Connection disappearing

Hi all,

Since being upgraded to ADSL Max, I've had some problems with my connection. Every 15 minutes or so, it just disappears. The sync light stays on and the router doesn't report that the connection is dropped (it still says connected), but I can't ping anything.

I've replaced the router, the DSL cable, the micro filter and the phone socket. When BT came in to replace the socket, they confirmed that the line was fine and that there are no faults on it.

When it's all working, the line syncs at about 3.7Mbps and I get downloads in the 350Kbps range, which is fine. But it only works for around 15 minutes at a time and the drops out for about 30 seconds. This makes gaming and working from home impossible.

I'm with Mailbox (or whoever they are now) but through a reseller. Can anyone advise any investigations or tests that I can do on my own to try and get them enough information to sort this? The reseller is great and he's been very responsive and helpful, but he can't seem to get a solution out of Mailbox for me.

Thanks in advance,

2 theories:
1] Your line is affected by noise every 15 minutes, which drops it out

2] You are actually logged off every 15 minutes

If you can get line stats off the router, and they don't change even when your connection is dropped, that would rule out 1] - as does the fact that the synch light stays on, but sometimes it's good to get the same answer by other means.

So , assuming it is 2], is it you or the ISP who is dropping you out? Take a look at your router settings to see if there is a time out on the session,to make sure it is not you.

Thanks a lot...

The only malfunction with that is that I can't access my router from my network, only remotely on the remote management port. This is because I had to forward all IPs (I have a /29 routed) and now I can't access the router anymore unless I am external.

I'll see what I can do in the short term to get that working so that I can access it from the LAN and get these stats.

I don't believe I am logging off because I have tried 2 different routers and I definitely set the timeout on the second one to 0 which was disabled. Unfortunately I couldn't keep the other router because it won't allow public IPs on the LAN.

In reply to:

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This is because I had to forward all IPs (I have a /29 routed) and now I can't access the router anymore unless I am external.

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Eh?? The router has a WAN and a LAN TCPIP interface. So you can only reach the WAN interface externally, seems fair enough. But you should have a LAN IP address on which you can access it internally.

Do you really need all 8 public IP addresses? I would ahve thought NAT and port forwarding would be sufficient?

Since I upgraded the firmware on the router, I can no longer just disable firewall. After disabling NAT, traffic still doesn't get to the machines on the LAN. I had to add forwarding rules for each machine.

Since doing this, I can only access the router interface on port 8000 from outside the network. Trying to access it on that interface from inside the network just pushes the traffic through to the first IP on the LAN side.

I do need the IPs because I run multiple 3 SSL servers on the LAN side of the network and each of these needs its own IP

I'd like to find a decent router to replace the netgear, but the 3com that was recommended actually doesn't do public IP addresses on the LAN side

You don't want or need public IP addresses on the LAN side - it's very insecure.

I'm not going to renumber my entire network on that basis or live with the issues that come from NATting.

All that is listening on most of the servers is the https connection on 443. The mail server has a couple more ports listening, specifically the http, smtp, submission, imaps and pop3s ports. All mail access is done over ssl with certificates for all of the users. All devices use firewalls locally.

If I had the money for a decent network device where I could terminate multiple IPs at the device and forward those back to individual IP addresses and ports on the local network, that would be great, but I'm working on a consumer budget here. BigIPs or Fortinet devices are not an option.

Ok, I have some more information on this.

I can see the connection dropping every 10 - 20 minutes. My connection time doesn't seem to go much about 20 minutes at the moment.

One piece of weirdness I am seeing is that the IP address that is being allocated to the WAN interface by DHCP is one of my /29 allocated block. I'm sure that this wasn't always the case - surely the IP on the external interface and the IP on the internal interface need to be in different ranges?