Spice Up Your Router (or Charter and Linksys can bite me!)
Thursday May 1, 2008
I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely unhelpful people. The guy actually said “gee, it’s kind of funny that you’re calling in with a Linksys router that isn’t able to get an IP address today–we’ve had a lot of Linksys router users call us today and tell us that.” I asked him if he didn’t think that that might be an indication of a problem in Charter’s setup and that it might be a non-coincidence that today, a bunch of Linksys-router-using people are calling?? He actually had the audacity to tell me that he thought it was Linksys’s fault… that maybe they pushed a firmware update out (HUH?!?! I have to flash my router to upgrade its firmware, dork), or maybe there’s just a bunch of Linksys routers that went belly-up on the same night (again, HUH?!?!?).
He tells me that since we can connect the Powerbook straight to the cable modem and it can get an IP address, that there’s something wrong with the Linksys router and that I will have to call Linksys for help. He says that Charter does not support any of its customers using routers at home. That’s cute. Like, you know… everyone just has one computer at home nowadays… ya dork! Now, I’ve not touched a thing on the cable modem or router in the 2 years that it’s been in my basement working fine with Charter, so I know for certain that I’ve not done anything to change things and that it must be something in Charter’s network that’s changed. The rude little Charter guy insisted that he was as high I could go for technical support and that customers weren’t allowed to talk to the network technicians. I didn’t but should have told him to bite me.
Oh, and the beauty of this is that I have Vonage for our phone provider, which means that the above conversation and the next one happened via cell phone. And the beauty of having a conversation from my house on a cell phone is that I live in the middle of a stinking forest and I get one bar of reception, if I’m lucky. So that makes for a nice, easy to understand phone call, especially when you’re talking… oh, I don’t know… to a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person.
So I hang up from the stupid Charter guy (I really hate Charter… did I mention that?) and call Linksys’s technical support number and start talking with a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person over my 1-bar cell phone connection in the middle of a stinking forest. She has a nice chat with me for a good half hour and asks me all kinds of questions about my home network and how many computers I have and how many of them are Windows (0), Mac (1), and Linux (5). Then she tells me that because my router is so old, she’s going to have to charge me $33 for helping me with it because it’s no longer covered under free technical support. So… just to clarify… because I paid $80 for a WRT54GS router 5 years ago and it’s still kicking strong, instead of… oh, I don’t know… a note of thanks or congratulations, I get a bill for $33 for her to help me get it working with Charter again. I told her that there’s no way in hell that I’m going to pay $33 for her help, which quickly led to the conclusion of that waste of a phone call. Unfortunately, seeing such amazingly awesome customer service by the likes of Moleskine and even Apple makes such patently horrific customer service as this really stand out. =:( Nice work, Linksys. I’ll be thinking more than twice about purchasing one of your products in the future.
Meanwhile, it’s like noon now and I’ve not yet been able to start work. That’s nice.
So after showering, eating, etc. I run up to the nearest Circuit City and plop down $49 for a new Linksys WRT54G2 wireless-G router, get it home, and connect it–foolishly thinking that it’ll work. Nope, same thing. About 10 minutes into my “Serenity now!!!” mental breakdown, I tried using the “MAC address clone” trick on the router. Sure enough, I entered in my Powerbook’s en0 MAC address and like magic, the new router is able to get an IP address from Charter’s DHCP servers. I run downstairs, pull the new router out, put the old WRT54GS back in, spend the next 10 minutes reconfiguring it and tell it to use the Powerbook’s MAC address, and sure enough, now it is able to get an IP address too. Needless to say, I’m taking the new router back and sticking with my old WRT54GS, thank you very much.
Gee, isn’t that a coincidence. Yep, there just must be a lot of people whose Linksys routers have died on them in the same day, ya moron.
What I think happened is that Charter rolled something out 2 nights ago so that their DHCP servers would stop handing out IP addresses to Linksys routers. Of course, Charter won’t admit to that.
So, now that I’ve officially been told by Linksys that they’re not going to lift a finger to help me if I have any problems with their router, I find this little lifehacker page that talks about upgrading your $60 router to a $600 router. I’d looked at the DD-WRT project before, but I was always a little nervous about bricking my router and having to go buy another one. With that fear now nicely removed, I figured that now’s a good time to see what DD-WRT can do. And DANG, I’m glad I did. There is so much more that I can configure with the DD-WRT interface than I ever could with the old Linksys interface. And the Web UI is so much more responsive! I’m totally impressed with it.
So, to sum up:
- Charter: you can totally bite me. As soon as I find another internet provider, you’re dumped like last week’s trash.
- Linksys: your products used to be totally awesome and then you outsourced your customer support, which means you might be saving money, but your customers are getting much less desirable support, at least as far as I’m concerned. You can sort of bite me.
