Troubleshooting Internet Connection Issues

If you haven’t already read our post about why your router often loses connection and requires a reboot, we recommend reading it here. This post looks at various ways to understanding why your internet doesn’t work.

So you always have to reboot your router, and the thought suddenly crosses your mind of “why does this keep happening?!” Well here are some steps you can take to help answer that question and determine if there are steps you can take to make your connection better permanently:

Determine if you have internet connection

• You can check internet connection by ping a known IP Address outside of your local network. We suggest pinging 8.8.8.8, which is Google’s DNS server. That has been proven to be highly reliable. Open a command prompt on your computer and type “ping 8.8.8.8” (without the quotes) and see if your packets make it through or not. If you are able to successfully ping an external IP address, then technically your internet connection is working. If the ping fails, then your internet is not working. If you find that your ping succeeds, move onto the next step of “Perform a manual DNS Lookup”. If the ping itself fails, try a few other website URL’s and assuming they all fail you may need to take that issue up with your ISP…

Perform a manual DNS Lookup

• This will test your ability to lookup IP Addresses by URL (i.e. www.example.com). On Windows, open a command prompt and type “nslookup www.google.com” (without the quotes) and see if you get back one or more IP Addresses associated with that domain name / URL. On Linux or Mac you may need to use “digg www.google.com” instead. If you’re able to successfully resolve domains/URLs to IP addresses then continue to the next check of “Telnet Ports”. If your DNS lookups fail, you can try a few different things. Try doing ipconfig /all in your Windows prompt (ifconfig in Linux) and look for the IP addresses of your DNS servers. Try to ping your DNS servers directly to check their connectivity. If you find them to be the source of the issue. You can set your router to always utilize Google’s DNS servers rather than the DNS servers that provide ng Your ISP. Just go into your router’s settings and set its DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. That should resolve a DNS server reliability problem.

Use Telnet to determine port availability

• If you can ping external IP addresses AND you can lookup IP Addresses from their domain names but still can’t access things through you browser or another service, try this step. Sometimes an ISP may restrict access to certain services in attempts to throttle internet connection. They do so by blocking the ports that these services use. Port 80 and port 443 deliver webpages with the HTTP service. Start by ensuring telnet is enabled on your computer (read more about Telnet here, including how to enable https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-telnet-2626026). Try to open a Telnet connection to your domain name of choice. By typing in your command prompt “telnet www.google.com 80” and “telnet www.google.com 443” (without the quotes). If the Telnet connection succeeds, those ports are not blocked. The Telnet connection is only useful to see if it can be established. Once established, the website would not listen to Telnet commands on those ports. So no need to go anything else with the Telnet connection other than use it to see if it can be established. This test will let you know if the connection will allow you to pass through your ISP or not. If you can ping IP addresses directly and also lookup DNS records, but these ports are not available. Then that likely means that your ISP is intentionally blocking them. Constantly resetting your router may be the only solution for this problem. Other than asking the ISP to stop doing this (which they probably won’t if they’re trying to throttle customers).

Our Keep Connect product will perform all these checks automatically while monitoring your internet connection. Reset your router when loss of internet is detected. It will also text you when it resets and also why it performed a reset. For more information, see https://www.johnson-creative.com/keepconnect