The Thailand expat forum for Travel, Lifestyle and Fun.

AntRobertson

Have been having a problem with my internet and/or torrents and was hoping someone may be able to help. Basically for the last couple of nights I have set downlaods and left them running but in the morning instead of having been completed at some point there's a connection error and they 'stall'. I think that's more a symptom than the actual problem however.

Usually on the odd occasion my internet goes down one or the other (or sometimes both) of the 'ADSL' and 'INTERNET' lights on my modem goes out, flashes, or otherwise acts erratically.

However in this instance that's not occuring; it just seems to hit a point where it doesn't register either uTorrent or any web browsers I open (I just get that usual page cannot be found thing). Most of the time resetting the modem and/or rebooting the PC seems to cure it temporarily, but if I leave it for any length of time (e.g. d/l'ing torrents) and return it's the same old story.

Any ideas?

__________________
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Butterfly

ADSL modem needs frequent rebooting, above all when you are doing torrents, something about their routing cache being "jammed" after too many incoming connections from the torrents

AntRobertson

^This is a new thing though Butters, maybe only in the last 4 or 5 days.

Typically what I do is set my downloads on at night and then off again (presuming they're completed) first thing in the morning. Been doing that since forever and no problem up until now.

Butterfly

depends, you could have a few good seeds and a good connection, more peers connecting to your router, hence jamming it more quickly

the improvement in sharing might cause this

AntRobertson

So what you're saying is that it could be because me connection's too good? Bloody typical!

Butterfly

^ yeah something like that

it happens to me a few times, eventually I had to do a reboot because I had too many connection, only sharing at high speed, but not downloading. A quick reboot and I was downloading again.

AntRobertson

Actually you could well be on to something there now that I think about it - I do have more torrents than usual running.

The reboot has been working as I say but then stopping again later. I'll remove some of the torrents and try again, cheers.

Marmite the Dog

Most of these problems seem to be caused by crappy modems. If you want a modem that can handle doing its job properly, Baldrick has mentioned one a couple of times, but you'll have to do a search as I can't remember which one it is.

AntRobertson

^Ta. Don't know what mine is, just the one they gave me when we subscribed (Belkin, maybe?), so wouldn't surprise me if it's kack.

lom

Belkin is not a real manufacturer, only a label being put on cheap shit electronics made by companies who doesn't want to market it themselves.

lom

I'm sure your problem will go away after doing that.
Too many connections through the router and its connection tracker will eat up all the routers RAM.

AntRobertson

Ok, well that sounds like a quick, simple and easy fix - will do that tonight (just pausing them should be enough right?).

Thanks for the help all.

Begbie

Make sure you have a static IPaddress

Butterfly

not sure if there are any good out there, tried a few and they all seem to suffer from that same cache overrun bug in one way or the other. I have NETGEAR and LINKSYS, same problem even with the BIOS flash that claim to fix the bug.

Butterfly

but they look very stylish though

Marmite the Dog

I have a simple, 1 port crappy Chinese piece of shit, but it works really well (at the moment).

My sexy looking Zytel piece of shit will never get plugged in again. Absolute rubbish.

Thetyim

Get a Linksys WRT54GL and a decent modem.
Then get Baldrick to talk you through loading decent software and setting it up.
Sorted out all my problems.

I had a TOT modem/router before and it was fine for surfing but couldn't handle torrents

AntRobertson

When you say that do you mean it was slow or you were having the same problems as me?

I'm an utter pleb when it comes to all this modem stuff but - current problems notwithstanding - I've been happy enough with the speed of downloads etc. Never hurt to have them faster obviously though.

Thetyim

It wasn't as fast as my Linksys, the speed was acceptable.
It just couldn't handle lots of connections which might have been hardware or software limitations.
It would just shut down ports on its own.
I thought that TOT were playing silly buggers but all my problems disappeared when I got a new modem.
The software is as important as the hardware and I think the Linksys WRT54GL is the only router that allows you to load any software you like.

lom

The major deciding factor of how many connections your router can cope with is the amount of RAM in the router and a fast router cpu will also help a bit.

Splitting the modem-router cpu load by having a separate modem and a separate router increases your connection stability.
The separate modem can then do what it is best at, keeping your ADSL line at maximum performance.

Your router may have more than 1 LAN port ie a built in switch with 4 LAN ports.
Don't bugger the router cpu with LAN-to-LAN traffic, use an external switch instead, they are cheap.
This is especially important if you are running router RAM and cpu intensive connections like torrents and online gaming where you easily can end up with thousands of connections for the conntracker to handle.
Then try, at the same time, to copy some huge file or stream some HD-video from one LAN computer to another, you really don't want that additional traffic through the routers internal switch.

Cisco-Linksys is a good router brand but there are others as well.
D-Link currently has some of the most powerful home routers on the market.
Netgear is also an ok mfg.
The WRT54GL is becoming a bit obsolete now, still good, great value for money but its specification is not up where today's routers are.
It is popular for running 3rd party software but other routers can also do that.

There are basically 3 different 3rd party router softwares, Tomato which covers 25-30 different routers, OpenWRT/Kamikaze covering around 100 different routers, and DD-WRT covering around 200 different routers.