- DD-WRT project: you guys totally rock.
- Forest that I live in: you rock except for making living with cell phones not fun.
- Not being able to start work until 4:30 pm because of all this: you TOTALLY suck. =:(
$33 for a support call about a five year old product seems reasonable. Especially since probably 80% of the time their product isn’t at fault.
The Carter support tech should have known the solution you stumbled upon. So yea, they suck a lot.
Wow, it looks like you went through a lot of hoops for a simple network change on their end =/.
It’s not nearly as good as your story, but I have had my own problems with my cable provider this year (they were fine for the last 7, not sure what happened now). I had been having a terrible connection for weeks when all of a sudden my modem decided to stop receiving a signal, period. Now, it is 8 years old, so I bet that it was dying. I call up mediacom, and after a few questions, they decided to replace my modem, and I was quite happy. I get the new modem, plug it in, get a dhcp and… wtf. Suddenly I have a 10.0.x.x number instead of a normal external ip. Needless to say I was quite infuriated, wondering how they could possibly pull that sort of stunt on customers. I called again, and I’m very glad that I ‘kept my cool’ so to speak. It turns out that their tech forgot to add the new modem into the database but still updated my case number with ‘modem installed’ and marked it as closed. So, I was getting the internal addr because nothing was set up correctly. So, a happy ending. And I’m thrilled that Mediacom actually uses tech support centers in Florida and Iowa. They do have one in India and somewhere in southeast asia, but often I get someone who speaks with my accent(midwest USA) =).
Wow,
What sounds like they did is that they used the MAC addy of LINKSYS modems and not allowing them to have a DHCP lease. I am not sure if Charter has, or will be offering there own ‘home networking’ solution, but if something comes soon that would explain what happened.
Hey Ian! =:)
Yeah, I was more ticked off because it sounded like they knew what the problem was and rather than take 2 minutes and tell me what it was, she wasted 10 minutes trying to convince me to pay $33.
@astromme: LOL!! bwahah! Well, I’m glad you kept your cool too! Sounds like it turned out well. =:)
@Mike Young: Yeah, I’m guessing that’s exactly what they did. All Linksys routers have the same MAC beginning addresses, I’m guessing, so I’m sure that’s it. But what really ticked me off was that I asked the guy what home router products they do support and he said that they don’t support any. WTF?? And if he would have just been honest with me and told me that they’re rejecting DHCP lease requests from routers, that would have been one thing. But he refused to be any help whatsoever and pretended that it was just coincidental that everyone with a Linksys router is calling in with problems today. The real pisser is that because of me living in a forest, there’s not actually any other alternative to them. I live too far from a main switch to get Verizon DSL and apparently my town hasn’t given Verizon permission to bring FIOS in. =:((( Only other option is satellite broadband and iirc, that’s prohibitively expensive!
Wow sounds horrible 🙁 But yea OpenWRT/DD-WRT etc. rocks. I’ve been using it on a WRT54GL that I have at my café, and customers with all setups Linux, BSD, Windows and OS X, all praise me for the great free wifi I provide, never had any troubles (first we had a DSL provider, now it’s opto fiber). I’m glad I’ve not had to call Linksys support.
ive been using the hyper-wrt on my wrt54gl with excellent results.
im considering moving to tomato firmware though as its still actively updated (and looks cooler).
there are ways to unbrick your router if you make a mistake or have a power failure during an upgrade.
you might want to take a look at http://www.linksysinfo.org forums for alternative firmwares for all your needs.
most firmwares support a couple of routers that are similar to the wrt54g series so you could dump linksys.
DD-WRT is “[url=http://www.bitsum.com/about-ddwrt.htm]an affront to the good will of the F/OSS community[/url]” and it seems to violate GPL. I recommend using [url=http://openwrt.org/]OpenWRT[/url] instead – it is entirely free, has lots of features and hundreds of packages.
@Aron Stansvik: Hey there! Hm. I’m new to this whole open firmware router thing. I’ll have to look at OpenWRT it sounds like.
@lord rel: I hadn’t heard of either tomato firmware nor hyper-wrt before now. =:) tomato firmware looks pretty cool.
@Grosv Daniel: Okay, so that’s definitely interesting and might be the only thing to motivate me to go through the firmware upgrade process again. *sigh*
It sounds like the LinkSys refusal to help you is a policy decision from corporate and wouldn’t have been any different even if the tech-support weren’t outsourced.
And Charter’s behaviour sounds about what I’d expect for any large company whose customers have no alternatives. I think we call them monopolies ;-p
Fortunately I live in an area where Charter has some competition, so I usually get slightly better service and support.
I’m puzzled as to why Charter would target Linksys routers like this.
3 years ago, my Linksys completely failed, and I purchased a D-Link router, which has worked perfectly ever since.
