dj_ivocha on 3/3/2010 at 22:58
[EDIT] Read the last two posts of mine for the current situation.
<strike>Until October last year we had a pretty bad 2mbit DSL connection (shared between the landlord, his parents, me and the other tenant). Then the landlord got 20mbit cable internet - one of those packages of cable TV, internet and VoIP phone.
Since then, whenever I'm on IRC while having uTorrent on, I'll get disconnected from IRC every so often, usually 3-4 times per hour. Those are the disconnects that others see as Ping Timeout and my own mIRC only notices after a couple of minutes, so it's basically impossible to have any meaningful conversation, since after a disconnect I never know if something was said in the period when I was already disconnected but mIRC hadn't noticed it yet. It's also quite annoying for the others in the channel, considering they see "dj_ivocha has quit IRC (ping timeout) ... dj_ivocha has joined IRC ..." and so on all the time.
The cable modem isn't actually resetting the connection, since I don't actually lose even a single ping (I have it running in a command prompt just for this case) and my IP doesn't change. A few months ago I used to lose a SINGLE ping everytime mIRC lost the connection, and I also got dropped from Starcraft. Actually I only got dropped from Battle.net, but not from any eventual game I might have been playing at the time. I only noticed the lack of a dropped ping today, but when I started Starcraft and left it running, I didn't lose connection to Bnet like I used to, even though mIRC still dropped me as usual. Also when I was losing a ping, there were sometimes problems with other applications - like youtube stopping its buffering of whatever video I was watching, for example.
This only seems to happen when uTorrent is running AND there are some active torrents. The higher an upload/download rate I have, the more often I get those disconnects.
Back in October I had Windows XP x64 with mIRC 6.3 (or maybe the previous version, not sure) and uTorrent 1.8something. Then I switched to Win7 with the same mIRC and some later uTorrent version (currently at 2.0), but the problems remained, including the dropped pings.
The router is a D-Link DIR-300, I don't know what kind of a cable modem we have, though.
Any idea how to fix this? Considering I watch about a gazillion TV series every week, my uTorrent is running almost all the time, so I can't stay on IRC at all, which is pretty annoying :(</strike>
Al_B on 3/3/2010 at 23:14
Probably the router, tbh. A quick google search suggests that it's less than perfect and probably worth swapping for something else if you get the chance. I've seen problems with routers that can't cope with a high number of connections (which bittorrent is probably creating) so that would be my first guess.
I don't know how confident you feel about doing something like this, but if you can't change the router then I'd be tempted to load the (
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/DIR300) DD-WRT project onto it. If you're unsure (or it's not your router) then definitely don't go down this road but it would probably improve matters if the router is the issue.
dj_ivocha on 3/3/2010 at 23:33
If it's the router, it's probably because of something other than the inability to cope with a lot of connections - I mostly download from a private tracker that doesn't really have that many users, so most of the time there are at most 10-20 connections open.
The problem is that it's in the landlord's room so I can't really fiddle with it. He doesn't use IRC so has probably never noticed any dropouts and will thus not be likely to agree to get a new one.
What other models would you suggest, that can be found for cheap on Ebay and have at least the same capabilities as this one?
[EDIT] Out of curiosity, if it IS the router, what exactly is happening that can cause mIRC of all things to drop its connection? Doesn't it only drop if it doesn't receive a ping from the server for some time? If so, considering those pings come every few minutes, how does it even notice such a short connection hiccup that even ping.exe can't catch?
Al_B on 3/3/2010 at 23:56
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
What other models would you suggest, that can be found for cheap on Ebay and have at least the same capabilities as this one?
No router I've had has been immune to the odd connection problem and dropout. I currently use a Linksys WRT300n and it has good performance and features on the whole. ((
http://cgi.ebay.de/Linksys-WRT300n-V2-WLAN-Router_W0QQitemZ140386297615QQcmdZViewItemQQptZDE_Computer_Peripherie_Netzwerk?hash=item20aface70f) One on ebay here).
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
Out of curiosity, if it IS the router, what exactly is happening that can cause mIRC of all things to drop its connection? Doesn't it only drop if it doesn't receive a ping from the server for some time?
mIRC may have a software timeout but from memory, 'pings' aren't required to keep a raw network connection alive. If you feel like sipping from the firehose then (
http://www.wireshark.org/) Wireshark or similar would probably show you what was going on when you get disconnected. My guess would be that the router is rejecting or closing the IRC connection from your computer.
Have you tried other IRC clients such (
http://www.hydrairc.com/) as Hydra? Not saying it'll solve your problem, but may at least eliminate mIRC as the guilty party.
dj_ivocha on 4/3/2010 at 01:06
Hmm, I'll give it a try tomorrow, but I doubt it will help - the java chat on the Starchat homepage always drops at the same time as mIRC.
