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I just picked up a new wireless router and I am seeing the following odd behavior and I'd like to understand what could cause such a thing:

After having internet connectivity through the wireless router for several minutes, new connections hang in all web-browsers "resolving host" but other applications that have connectivity maintain it (ichat, etc). Once I renew my DHCP lease (and the same local ip address is assigned,) connectivity is back to normal (for the next several minutes anyway.)

5 Answers 5

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Perhaps it's a DNS issue, however your router is handling it. Quite often, the router will host a proxy or lightweight resolver that you will send all of your requests to.

First, see if you can ping your router's IP when this problem crops up. That'll tell you if it is connectivity or name resolution.

Second, if you can ping, change your computers DNS to point to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS servers) and see if this gets you around it. If so, then it is certainly your router's DNS system.

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  • Cannot ping--renewing dhcp lease still works though
    – jpwagner
    Sep 10, 2010 at 20:28
  • The other question would be if your router responds to ping under normal circumstances. If not, it might be set not to respond to ICMP packets.
    – nhinkle
    Sep 11, 2010 at 5:38
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While this could be a problem with the onboard DNS on your new device, what is odd is that renewing your DHCP lease fixes the problem, which would not make sense unless the device is restarting its DNS on every new lease, or only gives access to its DNS to "valid" leases and your lease is somehow getting invalidated after a few minutes. Changing the DNS should fix the issue regardless, and in addition to the suggested 8.8.8.8 you can use 8.8.4.4 (also google) or both 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (OpenDNS).

You should also investigate in the configuration of your device to see whether it is handing out itself as the DNS server for new DHCP leases, and if so, if there are boxes to put DNS servers that it should use instead. Rather than configuring individual devices to use Google or OpenDNS, you could then configure the device to hand out those DNS servers instead of itself.

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On the router, I bumped back the primary to secondary and added 8.8.8.8 as the primary DNS server and did not see the issue for the rest of the day.

Would this indicate a problem on the ISP side?

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  • jpwagner: you should use the comments system, not add another answer to reply. Also, it probably means your ISP's DNS server is overworked, I've had to do the same.
    – Roy Rico
    Sep 10, 2010 at 22:32
  • Maybe not right paradigm as the above is not a comment on any specific answer. Also, if you comment on this thread, are you replying to my comment or my answer to my answer or the original post (ie cannot comment on comment.)
    – jpwagner
    Sep 10, 2010 at 23:22
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Any chance you are running a P2P-type application? If you are and it is behaving very aggressively, then it may be an overload situation which bogs things down until a reset (DHCP drop and renewal) occurs and then the cycle runs its course again...

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Wireless DHCP leases are typically 24 hour in most Home Routers. which you can check the lease time you have that address from the DHCP server. Unless its a VERY short lease time like you said in minutes, it is a problem with your DHCP settings on your Router. If so, press the reset button on the router and put a password on your WiFI

ipconfig /all

If the lease a normal 24 hour lease or something more normal/useable assigned from your router. I would point the finger PC. Something causing it to request a new lease. rouge app or some free network tool you might have installed.

DNS, I would be less worried about than DSN, unless he can Ping 8.8.8.8 but can't ping google.com

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