I wish I never told anyone I worked or studied tech. Especially older family and friends, because their requests for help are relentless.
A lot of friends are chill with it, and I don’t mind doing a little bit of help, but sometimes people are who are OFFENDED when you don’t want to help. In the same way a contractor friend won’t remodel your home for free, I am not going to fix every single issue you have with your computer for free. I’m happy to give advice, but i’m not going to work for hours without pay to fix everything.
I’ve been using Linux as an out. “Oh you’re having a windows problem? I got rid of windows 10 years ago, so I can’t really help you with that”.
More or less my response to anyone with an Apple computer.
My mum just does not believe me when I say ‘I don’t know, I don’t use this software’. When I say I have no idea how to get word to do what she needs because I’ve used nothing but latex for close to ten years, clearly I’m just trying to get out of helping, right?
She’s not the only one, either. They always expect you to figure it out. Especially egregious: I didn’t customize my CV for a teaching job. It said I can code a bit. Guess who became the windows support for the older teachers?
I mean… they’re not wrong. If you’ve got the knack and they know it, there’s nothing you can do about it.
I do the same thing but leverage networking instead of Linux.
“Sorry, I dont actually know much about computers, but let me know if you want advice about port trunking or configuring a VLAN”
Oh I have questions. I’m not going to ask because thread and because I’m smart enough to know it’s not an easy problem, but that sure wouldn’t be the escape you think it is if we were friends lol.
I hate networking issues. But I’ve replaced every foot of cabling, every networking device, and my ISP and I still get intermittent 2 minute network drops a few times a day. I am to the point of suspecting a rogue smart device is doing something malicious. I need a networking guru friend to annoy.
Disconnect everything physically plugged into the router and change the WiFi password.
Add your devices back one at a time until the dropouts start again.
If they start immediately then you’re looking at a modem/router issue (most likely). If they start after adding a device, remove that device and check the network stability again.
When the network drops happen is your modem showing that it’s still connected to your ISP or is the modem in a disconnected state?
It can be hours between dropouts. Not saying that’s not a really good idea, but I’ll have to add stuff in groups. It would take me months just adding one device a day.
Since I got my new fiber connection a few months ago, I couldn’t say whether the modem stays connected or not. The cable modem dropped connection, but Comcast swore it wasn’t any problem on their end. Until I got fiber everything was self-owned inside the house and everything was replaced at least once: wiring, cable modem, router/wireless AP.
Honestly since switching to fiber I haven’t done the deep troubleshooting I had with my modem, and I suppose there could’ve even been a couple of issues and switching to fiber fixed one but not the other. Some symptoms are the same: my phone will stop working with anything Internet until I disconnect or wait a while and my PS5 will complain that it has lost connection. Other symptoms are different: I haven’t noticed my white noise streams stopping abruptly in the middle of the night, my work meetings don’t suddenly drop.
It’s almost like before the whole internet would drop and now only DNS will, so existing connections work fine (like through vpn, existing streams) but new requests like refreshing Lemmy won’t work for a couple of minutes.
Sorry, it wasn’t until you asked that I started thinking maybe the symptoms had slightly changed when I switched to fiber because the most obvious symptoms are the same. I need to do more investigation on my end. But thanks for asking the question that made me give that some thought.
Hey, it’s ok. It’s troubleshooting and that’s free flowing.
So you’ve switched ISP’s from cable to fiber and the issue persists?
To a degree, yes. Like I was saying, some of the symptoms do seem to have gone away, but I do still have what appears to be intermittent loss of domain name resolution. Maybe I have so many devices phoning home that the service freaks every once in a while.
Unfortunately, now that I’m using the router to handle all of this with the stock firmware, I don’t have as good of logging as I did when I was running all of that on my Pi.
Are you using the same router on the fiber service you used on the cable service?
It was changed at one point, but not at the same time as the service was changed. I went from a nighthawk to an Orbi 3-way mesh probably a year before switching to fiber.
Total shot in the dark knowing basically nothing about the situation, but if your house is over 10 years old and you also have cable internet, you might have a MoCA filter somewhere along the coax line(I’ve seen them installed outside too)
They were installed all over the place to prevent interference between cable TV and cable Internet, but sometimes they cause problems getting a stable internet connection
I’ve replaced all the wiring out to the service box on the outside of the house. At one point I noticed the network drop coincided with a log message that a different IP6 address was trying to take over (or be handed off) DHCP provider (or maybe it was DNS, it’s been a while since I just gave up and accepted it). Then it will apparently timeout and go back to normal and everything comes back up. That’s why the duration is so predictable.
But at the time I was using a raspberry pi running pihole as my DNS/DHCP providers. I gave up and removed it, thinking I had misconfigured something and that was the cause of the issue, but it’s gone and the drops remain. Now I’m just running everything off of my Orbi mesh. And it’s all acting just like it did with my old Nighthawk (which I’ve left up on a different channel to divide up some of the smart device load but before anyone thinks they are interfering, this issue far predates me blowing $500 on a new router mesh that fixed nothing).
My TVs got really pissed off when the pi was hooked up and I wouldn’t let them call home. Maybe it’s one I’d them, but idk. We have probably 100 different smart devices from 20 different vendors between lights, cameras, thermostat, motion sensors, plugs, vacuums, Alexa’s, TVs and phones. I don’t think it’s sheer volume but I can’t rule it out. Having two different WiFi networks ought to lighten the load but idk.
Anyway, I appreciate the stab. It’s a hard problem, and I’m probably up to the task if I really get pissed enough, but as you can tell by everything I’ve done I’ve already been there a couple of times.
Right now the real annoying thing is, when the network drops, my daughter’s school laptop connects to someone’s Xfinity router (to which we don’t have creds) and never goes back to ours when it’s back and it’s administered by the school so I can’t make it forget that damn Xfinity SSID. She knows how to fix it but I think she tries too fast before it’s back up, then just assumes Internet is down despite the fact that I’m 20’ away on a freaking slack huddle for work…
I’m just venting at this point. Thanks, man. Don’t worry about it unless something I’ve said makes it really obvious.
See that’s dangerous though because networks are black magic to most users. Even more so than the computer itself.
I often explain it as though they’re asking an airplane mechanic to fix their Honda Civic. The principals are the same(fuel goes in, rotation comes out) but the machines are so different that doesn’t help much from a practical standpoint
The best antidote against being asked tech questions is not to use standard tech 😄
My out has been unfortunately true. I got into the corporate IT game. I really have no idea what’s going on in the consumer space if it’s not something I personally deal with.
Which means that when someone asks questions about getting a virus or how to do any little task, I tell them that normally I’d wipe and reimage without a second thought, or tell them to call the help desk.
They know I worked at a computer shop so this wouldn’t work 😫
Are those people who would help you out with free professional help, if you needed? Because that’s what it is, in your case.
Solid.
Similar, I take another system I’m familiar with and use it as an excuse. I know how to program a Cisco router, but heck if I know what an iPhone is, I can’t use them at work. Virus? That’s what the help-desk is for. Look, I work with fax machines, telephones, and video conference systems. The platform I work on is so secure that if we mess with it at all, it disables and we have to have them sent back and pay a lot of money to get them fixed, and I’d lose my job.
Granted, if it’s something simple I’ll help, but I’m not about to troubleshoot aunt May’s login issues for Amazon from 300 miles away.