[kwlug disc.] need some opinions on a misbehaving wireless network

[Unsolicited]

Can you eliminate wi-fi from the equation, just long enough to see if
it still continues?

i.e. This would confirm/deny wi-fi is an element of the equation.

Your additional routers would confirm/deny whether it is the router
itself. Assuming the problem isn't too intermittent.

If home = unit (apartment, whatever) ... Rogers will bring all lines
to a central point in the basement. The incoming line is split to the
individuals. (Thus, their ability to put filters on the line depending
upon what package the individual has purchased.)

Regardless, does the friend have neighbours who also use Rogers? Have
they noticed any problems? i.e. Could it be Rogers service / to the
area? Again, a neighbourhood will have a single feed serving multiple
customers. Something like 10 before they start using another line, IIRC.

I appreciate the desire to solve the problem and end the aggravation,
but regardless of the above, have Rogers send a new modem out. Such
has (unexpectedly) fixed problems. [Can the modem, or router for that
matter, be reset to factory defaults, just to see if the problem goes
away?]

That assumes they're renting the modem. However, my father-in-law, who
purchased his digital terminal, was able to go into the local Rogers
store and swap devices right then and there. If possible, that would
be the speediest way to eliminate the modem as an issue.

Robert P. J. Day wrote, On 6/18/2007 3:50 PM:
>   many months ago, i installed a basic 4-port linksys WAP in a
> friend's home in TO, and it worked just fine until a few weeks ago,
> when it started being unable to access completely arbitrary web pages.
> 
>   imagine three computers in the mix -- her desktop, her son's laptop
> and (when i visit) my laptop, all running wireless.  the first ugly
> symptom a few weeks back was when i couldn't do "fetchmail" to get my
> mail from mindspring -- every attempt produced a DNS error trying to
> resolve pop.mindspring.com.  and it got worse.
> 
>   suddenly, i could surf to *some* web pages, but not others, and the
> set of reachable pages changed totally at random, but it seemed that
> the other two (windows) systems always behaved somewhat better than
> mine (though still not perfectly).
> 
>   when i finally got hold of rogers tech support and explained the
> symptoms, the chap asked me to first test the windows laptop, said it
> sounded like a corrupt DNS cache, and got me to flush the DNS cache on
> that system.  it *briefly* started to work better, but shortly went to
> hell again.  and, of course, doing that on *one* laptop did nothing
> about the other systems.
> 
>   i have, of course, done all the standard stuff -- resetting the
> modem and router, trying to troubleshoot whatever i could think of,
> but to no avail, and the maddening thing about this is that the
> problem is unpredictable -- a web page that was unreachable will, five
> minutes later, be reachable, while some other page is now gone.
> 
>   at this point, i'm seriously starting to consider hardware, and i'm
> taking in a couple new routers when i visit tomorrow, since i can't
> imagine what else it could be by now.
> 
>   does any of this sound familiar?  any other bits of advice?  thanks.
> 
> rday
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