Having to re-activate every few days

R

RatX

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Hi all,

Having a funny with my 100 Mbps Octotel/Afrihost fibre line. Every couple of days things get flaky - my TP-Link Archer A6 router shows "poor network" under Internet status, DNS gets erratic and even if it is working, many pages just time out when loading. My work IPSec VPN remains connected and functional throughout.

If I hop onto my router and change the MAC address of the WAN interface to force re-activation (prompt for mobile number + OTP), everything almost immediately goes back to normal. Pages load, speed tests ok, no problems. I don't have to reboot the router or power cycle the ONT.

To my mind this rules out any fibre or general connectivity issues, but rather an issue with my account on Afrihost's side. I've tried navigating their helpdesk on this one, but end up in an endless 1st line script quagmire (ping/traceroute/log to Octotel/check router). Anybody encountered anything similar and got any pointers on how I can get it resolved?

Cheers.
 
RatX said:
Hi all,

Having a funny with my 100 Mbps Octotel/Afrihost fibre line. Every couple of days things get flaky - my TP-Link Archer A6 router shows "poor network" under Internet status, DNS gets erratic and even if it is working, many pages just time out when loading. My work IPSec VPN remains connected and functional throughout.

If I hop onto my router and change the MAC address of the WAN interface to force re-activation (prompt for mobile number + OTP), everything almost immediately goes back to normal. Pages load, speed tests ok, no problems. I don't have to reboot the router or power cycle the ONT.

To my mind this rules out any fibre or general connectivity issues, but rather an issue with my account on Afrihost's side. I've tried navigating their helpdesk on this one, but end up in an endless 1st line script quagmire (ping/traceroute/log to Octotel/check router). Anybody encountered anything similar and got any pointers on how I can get it resolved?

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Hi,

We don't use an account for our DHCP clients and grant leases based on mac addresses. Once activated the mac address is mapped to your package. I would not advise to change the mac address on the wan interface as that would cause mapping issues and won;t resolved the issue at all.

If you can send some trace routes and speedtests for us to see where the issue is happening we can investigate and resolve the issue you are experiencing.
 
Thank you, when the issue is present it is not possible to do a speed test, as the sites don't resolve and pages don't load. Traceroute gets past my router, but I have to wait for the issue to re-appear to be able to check how far. Changing MAC address to force re-activation is the only fix that has worked so far, consistently (I alternate between the router's physical MAC address and my PC MAC address, as soon as re-activated the line goes back to normal).
 
RatX said:
Thank you, when the issue is present it is not possible to do a speed test, as the sites don't resolve and pages don't load. Traceroute gets past my router, but I have to wait for the issue to re-appear to be able to check how far. Changing MAC address to force re-activation is the only fix that has worked so far, consistently (I alternate between the router's physical MAC address and my PC MAC address, as soon as re-activated the line goes back to normal).
Click to expand...

It might just be a coincidence that re-activating the line with a new mac address resolves the issue. It might be an issue with the line. It's been an issue for some time where client observe 100% loss for a couple of seconds and then the connection works again.
 
No, definitely not, every 5 days to a week I have to repeat the process. Work VPN remains connected and functional throughout.
 
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