Internet Connectivity Issues

Fri Jan 07, 2011 5:37 pm

So I've been having internet connectivity issues and I don't know how to effectively troubleshoot and address the problem. I'm looking for help so I'll go over the basics of what I'm experiencing and what I've tried and hopefully someone out there can give me some advice on what to do.

Here's the problem I'm experiencing: Every so often, my internet connection will drop and I'll be unable to connect to anything on the internet. The only "fix" I've found so far is a restart of my computer. That seems to work.

I've actually had this problem crop up every once in awhile since I built this computer, but it used to only happen once every few months. The problem has become more frequent recently - As in, several-times-a-day frequent, and it's clearly pretty unacceptable for me to have to restart my computer several times a day to restore internet connectivity.

My computer is connected via ethernet cable to my router. Nothing on the physical end has changed at all recently, so I'm assuming for the time being that the cable is sound, is plugged into the right jack, the jacks function correctly, etc.
I've also got two other computers connected to the router, and neither of them experience internet outages when my computer is disconnected. (I've been avoiding power-cycling the router as this will probably erase the port settings I have set up in the firewall so I'd like to avoid doing that. It also doesn't seem likely that it's related to the router since no one has touched it.)

I have tried doing IPCONFIG /release and then IPCONFIG /renew. This doesn't seem to solve my problems.
I also downloaded the latest drivers for my machine. I have an ASUS P5Q Pro mobo and the NIC installed on it is an Atheros something-or-other. I installed the latest drivers they had for that last night but I've still experienced internet outages since doing so.

I've tried PING 127.0.0.1 during an outage twice: One time it worked and I was able to successfully ping my machine, the other time it didn't and was unable to ping (however, I think I ran those IPCONFIG commands first and that may have screwed up that particular ping.)

When I look in Event Viewer I see some "Warnings" listed with the following messages:

The DNS Client service could not contact any DNS servers for a repeated number of attempts. For the next 30 seconds the DNS Client service will not use the network to avoid further network performance problems. It will resume its normal behavior after that. If this problem persists, verify your TCP/IP configuration, specifically check that you have a preferred (and possibly an alternate) DNS server configured. If the problem continues, verify network conditions to these DNS servers or contact your network administrator.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address XXXXXXX. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. . Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Normally I'm not immediately aware of an outage but some of these messages seem to correspond with the outages I'm experiencing. And FWIW at no point have I been running a torrent program. I have suspected that the outages may be caused by a particular program so I've been experimenting with not using certain programs (e.g. Ventrilo, Steam, Pidgin, Firefox, etc.) However I don't think any of these are really the "cause" of the issue after having experienced outages independent of any particular program.

At this point I'm kind of out of ideas. I know there's a problem and I suspect it's hardware related to my NIC, but I don't really know enough to pinpoint what's going wrong.
I've been roughly using this page as a guide: http://www.zappersoftware.com/Help/how- ... t-nic.html. There are several things I've yet to try here which I'm going to list (for my reference and also for anyone who may be able to help.)

ping 192.168.0.2
tracert 208.100.49.220
Try using direct IP addresses (http://74.125.159.106, ex Google) in browser when internet goes down
Resetting my BIOS

Fri Jan 07, 2011 6:41 pm

Sounds to me like it's a Nic issue Wail. Don't know much about your MB but does it have 2 nics? If so try the other one. If not do you have a nic you can put in a PCI slot just to test to see if you lose connectivity. My wifes machine had an issue like that and I finally decided to give her a static IP and that resolved the problem. I would try assigning your IP address you get from your router as a static IP in your TCPIP settings and make sure you also put in the subnet, gateway and DNS as well. Your router may only give out 1 dns address but it should also have the DNS from your ISP. If not you can always use 4.2.2.2 as the secondary DNS. Ipconfig /release and renew will most likely not resolve the problem because your going to get the same IP address back. Ipconfig /flushdns may help and if worse comes to worse go into your router and exclude the IP that it is assigning you and let it assign a new IP address for you. Since the other machines are not having a problem it has to be your hardware or ethernet cable.

Try these
Try ipconfig /flushdns from the dos prompt
Try another nic
Try another ethernet cable
Use the connection from another machine in the house
Assign a static IP
Assisgn a static IP and exclude the IP your having issues with

This is just a quick bit of info and I will go back over your post and try and read more of the info to see if I can come up with more help.

Fri Jan 07, 2011 6:43 pm

I had a dsl router give me a similar problem once. After countless hours to tech support I finally told them to send me a new one , they insisted it was not the problem, I finally called BS.

But seeing as how you only started having this problem after the new computer build I would think that is not the case.

Do you have a different ethernet card you can throw in it?

Fri Jan 07, 2011 6:44 pm

Lol looks like we were posting at the same time . Same bit of advice though. Try a different hole. :srofl: The cable is a good idea also just so you can rule it out.

