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[bunglemebaby]

As building a new HTPC to use as both a playback device and media server, I'm having a problem with one of my client computers. When playing back content from the media server it will kill our internet connection. The local network and Wifi still work fine, but no connection to the WAN. It's also only with my laptop. My wife's laptop and my Android both connect and playback fine. I can reliably reproduce the problem on my laptop. It seems to happen towards the end of the first song from and album/playlist.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to where to even start looking for a solution to this, so any thoughts or ideas are appreciated.
-Jon

[Matt]

I've never heard of anything like this.  I don't see how internet could be related to the server, unless you have the server on port 80 or something strange (the default is port range is 52100-52199).

[MrC]

How have you determined that there is no WAN connection?

When the laptop seemingly botches the WAN, is this true for other systems as well, or just the laptop?

[bunglemebaby]

I've never heard of anything like this.

Me either, so I tried it a number of times to make sure that MC was indeed a catalyst here. I'm betting it's not the root cause, but it's involved somehow. I am using the default MC port ranges, nothing on 80.

Insert Quote
How have you determined that there is no WAN connection?
When the laptop seemingly botches the WAN, is this true for other systems as well, or just the laptop?

It goes down for the whole house, seemingly at the modem since the router continues to work. In Windows 7 the network icon gets a little exclamation mark or something indicating "connected without internet access". Streaming continues just fine, but none of our machines or phones are able to get to the internet.

I have monkeyed with the router a bit a month or so ago, so that could be where something is a bit mucked but it's odd that this would be the only symptom of a problem.

Possibly also related is that this client was previously my media server on the few occasions when I used a media server. The library was copied from it to the new HTPC/server machine. The old copy of the library does still live on the client machine, but it is not being used since I'm connecting to the server.

[JimH]

Try changing the IP address.  Make it static if necessary.  You may have an IP address conflict (two devices with the same address).

[bunglemebaby]

Try changing the IP address.  Make it static if necessary.  You may have an IP address conflict (two devices with the same address).

This doesn't appear to be the issue. I did a check of every device connected to the network and all showed a unique IP address.

Two of the times that this happened my wife was connected to higher bandwidth services (Hulu and VPN into her work) at the same time. There was a third day where I was the only one using any streaming (via MC media server). Not sure if this is relevant or not...

It will take some testing (when nobody actually needs the internet) to confirm, but I think that the issue has only showed when playing FLAC files (implying a moderately higher bandwidth usage could somehow be related.) Yesterday I did a test for 4-5 mp3 songs and nothing disconnected, but this evening when streaming FLAC it died out halfway through the first track. I'll confirm later tonight or tomorrow if this is more than an unrelated hunch.

Any other thoughts or things to check?

[bunglemebaby]

I've managed to prove both of my thoughts in the previous post to be bunk. I manged to get the internet to disappear  while streaming some mp3's. It looks like Windows has stopped notifying me that the internet connection has failed. My tests this evening have been with just me around and symptoms remain the same.
The only difficulty I've ever had connecting to my ISP involved a MAC address issue on a new router. I can't think of anyway MC would poke anything even remotely close to this though. I'm using all WiFi currently, so the only MAC addresses available are those on the Wifi adapters and the router's. (So nothing strange with MC sending data to/through two devices or anything like that.)
Does anyone else have any wild but (at least somewhat) intelligent guesses or things to look at? This is incredibly frustrating. I've had to listen to Pandora while downstairs since getting the new HTPC/server up and running....

[MrC]

The first thing to check is that the device's firmware is up to date.

I've seen similar problems in some Linux distros where certain network traffic loads would kill the router, thus rendering the WAN disabled.  And many router/APs are linux-based.  But this was a while ago now.

It would be worthwhile to log into the router's web interface when the WAN appears down.  Check that the WAN has an appropriate IP.  Also use the router's diagnostic tools to ping some external IP address (if the device has such a tool).  Get the address ahead of time, test some pings, and hold onto that address until you need to test.  If the pings are succeeding, then the WAN is enabled.  Perhaps then DNS is the problem.  This isn't uncommon when using the cheap-o, memory-limited caching DNS proxy implementations on most commodity routers.  Note: you're likely to get better results overall by disabling the proxy-DNS and configuring the router to use your ISPs DNS servers (or OpenDNS, etc.), and hand those out via the router's DHCP server to your LAN clients.

[bunglemebaby]

Just to update this in case it helps anyone else:
It appears that the issue was indeed with the router. After reading MrC's advice I decided to give my new DD-WRT router another go (rather than updating drivers etc on the old one.) Once the new router was working in general it fixed my problem entirely. Thanks for the tips!! -Jon