Thread: Strange Connectivity Issue

Hi All,

The main reason for me starting this thread if because of unparalleled (sickeningly) inefficient technical support combined with the same from Netgear.

I have an issue which I believe to be a little strange. My Setup is a Hathway 128k Cable connection with a Scientific Atlanta Modem and a Netgear WGR614v7 router. There are 2laptops connected to the router. One is wired (XP SP2) and the other on Wifi. (Vista)

The setup has been working fine till recently when the connection dropped after a few minutes of activity. Tried a lot of things to figure out what could be causing this. There is one common pattern that can reproduce this issue. There is a laptop that runs on Vista on wireless. It seems like when that is turned on, and connected, the connection drops after a few minutes. I would have to restart the router and then things work fine.

As per advise from Netgear I had reinstalled the firmware , power cycled the router and the modem, changed the wireless channels. now i guess they have runn out of options.

I am totally confused if this is a wireless issue or a DNS issue. I doubt its a problem from the ISP end because as soon as i power cycle the router, things work normally for sometime.

Someone please please help!

Noe here are the weird things. Even when the web pages do not come up, any existing sessions including Bit torrent downloads, Outlook express , chat, etc seem to work. If I had given a ping before, that would also work. But when i cancel the ping and try again it fails. I have tried to acces Google by the IP address, and it works.

Have checked the hosts file on the Vista laptop. There was an entry below local host that said (::1) (yeah! colon colon one) nothing else. I had that removed and then tried.. the issue still persisits. I tried pinging the DNS addresses 202.88.158.8 (Primary) and 202.88.156.6 (secondary) The primary refuced to respond. The secondary did give intermediate responses. I gave the entried manually in the IP properties. Still the same issue persists.

From the description of the issue, it seems to be a DNS problem (you can establish a connection by IP but name lookup fails)

I would suggest to try and isolate the issue by trying open DNS, here's the addresses:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Using open DNS and not the ones assigned by Hathway, try to reproduce the same issue with your setup. If you can isolate and confirm the issue then the solution would be obvious.

P.S.: i dont know about Netgear, but Hathway tech support would be dumbstruck if you approach them for any technical assistance. Dont waste you time talking to them.