Having lived 10+ years with the slowest internet ever, it was quite the upgrade when fibre optic finally arrived. All seemed great, but for some reason my internet keeps disconnecting, or sometimes it stays connected but I get nothing but DNS errors and can’t use the internet if there’s a second computer or laptop connected.
It’s an Orange fibre optic box, and all devices are connected via wi-fi. If a phone or tablet is connected at the same time, there’s no conflict, but my son has a computer and laptop, and if he’s connected with either device I lose my connection, not always immediately but pretty soon afterwards. I’m guessing there’s some sort of IP conflict going on. If I disconnect and reconnect I can temporarily get the internet back, but it sometimes only lasts seconds. His connection remains stable, even when I’m the first to connect. I’ve also tried two different wifi dongles, but that doesn’t make any difference, nor does resetting the router. The router is quite far from either of our computers, so it’s not practical to try one computer with an ethernet cable either, especially as we have old stone walls.
I’m afraid I’m not terribly technically minded, so I’m wondering if anyone has advice on what to do in a situation like this?
I would be tempted to see if the laptops are both trying to get the same IP address and not just getting the next available allocated by the livebox- I am assuming you haven’t fixed Ip addresses on the livebox
If your sons computer/laptop has a DHCP server running on it, that could cause serious issues, including DNS issues if the DHCP server is configured to update DNS. It could be that the computer/laptop has a fixed IP address but I would have thought that would be more likely to cause issues for him rather than you. @billybutcher is probably your best bet for this one.
I might be, if I had my hands on the network in question.
It would be odd for a Wi-Fi client to have a fixed IP address but worth checking. That said if you have two devices either of which cause problems you’d have to think both were set to the same address - but then they’d clash with each other as well.
Is it only your computer or do these “rogue” devices knock other devices such as your phone off the network?
That feels like a possibility - or a hotspot perhaps.
In the brief period when your computer works, is it possible to log into the Livebox and see what clients it thinks are connected, and what their IP addresses are?
I’d check that all devices are using DHCP to get their IP address dynamically assigned by the Orangebox router. As mentioned already, it sounds like there could be a clash between a device using DHCP and another having a static IP that’s also in the pool of leased addresses used by the Orangebox.
Are the PCs and laptop all running Windows? If so, opening a Command Prompt and running the following command will show you whether the device is using DHCP.
Connect all of the devices to the router at the same time and run a diagnostic tool like nmap from one of them, or use the router’s own built-in tools to see whether any devices are trying to grab the same IP address.
The stone walls may cause dropout of the wifi signal, as an additional problem, so you would need to test wifi strength from each place.
Also, for good measure, using a wifi signal inspector app (don’t know whether one comes built-in to Windows), it should be possible to find out the channels that the wifi signal is being broadcast on by the router, and their relative signal strengths. Sometimes you might have to force a channel hop to get the optimal combination of channel strength and range.
My wife has a similar problem at home with her Dell laptop and Ubuntu, and irrespective of how close she sits to the router, it always seems to drop out after a while, or else be really slow, yet she has no problem with either her tablet or her phone. I’ve put it down to the wifi chip and driver of her computer so far, and the fact that it only seems to be connecting over 2.4GHz, instead of 5Ghz. Even resetting the broadcast channel doesn’t seem to make things better for long, but we haven’t gotten around to testing with a different wifi chip yet (which would be a USB key in our case).
I don’t think it is likely to be the source of your problem but also worth remembering that some routers, especially older ones, might have a surprisingly low maximum number of clients (say 16).
Although (as I said) this shouldn’t be an issue on your Orange Livebox it *might* be worth checking that the number of IPv4 addresses that DHCP can use is big enough - this should be somewhere on the advanced settings - eg on my (much older Livebox) it is in Advanced Settings/Network Configuration/DHCP
Orange seem to do well with IPv6 though, which effectively can’t run out of addresses (a /56 is offered for my home network which is 4.722366483×10²¹ addresses - not even I have that many computers )
Thanks for all the replies, I appreciate it; hopefully I’m understanding some of it.
Today it’s just me and the wife at home, so I’ve no connection problems, but I did log into the admin section of the live box. I’m assigned an ip address of 192.168.1.1 and it shows my wife’s phone as being a phone, and assigns a slightly different IP. I will have to test my son’s computer later to see if there is a conflict there, but I probably won’t get the chance until Thursday.
I opened up CMD and entered ipconfig /all.
It shows DHCP Enabled, I don’t see “DHCP Server” anywhere in the list; where it should be under Default Gateway, it shows DHCPv6 IAID.
At most there is ever only 4 devices connected at any one time.
Are you sure your computer’s address is 192.168.1.1 ? That would be highly unusual, and almost guaranteed to causes issues, as that is the address the Livebox generally assigns itself in order for the DNS service to be run on it.
If true, then it would also be a possible explanation for the DNS timeouts you are experiencing.
No, it does assign an extra digit on the end of the 1, it must have got missed off when I copied and pasted it. I can’t remember what it is offhand, but my computer is assigned the same IP each time. I noticed the last digit was different for my wife’s mobile.
Hmm, weird… not sure why the ipconfig didn’t return the DHCP server but it’s not a huge deal. The fact you’re using DHCP is the important bit. When you do get the time, check to see if your son’s computers are also configured to use DHCP.
It will open up the DHCP configuration page by default.
Do you see anything listed in the section “Baux DHCP statiques”? For example, I have a static IP assigned to one of my Raspberry Pi devices, and it shows up as:
Cool - that’s already helpful as it shows there’s not a static IP assignment configured on the Livebox itself
It is still possible that his computers are using a static IP address that’s configured on the machines themselves, so the ipconfig will be helpful in ruling that out when you do have the time.
That shouldn’t be a problem because such addresses are not truly “static” - they are still assigned by DHCP and will not clash with other addresses assigned dynamically by DHCP.
This one is just used as a media server. It’s running OpenMediaVault and Portainer, for no other reason than I wanted to learn them. It also runs Plex and SabNZBd. It’s got Home Assistant installed too, but I’ve not got any smart devices hooked up to HA yet.
I’ve got other Pis dotted around the house doing other things too, e.g. RetroPie. But these aren’t powered on permanently.
I have a Pi3b in operation as a samba/media server with openmediavault, and 2 Pi4s at work sitting idle after I gave up on Nextcloud, one of which is intended to become my next specialised IPMS (aka intellectual property management system) server, when I get around to configuring it so that I can take either it anywhere, or dial into it remotely without leaving it on the internet somewhere. You’ve given me an idea for the other one though, was the OpenVPN server easy to set up ?
)
