Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 22:20 Post subject: Odd, seemingly random DNS-related problems on my R7000
Hello, this is my first post so hopefully I've put it in the right place. I've tried searching for similar issues but I've never experienced anything like this bug before so I'm not even sure what to search for besides vague DNS problems.
I've got a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 that I installed DD-WRT on so I could use the YAMON plugin. The installation was about 2-3 months ago and everything has been working fine up until two weeks ago. The router will randomly go into some sort of limited connectivity mode and cannot be connected to. Sometimes it'll happen twice a day, sometimes a day or so will pass without any problems at all. The symptoms I've noted are:
* On a wired connection, the browser will stop loading webpages and displays the typical "cannot resolve dns" message
* On wireless, both the 2.4 and 5 networks can't be connected to. It just hangs forever as far as I can tell.
* I can no longer access the router via the browser at 192.168.1.1, it just says that it refuses to connect.
* Internet connectivity is not completely lost - certain services like Steam voice chat will still work perfectly fine. There also seems to be at least one device on the network that retains its internet connection since my roommates have been able to finish online games when these issues start. The connection definitely behaves oddly on that machine however.
* Rebooting the router always fixes the issue. I've only tried hard reboots by disconnecting power, not sure if a soft reboot works.
The router configuration and other details about my setup:
* YAMON plugin is installed and has not been modified since install
* Initially I used Google's DNS, but have switched back and forth between that and OpenDNS when DNS issues occur.
* I configured the router for WAN access about 3 weeks ago, primarily so I could SSH into some of my home machines. I followed standard security rules like changing the default SSH port and password-protecting the info page.
* I setup DDNS through NoIP for about a week but disabled it as a debugging attempt.
* There's usually 10-16 devices connected to the network, usually wired but a few are wireless
Debugging steps I've tried so far:
* Switching between Google's DNS and OpenDNS. The issue still occurs at seemingly the same frequency between the two.
* Disabling the NoIP DDNS service. The issue still occurs at seemingly the same frequency.
* I have NOT done a factory reset because I didn't want to spend time re-configuring everything if there's an easier solution I didn't know about. Also, if I don't understand anything about the issue, I feel like a factory reset will just delay the issue coming back, not actually fix it.
How should I go about debugging this issue? It occurs so randomly that I'm not really sure where to start.
