Progress On The Internet Front

Warning! Geek Posting Ahead

OK, to recap: a few weeks ago we decided to move the computer to the upstairs office. There wasn't any phone jack in the office so I splurged on a wireless router and network card so we didn't have to run cables through the floor from the basement to the office and if we ever got another computer it could share the same network connection.

Well, I got the wireless connection working but we had periodic problems. To be precise, two problems that appeared to be related at first but as the weeks and investigations proceeded turned out to be separate.

The first problem was the most glaring and frustrating. Every once in a while the network connection would drop from the computer to the router. It would usually immediately pick back up again so this didn't bother internet browsing too much, but it was really frustrating trying to play Eve Online and having the game client shut down whenever it happened. Sometimes it would only occur once an hour, other times every four-five minutes. I tried upgrading the firmware in the router (Upgraded Router Firmware) and a nearly disastrous incorrect hotfix from Microsoft (I Borked My Computer!) but nothing I tried seemed to work. There was lots of articles describing my problem but so many different solutions and none would work for me.

Finally late last week I found another tech article that described my problem but with a new solution I had not read before. Basically it described how the Auto Transfer rate of the router caused the network card and the router to require new handshakes during high traffic requests and this could cause the disconnects. By changing the transfer rate to be fixed at the highest possible the disconnects might stop. I tried this Thursday night and noticed an immediate improvement; only once has there been a network disconnect but that was when the router had decided to revert back to automatic (that's another minor issue). After a weekend of playing Eve and browsing the internet, no network disconnects. I'm hopeful that I've hit on the solution for the first problem.

The second problem was more insidious and hard to pin down. It couldn't be described in a one liner to search on Google (unlike "wireless router dropping connection") so as I investigated it I feared I was going to have to actually contact someone for support through a newsgroup or support line. Having provided support through such methods, I knew it could be a long frustrating process.

The problem is thus: periodically while browsing the internet the websites would stop being found. No website would come up anymore and it usually required a reboot of the PC to get back to browsing. But the weird thing was that Eve had no problems whatsoever connecting at the same time this was happening. So for all intents and purposes we had connection to the router and the internet service provider, but our internet browser could not, well, browse.

I figured it had to be something in the router or something on the computer. I tried several different setups for the wireless networking including setting up the wireless network using the D-Link software instead of the Windows XP software, but nothing seemed to work. After a while the websites would just stop coming. I reviewed the router setup over and over again, tried different security protocols, timeouts, network names, but nothing worked.

Then late Saturday while fighting with this problem once again I was looking at the router setup for the umpteenth time and paused on a page I had blown through many times. An innocuous setting that never clicked in my head before suddenly jumped out. "DNS Cache Relay Enabled". This triggered the pieces of the puzzle in my head to fall into a new configuration and things became a lot clearer as I read the help about this little one line setting.

The DNS Cache Relay is a feature of the router that attempts to save milliseconds off of a HTTP request. You see, DNS stands for Domain Name Server and these things are the machines on the internet that translate a website URL into a computer friendly address to find the desired webpage, picture, email, etc. What this DNS Cache Relay was doing was storing the information on the router so that requests could go directly to the web servers instead of to the DNS machines on the internet first.

I speculated that if the DNS Cache on the router became inoperable during regular browsing it would cause the issue we were having but Eve would not be affected because it connected directly to the game server without requiring a DNS lookup. The browsing problem resolved through the reboot because the PC would disconnect and reconnect to the router causing the DNS Cache to reset. It seemed like a workable theory so like any good scientist, I put it to the test by disabling the feature and browsing once again.

For the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday the internet has been at my beckon call. No browsing stoppages and no network disconnects. This morning I Googled "DLINK DNS Cache Relay" and turned up this posting that confirms my suspicions that I may have solved the second problem.

If true, it should be clear sailing from here on out.