Wed Jan 12, 2011 1:12 am

I have an Asus P5K motherboard with an Aetheros Ethernet adapter as well. I have noticed occasional connectivity issues similar to what you are describing. I have noticed that these connectivity issues happen more frequently when I am using Windows file sharing such as while copying files between computers. To fix it I just disable and re-enable my network adapter. Luckly it doesn't happen too often for me.

Anyways, you can try giving your computer a static IP address on your network. Your computer won't need to renew your DHCP lease anymore which what is giving you issues.

Wed Jan 12, 2011 1:42 pm

A couple of things:

pinging 127.0.0.1 (aka localhost) should never get to the NIC. It's handled purely in the TCP stack. If this is failing it's a major software issue, possbily related to the next comment.
This one is a little strange:
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.
It *sounds* like you are running internet firewall and it's running up against an internal limit of some sort. Are you running anything that may have a lot of simultaneous connections (e.g. BitTorrent)?

From what I can see you may have a firewall issue. Do you have a firewall running on your workstation? Does this still happen if your firewall is turned off? The router should have a firewall on it (unless you are running it in bridge mode) so you should be safe during the 'test'.

Additionally, it is possible for a single port on a router to go 'weird'. You could try plugging your workstation into a different port on the router if you have one available. Or swap ports with a different machine on the network if no spare one is available.

As to rebooting the router, why would it lose your config? If nothing else it should have an export/import feature for the config. What brand/model is it?

Snaggle.

Wed Jan 12, 2011 4:42 pm

Try what I do when I have internet issues, Wail: Turn off your computer for a while; find a local farm; acquire a plump, lively chicken; sacrifice it to the computer gods. Be sure to collect the blood in an appropriate sacrificial vessel--available cheap at Walmart or Pier One. Hope this helps!

Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:18 pm

DW_Snaggle wrote:A couple of things:

pinging 127.0.0.1 (aka localhost) should never get to the NIC. It's handled purely in the TCP stack. If this is failing it's a major software issue, possbily related to the next comment.

This one is a little strange:
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.
It *sounds* like you are running internet firewall and it's running up against an internal limit of some sort. Are you running anything that may have a lot of simultaneous connections (e.g. BitTorrent)?
From what I can see you may have a firewall issue. Do you have a firewall running on your workstation? Does this still happen if your firewall is turned off? The router should have a firewall on it (unless you are running it in bridge mode) so you should be safe during the 'test'.

Additionally, it is possible for a single port on a router to go 'weird'. You could try plugging your workstation into a different port on the router if you have one available. Or swap ports with a different machine on the network if no spare one is available.

As to rebooting the router, why would it lose your config? If nothing else it should have an export/import feature for the config. What brand/model is it?

Snaggle.

Good to point out the firewall thing. I am running a firewall, but I haven't tried turning it off. I did mention in my previous post that I'm not running BitTorrent when this is happening, but I don't really know - I do run Steam / AIM / IRC / Skype / Vent / Firefox basically by default, so maybe it's freaking out over that.
Will also try swapping the port on the router and see if that fixes anything next time it goes out.

Simultaneous with this internet connectivity problem one of my HDs recently went bad. Funny how all this hardware shit seems to happen at the same time. Must be the cold weather.

Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:55 pm

DW_WailofSuicide wrote:Simultaneous with this internet connectivity problem one of my HDs recently went bad. Funny how all this hardware shit seems to happen at the same time. Must be the cold weather.

Heh! If the drive was failing while the system was paging/swapping it may have handed back corrupted pages. That may explain some of the weirdness. For example, if the system paged out part of the firewall that had the limits in it and the drive handed back the page with some bits flipped such that 65536 became 1024 (or some equally low number) if would explain how you could exceed limits that you shouldn't be hitting.

Any idea if the Windows pagefile was affected by the drive? Or was it a more generic failure than a set of bad blocks?

Snaggle.

Fri Jan 14, 2011 7:11 pm

DW_Snaggle wrote:
DW_WailofSuicide wrote:Simultaneous with this internet connectivity problem one of my HDs recently went bad. Funny how all this hardware shit seems to happen at the same time. Must be the cold weather.
Heh! If the drive was failing while the system was paging/swapping it may have handed back corrupted pages. That may explain some of the weirdness. For example, if the system paged out part of the firewall that had the limits in it and the drive handed back the page with some bits flipped such that 65536 became 1024 (or some equally low number) if would explain how you could exceed limits that you shouldn't be hitting.

Any idea if the Windows pagefile was affected by the drive? Or was it a more generic failure than a set of bad blocks?

Snaggle.

Well, honestly I don't know. At this point it's looking like it's a physical component failure to me (drive seems to spin up, but there's clicking).

The drive that went bad was pretty old, but it's one that was being used for data storage only. How would I know if the Windows pagefile was using the drive? (My windows install is an an entirely different drive so it seems unlikely, but I don't really know).

Connectivity issues actually seemed to improve immediately after I took out the drive, but in the past day or two it's been crapping out again. Probably going to try and find a store to sell an Ethernet card and try that out.