Smart BB Downtime

simp

Hi There:-

I recently (and arduously!) switched from eircom to smart BB. I'm very happy with the faster line - and have found smart good to deal with - BUT - my only complaint is that I seem to have downtime every 24 hours or so...

I had noticed it a couple of times - the router would claim that the cable was disconnected - i.e. there was no DSL on the line - and I would check the cables, discover no problem, and find that I was back up within a half hour. Looking at the log of my router - I discovered that every 1 day 30 mins (approx), my WAN IP reverts to 0.0.0.0, and I am given a new WAN IP.

Is this a routine occurence? If so, is it possible to schedule it for during the middle of the night? Or is there something else wrong? The service is great, but I find this aspect a little disruptive!

Perhaps other Smart users might like to compare notes? Perhaps a Smart person such as Garfield might like to comment?

Thanks,

Simp

dub45

You should post about your problem on the Smart support Forums http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums/. The support response there seems to be very fast.

I am a Smart user and have not noticed this problem so far.

chorus techy

I haven't had this problem so far either, but I have found an annoying problem where the router just locks up and gets stuck on "Attempting to connect" every 3 days or so, and the router has to be reset. And it usually happens at the most inappropriate time, usually when I've just about finished downloading stuff off iTunes :mad:

simp

Thanks for that suggestion Dub45 - someone has posted with a similar problem on the Smart Boards:-
http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=8
Unfortunately, there seems to be no clear solution...
If I turn up anything of interest I will report back.

machalla

There are two suggestions I can think of, having had a similar problem.

The first is to try another phone cable than the one that was supplied with your aolynk router. I was using that phone cable and it seems to have been faulty and been causing disconnects. Having switched to a new cable I didn't have the same frequency of disconnects.

Also the othe likely culprit is your aolynk router itself. I gave up trying to get this work in a stable way and just bought a €99 linksys wag345 router (argos had them). Having switched that in instead of the aolynk I have had consistent uptime since (apart from rebooting the router once or twice).

If you happen to be doing a lot of torrenting the aolynk is not the router to use as it seems to have problems with many connections at once.

Hope that helps a bit.

simp

Thanks Machalla.

I'm using the old phone cable which I was using with eircom, and it's getting a consistently okay telephone signal - so I don't think it's that.

If it is the router (and I have been doing some swarm downloading) - is there any way to adjust the settings to stop this from happening? Or is it a lost cause, and should I just get a new one?

machalla

I found getting a new router sorted out al my problems. If you have a look back through the past few weeks of posts here (i think search is disabled for some reason) you will see people mentioning solutions for the aolynk but I didn't hear any really good ones apart from bridging it so it is just a connector and not a firewall. Not ideal I think.

In my case the new router suited my needs.

Sorry I can't be of more help really.

simp

Thanks for that, Machalla.

I'm on a Mac, running ipfw software, so I might try to switch the router to bridging mode, and see if that helps any.
(What is the difference between bridging mode and normal mode?)

machalla

As I understand it in effect instead of traffic coming through the firewall on your router it simply acts as a modem in effect that passes through the traffic to your machine itself. The firewall on the router wouldn't be active. Thats a top of the head explanation others may have better.

So make sure you have the firewall up and configured to your liking as you will in effect be making your machine a target without a firewall.

simp

I am perfectly happy to rely on the internal firewall if it will solve the downtime problem. So I will give it a go, and report back.

Snaga

^^ Pretty much sums up how it works.

Effectively it is acting as an ATM/ethernet bridge. It turns the ATM traffic between you and the dslam into ethernet traffic and vice versa.

Think of the dslam being a normal Switch and your [adsl line + Modem + ethernet cable] as being one very long ethernet cable - nothing more.

Your own pc/mac will then authenticate using PPPoE and get assigned an ip address directly.

As your pc is therefore directly connected to the internet, with no NAT layer in between its best to have a decent software firewall to protect you.

simp

Okay - so I tried to set up the modem in Bridging mode - as per Garfield's instructions elsewhere on this forum. And then the router became inaccessible, and the connection did not get restored. I tried to tinker with the Mac OS X Ppoe settings, but to no avail. So I did a hard restart on the router and started from scratch - put in the proper settings from scratch. Again, no joy - blinking light, no connection.

So then, I took the old D-Link DSL modem and connected it up - and it worked first time. I checked the speed, and it's actually *faster* - 1.95mbps down, compared to 1.49 with the Aolynk...

So I guess that solves that problem..! Simply avoid the Aolynk router.

As a matter of interest, why is this DSL Modem giving me a faster connection speed that the DSL2+ Router? Is DSL2+ a hardware standard, or a communication standard - i.e. are the modems identical?

TimTim

Thats the whole point of bridge mode, it becomes a modem and you can't access it!

When its in bridge mode, create a PPPoE dialer on your mac/pc whatever device is connected to it and it should connect. But as previously stated there will be no NAT or security of any kind so get a decent firewall.

Do a factory reset with that pin at the back of the modem to bring it back into normal mode.

dub45

simp wrote:

Okay - so I tried to set up the modem in Bridging mode - as per Garfield's in....................................

So then, I took the old D-Link DSL modem and connected it up - and it worked first time. I checked the speed, and it's actually *faster* - 1.95mbps down, compared to 1.49 with the Aolynk...

So I guess that solves that problem..! Simply avoid the Aolynk router.

As a matter of interest, why is this DSL Modem giving me a faster connection speed that the DSL2+ Router? Is DSL2+ a hardware standard, or a communication standard - i.e. are the modems identical?

Curious stuff:) as a result of your post I tried a fairly recent but officially non adsl2 wag54g (no firmware updates either) and it worked fine with the Smart connection and strangely enough the upload speed seemed faster than with a wag54gs adsl2 router/all in one (which also works fine). So the moral of the story is that if you go with Smart it may not be necessary to upgrade your existing all in one.