Pin pointing the problem

[DEL 707]

We've been having a lot of problems with our broadband for the last 2 weeks, lots of disconnects, sometimes the connection can stay up for an hour, sometimes your lucky if it lasts 5 minutes.

We're on Virgin cable and have recenelty upgraded to 20mb, the problems started before we upgraded though. We have the cable modem hooked up to a Netgear RP614v4 router. The 2 main users are me and my brother.

I'm a pretty light user, I only use the net for browsing and gaming, my brother's a heavy user, I'd said he's downloading torrents a good 12+ hours a day.

My brother swears blind that it's the routers fault, since at night when I'm asleep, he plugs the modem directly into his computer and says he's never disconnected. Yesterday I tried this myself since he was out of town, but for some reason my computer didn't want to work with the modem, so I went through the router as usual.
I had the computer on all day, a good 10+ hours but not in constant use. I had IRC running in the background the whole time and it didn't report any disconnects. Games ran fine as well, no disconnects at all in an hour long game of Team Fortress 2, normally I lose connection to the server every 5-10 minutes.

My brothers back today and things are as bad as they ever were, he's asleep at the moment, but from what I can tell, his computer isn't on, so I can't really pin the blame on his machine anymore.

I went to enable the traffic meter on the router just to see how much he's downloading but for some reason the option to enable it is greyed out.
I tried updating the firmware to the latest version this morning, but it's made no difference.

The logs on the router don't show anything, all that's there is this
Wednesday,06 Feb 2008 07:34:39 [IP Spoofing][Deny access policy matched, dropping packet]
The times a little funny, that was about 2 hours ago.

I havn't bothered phoning virgin yet, for fear of sitting in a queue for 2 hours just to be told to reset my modem.

 

[DEL 707]

Just checked my logs again, after another crappy night of net connections and a lot of these are popping up.

[IP Spoofing][Deny access policy matched, dropping packet]

 

[username]

seems someone is trying to attack your IP address from outside your house. Does your brother use Kazza or similar as these are often good sources of spyware and trojans. It may be your borthers activities have alerted some baddies as to your IP address and they are trying to contact your IP address using "spoof ip addresses" luckily for you your router prevents this happening. If he connects his pc directly to the modem he will not have this protection so his system may be severley compromised. I suggest a full virus scan and a go with the spyware stuff straight away.

 

[tolien]

It's almost certainly just noise - most ISP's IP ranges get scanned regularly by script kiddies and the majority of consumer routers report it as a DoS or whatever, prompting users to think they're being h4x0red or something.

Did you switch the modem off and back on and wait for the lights to settle before connecting it to your machine - the modem cares about the MAC address of the device it's attached to, so you need to jump through some hoops when you change router or connect it directly or whatever.

 

[DEL 707]

It's almost certainly just noise - most ISP's IP ranges get scanned regularly by script kiddies and the majority of consumer routers report it as a DoS or whatever, prompting users to think they're being h4x0red or something.

Thanks for putting my mind at ease

I know most people say this, but I'm very careful with the websites I visit and I use firefox with the noscript add-on.
I did a scan with nod32 which came up clean, did Kasper online scanner as well which showed nothing, spybot and ad-aware found a few pieces of adware but nothing remotely serious.

I doubt my brother has anything, since he bought himself a mac laptop at the weekend, so I'd be suprised if he's even got that riddled with virus'.

I'll try reseting the modem again tomorrow and see how things go.

 

[DEL 707]

I'm sure it's something to do with a program my brothers using.

This morning I had a load of disconnects, I looked at his machine and I thought it was off, but when I looked at the router menu and saw connected devices it showed him online.

I physically pulled his cable out and didn't have any disconnects for 2 hours, he comes back, plugs his laptop back in and i disconnect within 20 minutes.

I'm pretty sure he's just using utorrent, but I'll see if he's using any other download programs.

 

[tolien]

It's possible it's utorrent that's causing the problems - if it's opening to many connections, it'll crash the router.