We recently switched our landline phone service from Qwest to Charter. Our phone system is a little complicated as the guy who built our house used a non-standard wire pair for connecting all the wall jacks.
And the Sonitrol Security Alarm system is wired into the phone system.
Turns out, the Charter guys screwed up the phone connection, and rendered our house jacks and the Sonitrol alarm system useless.
The Sonitrol tech guys graciously came out, and reconnected everything and got it working. They said they’ve spent a lot of time fixing Charter’s screwups.
OpenWRT kicks ass, and you can run all kinds of cool software like OpenVPN as well. Basically you get most of the benefits of running your own server whilst getting the benefits of having a quiet, cool and portable device.
It’s amazing how many people don’t understand how to troubleshoot on helpdesks. Your router hasn’t changed. Nothing else has changed, and all of a sudden, Linksys routers stop working. The stuff that hasn’t changed can be ruled out.
@Tony: Hey Antonio!! =:) (btw, I’d love to comment on your blog too, but I don’t have a livejournal account. =;P) And yeah, I’m sure it’s policy to charge money for support, but it’s a stupid policy compared to companies that actually show they care about their customers (i.e. Moleskine). *sigh* And yes, you’re totally right about monopolies… they can bite me too. =:)
@Segedunum: I looked at OpenWRT and it looks powerful, but I am just not interested in a steep learning curve to just get some basic functionality out of my router. It’s a toaster and it sits there and does its thing. About the only reason that I replaced Linksys’s firmware on the thing was out of frustration and geek curiosity. There’s really nothing that the new firmware (or tomato or X-wrt) can do for me that would motivate me to flash it again. It’s just not that interesting to me. =:/
And yeah, I agree with you about helpdesk incompetence. Actually, I can stand incompetence. What I can’t stand is someone lying to me or being too arrogant to admit that his company might have implemented a change the night before that might have caused a whole family of routers to just all of a sudden stop working. =:/
I second the tomato comment. I ran a few different firmwares until I found tomato … it’s just simply “wow”. Very easy to use, snappy and snazzy interface …. still heavily supported .. and most of all rock solid!
You should thank charter for turning you onto tomato. It’ll also help with your VOIP if you setup the QoS (although to be honest I never got this working just right and it did a great job without it).
I can understand that Jason. It sort of begs the question why companies like Linksys can’t produce decent firmware of their own, or at least take stuff like OpenWRT, install it by default and make a good job of it.
Do we have any reason for the belief that Charter intentionally blocked your router? If it’s anything like Comcast they have to have a ‘registered’ MAC address for you. Depending on the setup that’s going to either be your computer or your Router. Maybe you originally registered with your Powerbook, but then changed the MAC to your Router to get it online. Perhaps their system hiccuped and they had to go back to the previous MAC they had on record for you.
Remember, that tech has nothing to do with Charters management or even network techs, and wouldn’t/doesn’t know if Charter had an issue like this. It’s probably just incompetence on the techs part, rather than any “Charter Hate Linksys” conspiracies.
Your a moron. Charter didnt do anything to the router. Your router got hung up; you said you could get online with your computer; cable companies dont provision the MAC of your router…you and your “5 linux” computers, what are you even doing with the 5 computers? The tech knew more than you did.
Bill, you haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
No one is saying that Charter did anything to the router, and ‘the router got hung up’ means absolutely nothing. I can only guess at what that drivel means. The fact is that only Linksys routers have been affected where they were working fine before, and a simple bit of trouble shooting by him showed this was some totally brain dead MAC filtering problem. Process of elimination…….
The tech new absolutely nothing, and didn’t lift a finger to talk to the network guys about it.
a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!),
LOL, I see hell froze over 🙂
i have charter myself, and am fairly proficient in ip networking. the wrt54gs is an ethernet only router. it is not a cable modem broadband router. this should mean that there is a cable modem involved in your network setup, which is a router in itself. the cable modem has a mac address. it is difficult or impossible to change and is written on the back of the cable modem. this is the mac address that charter gives a lease to. in my part of the world at least.
now, the cable modem i have will only serve one computer at a time. if i plug it into a switch/hub and hook a bunch of computers to it, only one will be issued an ip address. that is why you use an $80 router instead of a $15 hub/switch (aside from the wireless capability). a router is a mini computer that receives the single ip address from the cable modem. it then functions as it’s own dhcp server to a subnetwork, aka your home network, and provides a gateway to the cable modem.
it does get a little tricky here, but.. the cable modem will pass the ip address that it obtains, to the router (or whatever is plugged into it). however, the cable modem still has its own unique mac address. thus, your router gets the ip address that charters issues to the cable modem. the cable modem then functions only with a mac address. the cable modem is a router/forwarder. it doesn’t serve a subnetwork with subnet ip addresses, it offers its own ip as the dhcp lease.
