it.

A quick way to figure out if unusual fragmentation is the problem would be to ping an address inside your LAN to establish local parameters and then one outside your LAN with increasing size packets. Set the -f switch to not allow fragmenting packets. You shouldn't have any problems with smaller sizes but up around 512 or 1024 or 2048 or such (depending on network settings) the ping will fail. But if you see failures at packet sizes below 256 bytes, you may well have a router problem. Some older networks have the frament level set lower but not common on the internet at all.

ping -l 64 -f 111.112.113.114
will ping 111.112.113.114 with 64 byte packets for example and fail if the packet would need to be broken up into smaller pieces.

And the packet size where fragmentation needs to occur is very specific. For instance, on my LAN, 1472 bytes is fine but 1473 fails as follows:

ping -l 1472 -f cabpdc
Pinging cabpdc.us.pm.com [172.29.8.253] with 1472 bytes of data:

Reply from 172.29.8.253: bytes=1472 time=1ms TTL=128
......

ping -l 1473 -f cabpdc
Pinging cabpdc.us.pm.com [172.29.8.253] with 1473 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
......

I missed the fact that you've already had router speed issues with an older device. That is unusual since internet speeds are so slow that any functioning router should deal with the traffic fine unless you had a really loaded network (maybe 20 PCs on a 10Mbps or 200 PCs on a 100Mbps network) all doing internet stuff at the same time.

I do agreed that the fact you can connect directly without problems but have speed problems over time thru the router is suspicious but I still don't think we've pin-pointed the exact problem.

 

Newt, I read your article and found it very interesting.

I remember installing We-blocker (an internet filtering software) a while back. This is where my problems began. The belkin router did not seem to like me trying to connect to the We-blocker server so i uninstalled it. It automatically makes IE connect to a proxy server. When trying to uncheck the "automatically connect to proxy server" button IE closes down. When IE is re-opened the proxy server button is checked again.

Could the We-blocker registry entries still be active and causing me problems?

I will try pinging computers inside my network and post back.