John Peterson on 1/8/2010 at 07:57
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
Since then, whenever I'm on IRC while having uTorrent on, I'll get disconnected from IRC every so often, usually 3-4 times per hour. Those are the disconnects that others see as Ping Timeout and my own mIRC only notices after a couple of minutes, so it's basically impossible to have any meaningful conversation, since after a disconnect I never know if something was said in the period when I was already disconnected but mIRC hadn't noticed it yet. It's also quite annoying for the others in the channel, considering they see "dj_ivocha has quit IRC (ping timeout) ... dj_ivocha has joined IRC ..." and so on all the time.
Same problem here with a D-Link DIR-600 Hardware Version: Bx, Firmware Version: 2.02, bought in Europe, no newer firmware found.
After exactly 20 minutes I'm disconnected from the irc server, regardless if there is any activity on the connection or not. I know this because on freenode I'm connected to 20 big channels so there is always at least some activity during a 20 minute time frame.
The result of this is that after a few hours several channels on freenode have banned me and directed me to ##fix_your_connection because of the frequent disconnects. I have no idea how to fix it. The only potential problem I have noticed is a frequent list of "PING-FLOODING flooding attack from WAN" and "Xmas port scan attack from WAN", but I don't know if any of the ips listed are the irc server ips, with some work I could check if any of the "attacks" are from the irc servers, but even if they are there is no way I have found to disable or tweak the attack filter, or even disable the firewall altogether.
So does anyone have any ideas how to fix the disconnect problem? I bet the DIR-600 looked like a nice affordable router to other students with a small budget but a tech savvy, so that they might have found a solution to this problem?
I can also mention that before I forwared the ident port 113 several servers would never connect me, even those that don't require ident, like quakenet, I'm not sure how to diagnose that problem. In any case, after forwarding port 113, it worked better, but still not ok since the disconnects get me banned from several channels.
dj_ivocha on 22/6/2011 at 21:35
So, the problem still persists and it's gotten worse in the last month. I still get the disconnects in IRC when downloading stuff, but they now also happen when uTorrent isn't even running, I'm not watching Youtube or anything and I can say for certain that nobody else in the household even has his PC on, let alone is using the internet (due to the problem occurring during the night when everyone is asleep or during the day when there's nobody home).
What's even worse is that League of Legends is also affected by it. When I'm not in game yet but still in that shitty Adobe AIR lobby client of theirs, browsing or waiting for a game or whatever and the problem occurs, at first everything seems fine, but as soon as I try to do some action that requires communication with their server, like starting a new game or browsing the shop or looking at my stats, I get a message that the connection was closed and the client crashes (rather ungracefully too but that's the least of it). If I'm already in a game, I don't even notice there is a problem until the game is over and the lobby comes back up - there I can't see the post-game stats and get the connection closed message too when I try to do anything.
An even bigger problem is that lately the EU servers of League of Legends have been pretty overloaded and there's now a login queue, that can sometimes be up to 30 minutes long or even more. And considering this problem now occurs as often as every 15 minutes, by the time I get to log in, I've had it happen already and can start the whole process from scratch :(.
I've already eliminated every possible source back up to the cable modem (so my PC, the switch between and the router and the router itself have been replaced with new ones). Today I opened a support ticket on the cable provider's website, asking for a replacement modem, but in case they aren't forthcoming and/or it isn't the modem either, is there any way to try and trace the problem further back towards the provider? Like a tracert that runs continuously and repeats every 100ms or something like that? When I leave ping.exe running, it mostly shows a single dropped ping after this problem occurs, but not always, so I assume only a single packet is getting dropped and if that happens between pings, it doesn't get caught. Or something.
Please halp? :( I can't play LoL and can't chat on IRC either and I haven't been to #thief in like a year because I just keep annoying everyone with the constant timeouts.
dj_ivocha on 5/7/2011 at 17:40
So, I've looked at the router logs and it says it drops the connection every hour or 90 minutes and then reconnects again in the same second. So connection dropped at 14:44:40, reconnect at 14:44:40, drop at 15:44:40, drop at 16:44:41, drop at 18:14:41, drop at 19:14:40 and so on. Always an hour or 90 minutes to the second.
Today I disconnected the router and connected my PC directly to the cable modem for about 2 hours - no problem. Reconnected the router and exactly an hour after that - disconnect.
:confused: :confused: :confused:
Al_B on 5/7/2011 at 22:20
It still sounds like a flakey router. Were there any other computers connected either by wired or wireless connections when you reconnected your computer?
From what you've said it sounds like your router is sending network resets to the remote computers either due to a fault or simply buggy firmware. If you were able to borrow an alternative make / model of router temporarily then that would probably be helpful but I realise you may be limited with your options, particularly as your landlord controls the connection.
dj_ivocha on 5/7/2011 at 23:16
But I replaced the router 3 weeks ago as I said in my previous post - it used to be that DLink DIR300 that you had said is pretty bad, now it's a Fritz!Box 7170. The problems occurred with both routers, so how can it be the router then?
