Further Speedstream 4200 & Windstream

I wrote about the troubles I’ve been having with our Windstream DSL on Sunday past. This morning I awoke and came downstairs to see the router blinking blue where it should be solid if connected, but blinking means “connecting” and it just sat there doing that, and nothing was actually connecting, and DSL light on the modem was solid, and activity light nearly solid.

Let the games begin.

I jumped through all the hoops a few times. Basically connecting the modem directly to the computer, and getting into the browser configuration to see what’s going on. The information there showed that it was connected … to something, but not pingable. Like this: open a new tab, type twitter.com … it just sits there as if it’s going to contact the site requested … this is with the modem connected to the computer directly.

In the past I could then go to the PPP setup and input my user name and password for DSL and that would either connect or not.

Today I got something else when I tried that. I got an error message, which I should have printed, but didn’t … I kick myself about this. Anyhow it was like, my credentials weren’t good.

I tried it again, turned the modem off/on, tried everything over and over. Rebooted setting to Factory Default. Still the same things, modem connects to windstream as Factory Default, but then can’t ping, and nothing else happens when you try to load any website.

After I did a couple of different things like that, I guess I’d Factory Defaulted a couple or more times, then suddenly I got the Activation page. This time it was different from the previously documented [Sunday 3/7] time … now it had two choices, “recently reset the modem” or “new subscriber or new modem for current subscriber” … on the right was the “third party” link so I clicked that instead this time, and after all the waiting, it said everything was great. So I tried to make it all work again, the full thing via the router, nope.

So then I reset the modem again, connected it to the computer directly again, the “windstream” connected was connected … and the same Activation page as earlier came up again. So this time I chose “recently reset modem” and it boiled and toiled and round and round until finally it said it was done.

I reloaded the speedstream modem in the browser and lookee, right there where I had no input anything since resetting to Factory Default the “windstream” data was gone, and my credentials were there, except different from how I usually have had them working, this had @windstream.net tagged on. It was connected and I opened a new tab and typed twitter.com, enter, flloooop …there it was.

Sick of it all. So I just put the ethernet cable back to the router, so modem and router connected, then in the router I told it to “dynamic” connect.

It balked at that for several seconds, then decided that it was OK and … signal distributed to network.

Hmmm.

Not what I want to go through again, not what I want to do at all. I don’t want to mess with the router at all ever never, but I can’t make it connect lately if I don’t … connect to the computer to see what the stinking modem is doing and jump through all those Activation pages ……….. I’m gonna go insane.

Thing is now, I could wait hours with no internet, touch nothing, and eventually my internet would be connected, all while waiting with a solid green DSL line showing. But it’s not supposed to do that, it SHOULD work that I have a modem, just put it connected to the DSL line, then connect ethernet from it to WAN port on router, and tell the router to use PP0e and my credentials.

It was setup like that always in the past. Lately the outages like that are frequent and the only thing I can do is jump through the hoops or not. I know how nuts I feel when the DSL is not connected, and since there IS something I can do it’s the only thing I will do. The problem comes when examining that supposed something I can do, it’s not so easy, it’s complex as to why it’s happening and just which result I’ll get when I do this or that. It’s troublesome, complex, and totally insane.

Is it the DSL, that I’m on the edge of the speed we have? It worked flawlessly for weeks upon weeks, and if something DID happen, it was easy enough to reconnect but it never got like this until recently. Now I could put everything back the way I want it, it might work to have the router control the PPPoE now, but I do have connection to the internet setup using it dynamically and I don’t want to mess with it. We’ll see how long this lasts, a day, two days, more or less, or longer?