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There were temporary traffic lights on the information superhighway chez IHN this morning, average speed was down to less than one megainternetz per second. I did the usual rebooting of the router and mesh stuff a couple of times, but no joy.
So, I rang the ISP (Shell) and after some back and forth and them running various checks the lady suggested taking all the cables out of the back of the router (power, inbound line, ethernet connection to mesh router), waiting twenty seconds, then plugging them all in again. Hey presto, once everything had powered up again we were screaming along again at the usual mind-blowing ten (I know, count 'em, ten) megainternetz per second. So, problem solved.
Thing is, how does taking the cables out the router and sticking them back in again make any difference when it's powered off? Is it some weird IP/DNS caching thing?
Suspect they say take all the cables out to avoid any confusion about which one might be the actual power cable.
Outside of it being a definite hard shutdown rather than a soft reboot which isn't really, I'd be going with "coincidence."
Either that or they were giving you something to occupy your time for a few minutes whilst they fixed the actual problem at their end.
[i]Suspect they say take all the cables out to avoid any confusion about which one might be the actual power cable.[/i]
Yeah, I wondered that.
[i]Outside of it being a definite hard shutdown rather than a soft reboot which isn’t really,[/i]
This is the thing, when I reboot, it's definitely a 'hard' one - it gets switch off at the plug as the plug is easier to get to than the router.
[i]I’d be going with “coincidence.”
Either that or they were giving you something to occupy your time for a few minutes whilst they fixed the actual problem at their end.[/i]
I think it might have been a variant of this - they'd done some fiddling at their end and wanted me to reboot the router, but for reasons as above they wanted to make sure it was a 'proper' reboot.
Yeah, that would make sense.
I've done it as a stalling tactic, indirectly. From my memoirs:
>>
A chap calls, Dave answers. I forget the details but it was an obscure problem. Dave flags me for assistance.
I advise him to set the customer doing a checkdisk and defrag, then call back if he's still having issues. Dave sceptically asks me "and that'll fix it, will it?" I reply "not even remotely, but it'll buy us some time so I can go research what the actual problem is for when he rings back." Dave is totally on board with this plan.
Dave goes back to the customer. "... so, yeah, type this, then type that, and off you go." "And that will fix it, will it?" asks the customer. "Oh, absolutely!" answers our hero. "Great, thanks, bye!"
The line goes dead. Dave, being Dave, goes "bwa-hah-hahahahah!" in a comedy villain twirling-moustache stylee.
The customer, still on the line goes "ooh!", Dave goes "shit!" and slams the hang-up button.
Congestion on the ISP's LNS/interconnect, reboot means new session presented possibly to an LNS less congested. Typically an ISP will have multiple interconnects from BT, over which BT will present the ISP's customers connections. Sometimes an interconnect can become congested, due to a number of reasons, including things under the ISPs direct control. Dropping the session and re-connecting can mean that BT present the session on a different interconnect, possibly less utilised and/or with some intervention from the ISP.
OR said second reboot was longer than the first and was affective.
Also re-seating ethernet cables not a bad thing to do. Last time I had flaky broadband I rebooted a couple of times which made no difference, then remembered that a couple of days before I'd been moving kit around. Re-plugged the ethernet and all has been fine since.
when I reboot, it’s definitely a ‘hard’ one
Not necessarily. My Vodafone router has a pinhole-sized button recessed inside the back cover that you have to press for 20s.