Hi all, It's not really Linux related, but a curious thing nonetheless.
Last week I posted here asking if anyone else had symptoms of their cable connection being dropped (with monotonous regularity). My setup is a Motorola Surfboard (the white one, SB4200i, provided by TelstraClear with Paradise as my ISP) connected to an SMC 7004ABR router. All machines on the home network can talk to each other, but the connection to the outside world drops at least twice a day. For example, it drops overnight so I reset things at 8 or 9am, then it drops again around 3 or 4pm (usually right in the middle of something). Then it drops about 10 or 11pm, and if I'm not up to reset it then it stays that way until morning. To reset the link all I have to do is log into the router and view the status page. The act of viewing the status page restores the link to the outside world. My network has been generally fine for the last 3 years on cable, with the same hardware, but this problem appeared on or around Tuesday the 9th May. The curious thing is, a friend of mine near Barrington has noticed the same problem. He has a completely different setup, and is on ADSL with IHug. His symptoms are identical however, and again- he can restore the link by viewing the status page in his router. Not only that, everything was working well for him until around Tuesday 9th May. He suspects something to do with unbundling. Now, it is likely that people on this list run with Linux PCs acting as firewall/routers, not dedicated hardware like I have. In fact the number of people on this list with a similar setup are statistically likely to be quite small, but I am trying to find more evidence of this problem. Last night I reset the connection, so that it was up, and disconnected everything on my home network. This morning, I plugged one PC into the router and the connection was down. I take this to mean that whatever causes this problem is inside the router, or on the WAN side. I have also tried plugging a PC directly into the cable modem when the router was down. In this case the connection was up (at the modem), but, since it is easy to restore the connection the act of plugging in might cause it to come up anyway. I have a few ideas to try with this still, and SMC suggest that I clone the MAC address of one of my PCs into the router and then see if the problem persists. Has anyone else noticed anything odd with their broadband connection, especially since Tuesday 9th? Andy
