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Sarkie
join:2007-09-03
Brooklet, GA
| Kinda new at this, but I'm having an issue with PPPoE
Right, so I'm not exactly technically inclined as it were. Or a better way of putting it is I'm more or less a newbie at it. Anyways, I'm using Bulloch Net, way out in the boonies (Basically, I've got a choice between them or Dialup at the moment) and supposedly their upgrading to fiber optics -which would be cool- but for the time being their running me on a PPPoE DSL connection. For the most part it doesn't give me too much hassle, but it goes down about 12 times a day. Usually, I'll have a good run of about 2-5 hours and then it'll repeatedly go down for about an hour. (I stare at my status watching my IP change again and again...5-10 times on an average crash-fest.) What I want to know is if that's normal. Expected. I called the ISP and they connected me to a tech who basically talked to me about idle time on a connect-on-demand.(I've got it set to just keep the connection alive.) So they aren't helping me. Anyways, can someone offer me some insight on this? | |
DracoFelis
Premium
join:2003-06-15
| said by Sarkie  :I called the ISP and they connected me to a tech who basically talked to me about idle time on a connect-on-demand.(I've got it set to just keep the connection alive.) So they aren't helping me. PPPoE DSL connections generally will give you a different IP each time you connect (unless you pay extra to your ISP for a "static connection"). And yes, some ISPs have this nasty habit of dropping the connection when it is "idle" for even a few minutes (even just sitting reading a web page counts as "idle", because no actual internet traffic is going on). 
About the best counter-defense I've discovered, is to setup your hardware to do some (small) internet traffic every minute or three (thus preventing your line from ever being "idle"). And it doesn't even have to be a lot of traffic, just some small traffic to somewhere on the internet. For example, the traffic of my VoIP adapters doing a "register" every few minutes is enough traffic (but uses practically no bandwidth). And some routers also have a "keep alive" option that can send out a packet every so often. If all else fails, you could even have your PC run a script that sends a "ping" command to some internet address (maybe www.google.com?) every few minutes. The idea being, is that you aren't trying to send a lot of internet traffic (no sense wasting bandwidth), but you are trying to send a little traffic every few minutes (so that your connection hopefully never "times out").
Of course, even that approach isn't a "cure", it will just make things a little better. Because even with that approach, I've found that some (bad) days my connection will still go down multiple times during the day (getting a new IP each time I reconnect). Thankfully, this approach means that I can sometimes squat on a single connection (and therefore a single IP) for several days (or sometimes even a few weeks) at a time. | |
Sarkie
join:2007-09-03
Brooklet, GA | reply to Sarkie
Eh, my router's set up to keep it alive. It just crashes. Constantly. Like I said, or think I did, ever 2-5 hours it'll just randomly crash about 12 times in a row then start working again. It's really odd. | |
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