Odd Problem... "Internet Access" but "You are offline" every ~24 hours

[Ashton]

I've got a weird problem that starts and stops randomly... My desktop and my mother's desktop (but not my server, either of our laptops, Echo, Xbox 360, phones, etc...) will randomly start every 24ish hours (always at night but at different times each day) stops being able to access the internet, despite windows saying we have an active internet connection and network diagnostics finding zero problems. Webpages will fail to load, the browser will say I'm Offline, Games will fail to connect to any servers, etc... then I reboot, and it works fine for ~24 hours and then I have to reboot again.

I've run virus scans (both from within the drive and by removing it and running a different scan externally from my server/laptop) and the drives come up clean, so if its a virus it's extremely obscure and none of the major antivirus software can find it...

The weirdest symptom though is if I have Youtube up, the videos continue to play fine, though sometimes the entire rest of the page goes blank, I can click on annotations and it will jump to the new video despite the rest of the page failing to load...

And then after a random number of days, it stops losing connectivity every 24 hours. Then sometime later it starts again.

The two systems are completely different. Mine is Win 7, hers is Win 10, Mine is an intel Xeon, hers is an AMD Bulldozer... absolutely nothing in common except they're both connected over CAT5e to the same network (But the connection is still active, as per windows diagnostics so I don't think that is the issue, and the 360 is also hardwired and never has a problem when the other two do) Both PCs are up to date in the browsers/games/etc.

Any ideas?

 

[Dead Parrot]

Some type of miss match between the DHCP server and the clients? Any possibility that some other device is trying to be the DHCP server? Replace the switch with a different one. I have had one fail even though the lights all said things were fine even to the point of blinking while passing 0 data.

 

[pek]

Some type of miss match between the DHCP server and the clients? Any possibility that some other device is trying to be the DHCP server? Replace the switch with a different one. I have had one fail even though the lights all said things were fine even to the point of blinking while passing 0 data.

Swap the devices/ports around to see if the problem follows the switchport or the device.

 

[Biznatch]

I've got a weird problem that starts and stops randomly... My desktop and my mother's desktop (but not my server, either of our laptops, Echo, Xbox 360, phones, etc...) will randomly start every 24ish hours (always at night but at different times each day) stops being able to access the internet, despite windows saying we have an active internet connection and network diagnostics finding zero problems. Webpages will fail to load, the browser will say I'm Offline, Games will fail to connect to any servers, etc... then I reboot, and it works fine for ~24 hours and then I have to reboot again.

I've run virus scans (both from within the drive and by removing it and running a different scan externally from my server/laptop) and the drives come up clean, so if its a virus it's extremely obscure and none of the major antivirus software can find it...

The weirdest symptom though is if I have Youtube up, the videos continue to play fine, though sometimes the entire rest of the page goes blank, I can click on annotations and it will jump to the new video despite the rest of the page failing to load...

And then after a random number of days, it stops losing connectivity every 24 hours. Then sometime later it starts again.

The two systems are completely different. Mine is Win 7, hers is Win 10, Mine is an intel Xeon, hers is an AMD Bulldozer... absolutely nothing in common except they're both connected over CAT5e to the same network (But the connection is still active, as per windows diagnostics so I don't think that is the issue, and the 360 is also hardwired and never has a problem when the other two do) Both PCs are up to date in the browsers/games/etc.

Any ideas?

Focus on DNS. It's failing and causing your issues. Windows uses DNS queries to check if there is internet. If that fails, you get the yellow exclamation point by the network tray icon. This explains why a running youtube video will continue, but you cannot load a new site.

You can easily confirm this by trying the following next time this occurs:

1- Open powershell and run 'ping google.com' - This should fail with an error that it cannot resolve the host.
2- Ping 8.8.8.8 (googles DNS server), this should work as you are skipping the DNS check and pinging the IP directly


If that confirms it, you need to find out why only certain devices start failing, and what is causing them to fail. You can/should use a 3rd party DNS server, not your ISP's DNS server (especially since they do shady shit like DNS hijacking for ad injection). On your router override the DHCP client DNS settings and use a couple providers. I use googles and OpenDNS as my providers. Just good their DNS IPs and add them to the routers DHCP overrides.