HI all,

I've had this problem intermittently over the last 6 months or so but lately it's become really bad.

Basically at seemingly random times any device connected to our router using an ethernet cable will just start having major connection issues. For example, the internet won't work at all, and if you disable and then enable the ethernet card it comes back. Say you then run a speed test or a command like

Code:

ping google.co.uk -n 60

, both of these work initially and then by the time either of these actions are about half way through, the connection has dropped again.

WiFi connections seem unaffected when this happens.

I'm using a Vigor 2860n with firmware version 3.7.4.3. Has anyone got any ideas as to what may be going wrong here?

Thanks in advance.

Ideas: -

• Has one of the other lans, or the DMZ been turned on with DHCP handing out incorrect addresses? (had that once)


• Has part of the IPv6 been turned on (without any real IPv6) and so the router advertisements are causing the clients to try to use IPv6? (had that once too, check LAN1 and DMZ)

IPv6 router advertisements are async and come a number of seconds after connecting so can cause interesting effects when half configured. In my case problems were triggered by FW upgrade introducing new functions which were on by default.

Thanks for the responses.

I do have a second LAN enabled and this is operating as a separate VLAN to provide guest access in the office. As far as I can tell this is configured as it should be. Is it worth disabling that for a while to see if this resolves it? Not sure about the DMZ - is this what I find under "DMZ Host Setup"? Because none of these are showing as enabled if so.

And no, IPV6 is also showing as disabled in all LANs and the DMZ.

We haven't updated our firmware in quite a long time because the last time we did this our router crashed while doing it and never recovered - we can't even factory reset it and had to buy a new one despite it being brand new at the time.

My DMZ gets its IPv6 turned on every now and then without me asking. Some other change triggers it. I've not seen your exact fault but it sounds very much like either DHCP or RA. You may want to use a packet sniffer on it (wireshark is good) presuming you have the time.

shaneoh1980 wrote: We haven't updated our firmware in quite a long time because the last time we did this our router crashed while doing it and never recovered - we can't even factory reset it and had to buy a new one despite it being brand new at the time.

You can recover (usually) from even those FW faults, there is an emergency reflashing method. However, if you get to a stage where you are happy with the way the router is working then I would apply the following rule of thumb: -

If at last you do succeed: never try again!

We don't seem to have had any IPv6 turned on by itself at this stage.

For now I've disabled LAN2 and everything is OK. I'll leave it for a few days and try to enable LAN2 again because we actually need this feature to be in use.

Oddly whenever we have connection issues and we make changes to our router configuration we find that no fixed connections work until we pull all ethernet cables out of the router and plug them back in. I'm wondering if this is something related.

Do you know how I can find the emergency reflashing method? I can't seem to find anything online. I'd like to use that to try fix our other 2860 so it's available as a backup.

Thanks.

Here you go http://www.draytek.com/?a=resource/update&action=post/update&id=1852