Router 'breaks' after massive download

[JorgeA]

You may have bad telephone wiring.

Could this be something that flares up only after doing a large download? It doesn't seem to ever happen at other, normal times.

--JorgeA

[RJARRRPCGP]

You may have bad telephone wiring.

Could this be something that flares up only after doing a large download? It doesn't seem to ever happen at other, normal times.

--JorgeA

It can occur randomly.

And symptoms to look for with Internet Explorer, is random and frequent "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" errors.

Edited December 13, 2011 by RJARRRPCGP

[Tripredacus]

You may have bad telephone wiring.

If I am not mistaken, JorgeA has 2 DSL modems, in which an OLDER model is working fine?

If this is the case, the possibility of having degrading wiring may still exist but at this point it would not be a valid thing to troubleshoot.

[JorgeA]

You may have bad telephone wiring.

If I am not mistaken, JorgeA has 2 DSL modems, in which an OLDER model is working fine?

If this is the case, the possibility of having degrading wiring may still exist but at this point it would not be a valid thing to troubleshoot.

Tripredacus,

Nope, I only have one DSL modem (Westell 6100F).

Actually, the replacement modem just arrived, so technically I do have two of them, but I've only ever had one in operation at any given time.

BTW, the new one is also a Westell, but 6100G.

Verizon generously offered to replace the old one for free, but now I'm thinking of keeping both of them (paying for the new one) and running the old one till it really, actually does burn out.

As to the possibility of bad wiring, it's a good idea. While I was on the phone with Verizon tech support, he did check the line and everything was OK

--JorgeA

[allen2]

My 2 cents there:

- a bad phone wiring shouldn't change with time if no one make changes.

- sometimes router needs a hard reboot as some router won't make a real reboot if you just power on and then on.

Also next time you get the problem, you should try at least the following (from a command prompt) :

- nslookup the unreachable website address for example :

nslookup www.msfn.org

and if it doesn't work then the problem is that you can't reach a working dns for this website.

- try a traceroute to the destination: if using windows,

 tracert -d www.msfn.org 

and you might be able to see where it is dropping the packets. Of course, it is good to have a traceroute made when all is working and compare as sometimes firewalls drop the packets when they reach or almost reach the destination.

- if you had problem at the dns step, you could try a traceroute to see if you can reach them: get your dns servers from the result of

 ipconfig /all 

and then do a traceroute with the dns server ips (one at time of course).

- you can also try using pathping instead of tracert. The tracert -d option is recommended to disable ip resolution when tracing and get a faster trace. A similar option exist for pathping and is -n.