Casual Conversation

It can be hours between dropouts. Not saying that's not a really good idea, but I'll have to add stuff in groups. It would take me months just adding one device a day.

Since I got my new fiber connection a few months ago, I couldn't say whether the modem stays connected or not. The cable modem dropped connection, but Comcast swore it wasn't any problem on their end. Until I got fiber everything was self-owned inside the house and everything was replaced at least once: wiring, cable modem, router/wireless AP.

Honestly since switching to fiber I haven't done the deep troubleshooting I had with my modem, and I suppose there could've even been a couple of issues and switching to fiber fixed one but not the other. Some symptoms are the same: my phone will stop working with anything Internet until I disconnect or wait a while and my PS5 will complain that it has lost connection. Other symptoms are different: I haven't noticed my white noise streams stopping abruptly in the middle of the night, my work meetings don't suddenly drop.

It's almost like before the whole internet would drop and now only DNS will, so existing connections work fine (like through vpn, existing streams) but new requests like refreshing Lemmy won't work for a couple of minutes.

Sorry, it wasn't until you asked that I started thinking maybe the symptoms had slightly changed when I switched to fiber because the most obvious symptoms are the same. I need to do more investigation on my end. But thanks for asking the question that made me give that some thought.

I've replaced all the wiring out to the service box on the outside of the house. At one point I noticed the network drop coincided with a log message that a different IP6 address was trying to take over (or be handed off) DHCP provider (or maybe it was DNS, it's been a while since I just gave up and accepted it). Then it will apparently timeout and go back to normal and everything comes back up. That's why the duration is so predictable.

But at the time I was using a raspberry pi running pihole as my DNS/DHCP providers. I gave up and removed it, thinking I had misconfigured something and that was the cause of the issue, but it's gone and the drops remain. Now I'm just running everything off of my Orbi mesh. And it's all acting just like it did with my old Nighthawk (which I've left up on a different channel to divide up some of the smart device load but before anyone thinks they are interfering, this issue far predates me blowing $500 on a new router mesh that fixed nothing).

My TVs got really pissed off when the pi was hooked up and I wouldn't let them call home. Maybe it's one I'd them, but idk. We have probably 100 different smart devices from 20 different vendors between lights, cameras, thermostat, motion sensors, plugs, vacuums, Alexa's, TVs and phones. I don't think it's sheer volume but I can't rule it out. Having two different WiFi networks ought to lighten the load but idk.

Anyway, I appreciate the stab. It's a hard problem, and I'm probably up to the task if I really get pissed enough, but as you can tell by everything I've done I've already been there a couple of times.

Right now the real annoying thing is, when the network drops, my daughter's school laptop connects to someone's Xfinity router (to which we don't have creds) and never goes back to ours when it's back and it's administered by the school so I can't make it forget that damn Xfinity SSID. She knows how to fix it but I think she tries too fast before it's back up, then just assumes Internet is down despite the fact that I'm 20' away on a freaking slack huddle for work...

I'm just venting at this point. Thanks, man. Don't worry about it unless something I've said makes it really obvious.