Alright, I'm having a properly annoying problem. After turning my PC on the internet WILL drop after an indiscriminate time, usually 10 minutes or so. It has happened immediately and also it has kept alive for a few hours once. The setup is a wireless router/modem (I shall refer to as router A) which is linked via ethernet to another wireless router set as a switch (router B) which is linked via ethernet to my PC. Router A is a D-Link DSL-1640R linky. Router B is a Netgear WNR-2000 linky. I've set router B at a completely different IP than router A and made sure it doesn't clash with other PC's on the network and disabled DHCP on it. Everytime the internet goes out I can still access both routers through their IPs. Both windows network troubleshooting and that funky MSN thing point towards not being able to find the DNS server or no response. To fix the problem I have to reboot both routers a couple times, which is annoying because other people use the wireless network and it disrupts their internets too. This only affects my PC too. Is this because the routers are incompatible or have I just not done the right things turning it into a switch? Sorry to be a bit all over the place.
Have you tried manually setting the DNS in router & PC to the same as the gateway router? Failing that, mine sometimes plays up after a power fail and all the devices need to be rebooted, not sure why, as they always seem to be fine before.
If you're getting the address by DHCP from the netgear router, it could be specifying itself as the primary DNS address. could you go into a bit more detail on your setup? a) is router A's IP set as the default gateway on the netgear b) what is the default gateway you get assigned c) are both routers running DHCP ? d) what DNS address do you get assigned from DHCP ? e) can you still "ping" out to an IP? (random google.co.uk ip - 66.102.9.103 )
it's not the routers if it only affects your pc.. more than likely your wireless nic going into power saving mode- try going into the device manager and check out the wireless nic properties there'll be a power saving option- uncheck that and see if it fixes
It would appear manually doing the DNS settings has worked, it hasn't dropped out all day. I'll see what happens over the next few days just to be sure. Thanks very much to all of you.
Hey guys, its still dropping out. Its only doing it once a day now, instead of after every power-on. Could this be to do with lease times or something? I'm sorry if I seem a bit slow at this subject, I don't really know what I'm doing. For more info, this is a picture I knocked up in paint of how the network setup is in the house, if it helps.
Could you make sure you've turned off the DHCP server on the Netgear? (router B), in your situation you should only have one dhcp server, and that should be the router attached to the phone line (router A) Multiple DHCP servers do break networks unless setup correctly, its far simplier to just have the one.
Have you tried moving your PC to connect to Router A on your diagram? This would diagnose whether the issue is the second router or your PC.
sorry missed that from your original post!, could you give us : IP address of router A IP details gained from DHCP (gateway, dns servers, subnet mask) (ipconfig /all will list them) could well be an issue on the netgear, is RIP enabled ? is everything on it turned off?
I know it doesn't sound like it should be related ... but can you try to disable TCP offload and see if that helps? There's a driver issue / bug with some network drivers (mine has it, for example) under Windows 7; when you hit around 10mb of traffic on your NIC, it locks up and stops sending traffic out. Its told me my DNS servers aren't responding or that my NIC is faulty when I use the troubleshooter, so it could be this for you too? To disable the TCP offload, go into the NIC's properties in device manager and look for "TCP Checksum Offload" - or there's a netsh command you can google and run at the command line for global disable. If that doesn't work ... try setting your DNS servers statically to OpenDNS instead, and give yourself a static IP, eg: router 1 (internet) 192.168.1.1 (serving DHCP from .50 upwards) router 2 (yours) 192.168.1.2 (DHCP off) your PC 192.168.1.3 everything else: DHCP
