So! Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and/or Sunday are Karazhan raiding nights in my World of Warcraft guild. I'd been away to Michigan to visit Iaian, and then crunched college (still am, because I keep putting stuff off because I'm sick of school already) and I wasn't able to get any fun time raiding done. That all changed last night! Signed up for the raid, logged in at 7pm sharp, and we downed the first boss with only 9 of our 10 people. I sensed an awesome run ahead of us! But then... Disaster struck.
My internet connection died... Repeatedly, no matter what I did. My brother and I play WoW at the same time all the time! It's not something we ever think about... We just do it! "Hey, wanna help me with this quest?" "Sure thing! I'll sign on in a second." It just works and we don't think about it not working. But last night, something happened and I don't know what it was.
The symptoms are something I've been having problems with a lot, but not nearly as bad as last night. Basically, the DSL modem stops responding to internal connections, and, as such, I can't tell if it's still getting information from the internet, but it doesn't forward any of that stuff to my router. It would crash, I would reset the modem and re-initiate the router's network cards so it would detect the new IPs faster than just waiting. Log in to WoW, and... BOOM. Rinse and repeat... For nearly half an hour, every time I reset the modem and reconnected to WoW, it would die without exception. I could visit websites just fine before, but as soon as we both logged into WoW, the modem froze up. I restarted my Linux router, I restarted my laptop, I shut down my file server (it runs torrents) just in case some stray connections were bogging it down. Nothing. So I finally decided that it wasn't going to work anyway, so I bypassed the router and plugged the modem directly into Vista and... Perfect quality. I was able to keep a connection going for more than 10 seconds. This has happened before... Some weird hiccup in the ether that would kill the modem and I'd just reset it a few times and it's work just fine. So, hey, I thought that it might work now! So I plug the router back in and we both log on and BOOM. Death... Again. Then I just said, hey... We can't do this. I'm the healer, so I was the lucky guy to keep playing the game with the modem feeding directly into my laptop and I played the night without a single other hitch. Nothing at all. In fact, I started watching other people disconnect randomly and we decided to stop because we couldn't get anything done.
So... What is up?! I was the definition of "angry" last night, and I'm fed up with coaxing my network along like it's about to fall apart at any moment. This all started a long time ago with the AT&T merger... Or, at least, I thought it was. I had also completely reworked my router back then, and upgraded it to a newer version of Debian. I'm now convinced that my router is the problem, but I have no idea how, and it seems to be completely random.
I now interrupt this post to bring you an announcement. As of 1:16pm, right now, my network has once again crashed due to, what I believe to be, excessive connections and/or traffic. I am currently downloading a torrent of the Ubuntu Server 7.10 ISO. It had a consistent speed of 150KB/s for 25% of the download and then the network crashed. (It shockingly managed to recover on its own without my intervention and it downloading again.) What is going on?!
I downloaded LOST last night without a single problem, except it was incredibly slow. My connection has a theoretical limit of 160KB/s and I only really get 150KB/s out of it at any given time, but only if I'm very lucky. As in... My practical limit is 150KB/s, but something keeps it from going anywhere near that high. In my experience this usually occurs during or some time after I download a torrent, or do something that either opens a lot of connections or moves a lot of information. Moving from LAN system to LAN system, behind the modem, is unharmed, so it's not my LAN infrastructure. It's either the modem or the router.
Another thing I noticed... LOST, last night, was downloading at 30KB/s the entire time, spiking to 100KB/s very rarely. TW downloaded it in about 10 minutes, and it took me 2 hours. It shouldn't be taking me that long, even with my slower connection. My limit is 150KB/s, but even with an idle network, I can rarely reach that high. As I mentioned earlier, I'm downloading the Ubuntu Server at sustained 150KB/s... However, instead of XP and uTorrent, I'm using LiveCD Ubuntu 7.08 and the built-in GNOME torrent client. There is something very fishy going on here. This speed increase could be related to something in XP, and it probably is, but I'm not sure, since I used torrents on Vista at my friend's house and it was sustaining well over 100KB/s.
Conclusion? Router functions are broken. Solution? Rebuild it... I really don't want to, and I have a lot of custom compiled applications I play with sometimes, but none of that's important if my router doesn't work properly. But here's what I'm thinking... Install a version of Ubuntu. Desktop or server? I haven't decided, yet. (Give me an opinion, if you know about this and even decided to read this far, because most people don't.) I want a GUI, so even if I install Server, I'll be installing the UBUNTU-DESKTOP package afterwards. Actually, that's probably exactly what I'll do. Then, if I don't need the GUI, I just won't start it, and if it decided to start automatically? So much the better. Then I can use VNC to navigate the UI and SSH to poke around the guts like I do. The fact that Linux torrents run this fast (and always have) tells me that maybe I should be doing my P2P stuff directly from my router. I'll also be looking into dedicated router software for Linux, instead of using some lame IPTables script, which could very well be the source of all my problems, but I think Linux router software takes advantage of IPTables, so it's probably not IPTables itself that's causing the problems.
Anyone have any input or suggestions?