Non-tech description first…….
The network is ‘glitching’ every 1 to 3 days.
I have no idea what it is, or why it is doing it. I just know it happens at any time it wants.
When it happens, I lose network connectivity to the Internet and between devices at the house. This means that if my website is down, sorry. Send me an email. I do not have anything automatic set up to let me know when it goes down, because when it goes down, I cant send emails!
It is driving me nuts!
Techo version.
The Asus router has a lot going for it. I really like a lot of its features and it seems to be powerful enough to do the job when things are going smooth.
The frustrating thing is that I have not had more than 2 days of a working network since all this started. I have not been blogging about it because I have been spending my time trying to find and fix it. (The other generic blogs are all scheduled blogs that I wrote ages ago).
It is annoying because once it goes down, the only way I can find to get things back up is to reboot the router.
Here is the thing, I am not 100% sure it is even the router that is causing the issue.
It seemed like it was at first. Like there was a memory leak or something (keeping an eye on the status page of the router does not show anything like that).
I then setup a cronjob to reboot the router at 3:14am every morning….. When whatever it is that glitches does the same thing as when the router reboots. It will take out random devices around the network. Not just take them out, but sometimes services on those devices.
For example. It will glitch one or more Linux PC’s. Sometimes they refuse to ping, sometimes they ping fine, but the web server service does not respond, or it pings fine, but the SNMP service goes south. Sometimes it is the Linux boxes, sometimes the Opto controllers, sometimes the Arduino, sometimes a combination of devices, sometimes a single device. The best way to get them back is to just unplug their network connection, count to three, plug it back in and they are fine.
Why is it not the router? Because I have had times when the router stays up, but that sort of glitch goes through the network and takes out one or more devices. I can not seem to find a way to log the system from the firewall on the Asus, so all the traffic data is bound up in the core Linux router log data. Having some issues finding a clear way to log it to the USB stick rather than RAM, so I have not been able to view any logs.
Sometimes it happens when I am at home, and sometimes when I am at work.
Is is like there is a kill packet floating around taking out stuff at random.
The worst is when it happens and no one is at home.
It reminds me of what was happening to Ipcop. Where it just glitched and went weird. I blamed Ipcop or the PC it was running on, but now the Asus is doing the same things.
To top it all off, I am trying to monitor the network traffic to see what is going on and I have found that my network is circulating around 90 gigabytes of traffic every 24 hours… does that seem like a lot to you, because it seems to be an insane amount to me!
I thought it might be the Verizon ONT, so we got the guy to come out and change it. Nice side effect is that we now have speeds over 100Mbs, so when it’s working, the Internet fairly screams at our place.
I also changed out the two switches in the place for gigabit versions and that did not change the glitches, but again, when its working, everything hauls ass big time.
Blood pressure was up again this morning. 132/93
I do not have any clue what is going on. I do not have a plan to move forward.
In other news, a blog reader, David, very kindly sent me a Ubiquiti Wifi AP to evaluate and integrate into the system. I have been using it because one of my frustrations with the Asus is that I can not seem to get more than 30Mbs speed from the Wifi…. The UBNT is doing the same speed…. it is nice to have something to compare against, so now I know it is my wifi devices… Only they get ~50+ at work, so I know it’s not the devices…..