[Hoary] ADSL connection stops working after 2.5 hours of uptime

James Wilkinson ubuntu at westexe.demon.co.uk
Tue May 17 22:24:24 UTC 2005


Ari Torhamo wrote:
> My brother just mailed me about the problem he has had since I upgraded
> his system to Hoary. His Internet connection always goes down after
> about 2.5 hours (this varies a bit) and to get back online my brother
> has to reboot he's PC. He is connected to Internet through an ethernet
> card and an external ADSL device. He just tested the connection with
> Windows XP and it stayed on for 22 hours until he shut down the machine.
> A week ago the problem disappeared for a couple of days seemingly
> without a reason.

OK: I'm going with a hunch. I suspect it's a DHCP timeout.

Get him to run System -> Administration -> Networking when the Internet
goes away. Tell him to check that "The interface eth0 is active". If it
isn't, activate it. If it is, deactivate and reactivate it. See if that
helps.

If not, tell him to grab the IP address and gateway address by clicking
the Properties button.  On my machine, they're 192.168.0.250 and
192.168.0.254 (respectively).

What sort of external ADSL device? If it's a router (most of them are),
chances are that you'll have 192.168.x.y addresses [1].

The next thing to do is to ping the router continuously and see if the
pings go away with Internet connectivity. If they do, try to ping *his*
address.

What sort of ethernet card is he using?

Now for the stuff you were dreading ... the command lines. Any chance
that you can e-mail these to him?

If he can run
ping 192.168.0.254
continuously (replacing the IP address with his gateway address) he
should get:
64 bytes from 192.168.0.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.623 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.254: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.671 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.254: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.620 ms
If the link drops, he should get:
>From 192.168.0.250 icmp_seq=6 Destination Host Unreachable
>From 192.168.0.250 icmp_seq=7 Destination Host Unreachable
>From 192.168.0.250 icmp_seq=8 Destination Host Unreachable

He may be able to find out what sort (brand, driver) of ethernet card he
has through the System menu -> Administration -> Device Manager. If not,
can you post the results of
lspci

Thanks,

James.

[1] Or another of the "reserved" IP addresses. There are three
netblocks: I've never seen routers set to use anything other than
192.168.x.y.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Just remember:
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | 1 virus         3 viriii
                      | 2 virii         4 viriv
                      |     -- Matt S Trout




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