Recently, for over two weeks, my Internet has been sporadically going down; sometimes at hourly intervals at 2 minutes and sometimes the internet stays down at hours at a time. So even with the tech guy coming in on Friday, I decided to swap my modem beforehand, to eliminate the possibility that it was all the modems fault. I didn’t want the guy to swap my modem and tell me that it is now fixed, and to have to call them again when the internet goes down again.
I suspected that with telus installing their fibre optics downstairs in my apartment complex that Telus doing something untoward with the Shaw customers.
Sure enough after installing the new modem, the internet service goes down, so hopefully my Shaw Tech guy will catch the Telus guys red-handed on Friday with my shaw cable dangling from the outlet or in Telus hands.
Now one nice thing about my whole setup is that everything in my apartment has been router proof. Swapping out a router doesn’t require any changes in all my electronic IPs. I have a dlink switch that connects everything that are on ethernet wires and an Apple Airport Extreme and Airport Express to handle the AC Wifi. The Airport Express is used as a bridge to the Airport Extreme for my wired ethernet 100. This is to separate all the ethernet 100 from the gigabit, otherwise my whole network is throttles down to 100. Yes, this was tested that 100Mb ethernet gadgets last year and it does slow down your gigabit ethernet network, when connected.
The only thing the Shaw router does is to provide the internet and DHCP. One day I might even move the DHCP over to my Airport Extreme and have the router act as a bridge.
Alright, here are are my current findings.
My Cloud gen 2, on the old router, has been, pretty much sleeping at days at a time. I have a script that I use that turns off everything including the Cron. One Cloud is externally cloud accessible, meaning that I can access it from my iPhone, iPad etc. The other cloud is simply my clone backup with no cloud access.
I suspect that the WD techs do read the forums as over the years, a lot of our ideas that we discuss on the forums gets implemented because when I had to change my clouds over to a static IP (was using reserve perviously) I noticed a clickable assignment for DNS to be Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. This DNS assignment wasn’t there a couple of years ago until I posted up my problems with DNS on how I was using google DNS and Open DNS for speed. I am not saying that it was my idea nor that WD is doing things based on what I post, but yeah…
Anyways, do be careful with different DNS servers on your Clouds versus the rest of your electronics with static or DHCP because…
if your cloud is using google DNS servers and the rest of your network does not because of the DHCP assigning all DNS servers to 192.168.0.1, you will get… “yourcloud.local” not found, that is if your router internet goes down.
If you point everything at your router as the DNS server you can still resolve your local names, even when the internet is out, your router is still theoretically working.
However if your Cloud has the google DNS servers, it would attempt to resolve any DNS outside your network which can cause problems if your router doesn’t have internet connection. Last year my cloud would lock with no response on my Mac and I kept thinking that I had a hard drive error on my Cloud.
I don’t know how many has read that post but my cloud had OpenDNS servers and when my internet was out (which I didn’t know that), I would connect with my cloud and you can see the directory entries, but if you clicked on a movie to stream, the movie would start and suddenly freeze… This happened for most files until the internet came back on. Thus at that time I came to a conclusion that my Cloud was going bad.
All this had to do with DNS server entries on your static IP assignments.
Ok… so that is one of the problems…
So despite my script working (cloud sleeping) for almost two years now with no changes, but new router the cloud kept waking up through out the night. I woke up this morning to find it chattering away… click… click… click… click…
I even took out the two port forwarding assignments by WD, WD2Go and WD2goSSL. I don’t even know how they got inserted so quickly after I just attached my router, but there they were… I’m guessing that every time I access the Cloud Dashboard, the Cloud option is checked and an entry is made to the router asap; much the same way they keep turning on my scans and cron, even though I turned them off and killed the cron; all services on the gen2 clouds keeps turning back on, including the port forwarding options.
Remember that my network is totally, well mostly, quiet. No PC with mapped cloud drives. I do have a MAC mini that does have the cloud drive mapped but the mac is sleeping and this has always been the case for the last two years. No DLNA.
Now it could be the fact that my internet is going up and down and… the fact that one of my drives is cloud accessible which attempts to connect to WD every time my internet connects, which then turns on my cloud… but my backup Cloud that has Cloud settings OFF is also waking up despite the fact that it never use to.
Also, before the router swap, my internet was going on and off for the last two weeks and I’m fairly sure that my Clouds slept through all that activity. The main difference though is that my clouds are now really static versus reserved. One other thing is that my DNS servers are pointing at 192.168.0.1 instead of Google DNS. However when I did reserve, my DNS servers might have been pointing at Open DNS assigned on the router itself.
Did everyone get all that?
If my clouds had OpenDNS servers before, then when my internet went down, my clouds would do nothing because no internet, no resolution.
If my clouds are now using 192.168.0.1 which points to the router and the internet goes down, my router reboots, the DNS servers are then trying to resolve itself since it is 192.168.0.1, my Cloud wakes up…
This is all speculations… and my internet seems stable today… I hope…
but your video doesn’t have sound until your modem started to growl when it booted up. If it is a timed event, it really has to do with some external event?