You might also check your drivers, although if it happens on both of your machines independantly that probably isnt the problem. If you can still ping, I would think it is either the cable modem itself, or the connection between it and your network.

Robert/noname: I hope not. It's only about 6 months old. But I'll try the other port next time it happens. Well no.... I mean, if that was it, my wife wouldn't be able to surf... right? I'll try it anyway.

Ryan: I don't think its the wireless to top floor hub, since again,when one machine is down the other one is up normally.

Are both you and your wife using wireless? What happens if you use a cable? Do you still loose connection?

I have had mixed results with the cheaper SOHO equipment - I've had a few things last years and others flake out in months... Is everything plugged into UPS/surge protectors? Have you had any lightening lately?

Ray,

This could just be your cable modem. I have the same probably with mine. It will work great for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden I will be getting dropped packets. Comcast (the worst) has come out and correct the issue. Run a ping test and use toast.net to determine if your connection speed is good.

Personally I would use process of elimination starting with hooking your laptop directly to the cable modem and going down from there. It will be alot easier to diagnose.

Another thing to check is to make sure that the firmware on the hub and bridges is the latest. Also check the wiring. You be surprised how many times my wife knocks off the internet in my house when she's vaccumming.

I get phantom netwrok issues as well (not exactly like you describe, but possibly in the same family). Typically, they are resolved by rebooting the cable modem.

Ray,

With the random nature of the problem, my guess would be one of the access points. Can you tell if it is a problem with both access points or just one? When you say that you access point are not using DHCP, are the DNS and gateway settings the same?

In my other life I repaired medical equipment and the "half-split" troubleshooting technique is very handy in this type of situation. Divide you network into segments (AP to Bridge, and Bridge to Router/Modem). Since it happens on both laptops they are not part of the problem, unless of course you have made software changes to both. Once you have isolated which segment has the problem. Subdivide that into smaller segments Bridge, AP, modem, and cables.

Ray, I only have a few suggestions for you - but they may be helpful. First, if you have one of those fancy pants "internet security" packages running on 1 or both of these machines get rid of it. "Norton internet security" in particular wreaks havoc with wireless.

Second, log into the wireless router and check whatever stats are there. Try to see if there are other wireless devices attempting to connect. Try different channels and settings. Use the MAC filter etc.

Third, and this is silly, check to make sure you are connecting to YOUR network. People set up wireless all the time and your devices might just be grabbing the wrong network. They might be able to connect (handshake) but not really do much else - or the signal may be so weak that it's dropping in and out. I always enable the little icon in the sys-tray and hover over it so it tells me what network I'm on.

Finally, look for EMI around your living area. Is the weather changing and causing the AC to kick on? Have you recently installed a large electric dryer? Does your dog walk around with his hair sticking up like he's saluting the jackson 5? If so, you may have issues with the general environment. These are harder to solve but they can involve things like plants, signal boosters, better power cords etc.

Hope you fix it :)

Ray:
- Maybe your wireless card is going bad on your laptop?
- Can you ping the wireless router?
- Can you ping the cable modem?
- Check your Windows Event Logs (Control Panel/Administrative)

"It can also hit the other laptop. It can't hit the IP of the hub upstairs or any machine on the lan upstairs"

Sounds like the powerline network thing may be at fault then.
Can string a length of CAT5 betwen the upstairs and downstairs instead, even for a few days ?
My wife goes a bit mad when I do things like that, but sometimes it's a good way to do something :-)

Tom, it may well be the powerline ethernet, however, remember that when laptop A is down, laptop B is fine. It's almost as if the wireless hub loses the ability to send N streams of data to the upstairs hub. It's connected, but unable to handle multiple people. That's another way of saying it.

I used to do network support for many years, but I have not had the opportunity to work with powerline networking. This is redundant to some of the suggestions above, but here is the order I would do things.

Don't be quick to replace anything. When the problem comes up again, start simple and add complexity until you find where the problem occurs.

1. Take the laptop upstairs and plug it into the first router if possible.
2. Plug it to the upstairs hub.
2b. Can you try wireless upstairs? (May require moving the access point upstairs for a little bit)
3. Plug it to the downstairs Power Bridge.
4. Plug into the downstairs access point with a cable.
5. Can you swap wireless cards with your other laptop without causing too much trouble?

Those will help determine which portion of your network is causing the issue. You may have to reconfigure your laptop for some tests, write down any settings you change so that you can get it back to where you started. If the laptop has the problem in all cases, but not with the other computers, then you have a problem (probably software or driver related) with your laptop.

Your problem(s) could include:
a) interference on your wireless or your power network or both. (I.E. It's possible to have an electrical device on that same power circuit that also disrupts your wireless. I've seen a Microwave disrupt a 9Ghz wireless TV signal)

b) A misconfiguration of the laptop networking, or the wireless hub or both (sounds unlikely since it WAS working, but it's possible that you had problem A, and then you accidently caused problem B while troubleshooting.)

c) A neighbor causing wireless interferance. (Either by connecting to your wireless hub, or broadcasting on the same channel with their own wireless hub)

d) New software?

e) A device or cable that has gone bad. In 10 years of networking I have found that this rarely happens, even on home grade equipment, unless you've had a power surge, overheating, or other environmental issue.

Sorry about the length of this post. This is not complete, but covers most of the bases. If you need, feel free to email me directly.

Good luck!

Dan

Ray,

Does your cable company charge you for multiple hookups? It's hard to tell from the description, but if you have a simple hub hooked up to your cable modem, most likely your getting multiple IP addresses from your cable company and you may be paying them extra bucks for it.

If your xBox360 is plugged into the hub, that's getting an IP address as well.

You can eliminate that by replacing the simple hub with a broadband router. A good one will provide it's own DHCP with NAT (Network Address Translation), which essentially shares a single IP from the cable modem on your own internal subnet. Nice ones also provide hardware based firewall protection, DMZ, VPN, port forwarding, etc.. All the bells and whistles and actually very easy to understand.


I've been using a SMC Barricade Plus, which I love, but I'm planning on upgrading to a linkSys model, most likely the WRT54GX2,which is around $150 or less. The WRT54GX2 also provides wireless.

Check out the linksys site, search on the model and look at the user manual (pdf), you'll get an idea of how easy it is to set up. Not any worse than going through the CFIDE.

You could manually enter IP's for only machines that need them - servers and such - and use DHCP for everything else. Assuming your router allows you to restrain the range of IP addresses in the DHCP pool, just manually assign addresses outside of that range, and then you won't have to worry about conflicts.

The solution to accessing resources with dynamic IP addresses (ie NAT) is at http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ . This will allow you to have mysqlserver.dyndns.com and the client software keeps the ip address nice and updated.

I had similar problems with an older DLink wireless router. I finally decided that the port used to connect to the WAN was bad. My internal network worked like a charm (Wired and wireless). The router was 13 months old - just out of warranty of course. I replaced it with a newer faster DLink and the problems went away.