Which reminds me. THe last two weeks have been a nightmare for our network. Every hour the network drops. I spent a couple evenings tracking down the root cause before I called comcast (I don't want to have to waste time with L1 and L2 only to have them send someone out and charge me $150). It was clearly a communication issue between my newish Netgear router and the Comcast DHCP or my modem. The router was dropping the lease from the WAN despite it having a 24-hour expiration. Bizarre.
So rebuilt the router twice from scratch. Factory reset the modem. Swapped out the modem with a spare I had sitting around. Factory reset it. Activated it with Comcast (wasn't very clear how to do that). Still every hour. Just banging my head against the way because nothing was obvious. Started to see similar issues on Reddit come up over the last couple years as Comcast swapped over to IPv6. Apparently Netgear has some bizarre stances that no one else in industry does. ANyways, I thought for sure that had to be it. I tried everything else. Crash course in IPv6, got the router setup for it, devices seemed to be getting v6 addresses, and finally went out to do a IPv6 test and it failed. But what caught my eye was my IPv4 address wasn't in the subnet from my modem....
fuck
It immediately hit me I had my security system router between the modem and what I considered my primary router. It's always been a passthrough basically. Never had any issues with it. Barely remember it exists. Went to the security system panel and sure enough, same subnet as the router. Felt very dumb. Pulled the security router out and put the primary router after the modem and it's been rock solid all day.
Glad I got it solved but now all of my wiring and switches are a mess. And I'm not sure if I can get the security system router to work behind my router. So that will need to be a call to comcast I'm sure. Anyways, I think I'm going to pick up a good managed switch to consolidate everything instead of running old routers as unmanaged switches in different rooms. I know they're expensive, but this network is only going to get more congested as we add more IoT and other crap. Then I don't have to have a delicate house of cards to sort through when it all goes wrong.
The other thing that struck me is that if this had happened to my mom or anyone who doesn't have at least a working understanding of how this all works, they'd have been told to buy a comcast modem, comcast router, and probably had at least two visits from Comcast and spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars trying to fix.
