In reply to a post by brushton:

In reply to a post by DFScale:

In reply to a post by brushton:

Does it tell us anything if some devices are still on a near-24-hour refresh after 30 minutes have expired?

The dumb question is the one you don't ask ...

AIUI, the clients own the lease for the time they were originally given. You can't push a reduced lease by reducing it on the server. There probably is a client command to renew the lease [different for every operating system no doubt ...]. The certain way to reduce the lease is to restart the machine in question [or wait for all the leases to expire].

Thanks!

I did wonder if that might be the case, but when I reduced the lease time I saw some that had changed to the new timeout and some still unchanged. I hadn't knowingly reset any of the "short-lease" devices, although I didn't look closely enough to see if maybe they were only the ones connected by wifi and that might have disconnected and reconnected. (Was concentrating on setting up the Pihole).

Anyway, I've now installed the Pihole DHCP server (with a 2d timeout for now) and disabled the one on the router, so I'll see if this makes any difference.

Typically the clients will attempt a renewal at half the lease time.

Is there a DHCP relay on the router?

In reply to a post by Eeeps:

In reply to a post by brushton:

In reply to a post by DFScale:

... nested quotes trimmed ...

The dumb question is the one you don't ask ...

AIUI, the clients own the lease for the time they were originally given. You can't push a reduced lease by reducing it on the server. There probably is a client command to renew the lease [different for every operating system no doubt ...]. The certain way to reduce the lease is to restart the machine in question [or wait for all the leases to expire].

Thanks!

I did wonder if that might be the case, but when I reduced the lease time I saw some that had changed to the new timeout and some still unchanged. I hadn't knowingly reset any of the "short-lease" devices, although I didn't look closely enough to see if maybe they were only the ones connected by wifi and that might have disconnected and reconnected. (Was concentrating on setting up the Pihole).

Anyway, I've now installed the Pihole DHCP server (with a 2d timeout for now) and disabled the one on the router, so I'll see if this makes any difference.

Typically the clients will attempt a renewal at half the lease time.

Is there a DHCP relay on the router?

No DHCP relay, no subnets, but the router was originally working as the DHCP server. That's now disabled in favour of the Pihole and so far all has been well - though the connection has previously lasted for several weeks before playing up. I'm still trying to get an answer out of Gigaclear as to *exactly* what they can see in relation to the drops but I seem to be back at square one, having encountered someone on their helpline who's suggesting they send replacement devices and try a vanilla setup and says their "higher network team don't talk to customers" *sigh* That's a shame, some of the helpline staff are quite knowledgeable anyway, and if I could get to one of those I reckon I could get some more useful information.

Following up on this I had the "final" assessment from Gigaclear as follows:-

As discussed, our network teams has investigated and come to the conclusion that the disconnects are occurring due to home network device:- The error on our diagnostic tool is "user-request", suggesting a application level or device (i.e. not physical switch) requesting this

If you require any further assistance regarding this following the investigation you said you would complete into you home networking, then please don't hesitate to reply to my email and I will get back in contact as soon as I can.

Whilst the Pihole might have helped - and the ad blocking is a welcome bonus - the problem still exists, it happened while we were on holiday so I was network blind for several days until we returned and I was able to power-cycle the router.

So now I'm wondering where to go next.

Should I go down the Wireshark (or similar) rabbit hole trying to find the source of this "user-request" (although my background is IT I know very little about network analysis and its tools)?

Should I swap out the Linksys mesh network in favour of a traditional, more-capable, router? According to the specs the Linksys MX4200s can support "40+ connections per node". I have about 40 devices, with a mixture of wired and wireless connections, so whilst capacity shouldn't be a problem I do wonder if that could be the cause.

Or is there another option? (apart from just sucking it up of course )

I used to use one of these to these one of these to power cycle my router once a week.

I have an OPNsense router and there is a CRON option where I can make the box reboot regularly.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

I used to use one of these to these one of these to power cycle my router once a week.

I have an OPNsense router and there is a CRON option where I can make the box reboot regularly.

Interesting, thanks. I do have a bunch of similar plugs (TP-Link Kasa/Tapo) talking to Home Assistant but obviously once the router drops the internet connection I can't access them externally. I don't *think* it would be possible to set up an automation for one of these to cycle the power periodically but I will have a look.

The Linksys MX4200 doesn't seem to have the ability to run a cron job but I'll look into using Opnsense as an alternative, that might provide a workaround - or even eliminate the problem (although it's another rabbit hole )