now.. to explain your problem. when some cable modems give their ip address away like that they make a hard association to the mac address they gave it to. an association that persists even when you turn the cable modem off. you have to use the reset button. if you change computers you have to do a hard reset on the cable modem. yes, i believe if you did a hard reset you wouldn’t have had to ‘clone mac address’
the reason clone mac address ‘worked’ is that the cable modem (not charter) was expecting the mac address of your pc. if you do a hard reset on the modem (not just unplug it) it should lease out a new ip to the next device requesting one.
the reason it got screwed up to begin with was that your router somehow got reset. and you have to manually push the clone mac address button.
whoever set it up initially set it up using the pc’s mac address.
your cable modem only wants to talk to your pc now until you push the reset button on the cable modem. if you turn off the mac cloning on your router, and reset the cable modem, then plug the router into cable modem, it will receive an ip and function as expected without using the ‘mac address cloning’. however, if you then try plugging your pc directly into the cable modem, it will not work. until you press the reset button on the cable modem.
i dare say charter has no idea what the mac addresses are beyond that of the cable modem. the only way they could bar linksys would be to bar linksys cable modems and cable broadband routers.
and umm.. i’m sure they receive a lot of calls about linksys stuff. everyone has linksys.
here’s some tips for the future:
use the internet, not tech support. calling tech support is for the seriously masochistic. aside from telling you they are very sorry for your problems, their main job is to establish that you do not qualify for tech support.
locate and press all reset buttons. try holding them down longer.
record, then tweak, all settings.
oh.. and for the record i have a linksys wrt54g and charter cable internet, and have not had such an issue.
Ya, I’d have to agree. Linksys TOTALLY sucks. I don’t know if I placed enough emphasis on how much they really do suck. I’ve been struggling with a linksys router for about 5 years now. Appx every week the thing craps out. It’s really fun when I try working from home at 7AM… Op! The linksys router crapped out again. Always a good time.
I had exactly the same thing happen to me this morning. I’m in Lenoir City TN. Sunday morning (May 18) my internet connection is totally down. I call charter and go through 15 minutes of their automated troubleshooting finally get connected to a tech who tells me their doing an “upgrade” in my area and my service will be restored on Monday morning. I get up on Monday (May 19) and check my service still down. I call Charter support and they tell me it looks like my cable modem has gone bad. I take it down to the local office and according to the woman who works there I’m the 15th or 20th person who brought their cable modem in already and it was only 9:00 AM. I get back home and plug it in and call charter to provision it and no dice. They have me hook the cable modem directly to my pc and it works so they say the modem is working now I have a problem with my wireless router, a Linksys WRT54GL, and they promptly hang up. I fiddle with the router for another hour or two and can’t get anything to work. Then I swap it out with another older router I keep on hand and it came up working as soon as the router booted. Just to test I put the Linksys router back on and it couldn’t get a ip from the cable modem via DHCP. So it sounds to me like the upgrade either fried my Linksys router or the upgrade is incompatible with my Linksys router. If I find anything else out I will let you know.
@ldew: ewww. sorry to hear that!!! =:( yeah, please do let me know if you find anything else out. I’m curious. =:)
I had the same problem today also.
I bought a new linksys router, a new Modem, and called Charter. It worked on my PC just fine. but the router did not work.
Once I spoofed the MAC address, everything worked again.
Just wanted to follow up. I finally assigned my PC’s MAC address to the router and it came up working. Just for grins & giggles I downloaded the ww-drt firmware into my router but Charter wouldn’t assign it an ip address unless I spoofed it’s MAC address.
as i’ve explained, all you have to do is hard-reset your modem and you won’t need to spoof any MAC.
you guys are dense.
umm NO. I hard reset it about twenty times. I held the reset button down for 5 seconds. I held it down for 30 seconds. I held it down while plugging in the power and left it held down for 5 seconds. I held it down while plugging in the power and left it held down for 30 seconds. I then reset and hard reset the charter cable modem with all the variations I mentioned above.
I have had charter for about 5 years now and am quite proficient with IP networks having installed and maintained several of them.
I also completely understand how routers bind to the mac address of the device connected to it and how when that device is changed you have to reset the cable modem so it will rebind with the new mac address.
A hard reset didn’t fix this problem. When I swapped the router the cable modem worked with the replacement router (and yes, I did have to do a hard reset to get the cable modem to work with the new router.) But when I replaced it with my Linksys router (and did a hard reset on the cable modem) the cable modem would still not recognize the Linksys router until I spoofed the mac address.
So hard resetting it did not fix my problem.
It may very well have fixed your problem… or at least the problem you had with your router (God only knows what other problems you have.)
And who knows, maybe I am dense but at least I’m not a pompous know-it-all a$$ like yourself.
if you know about ip networks then you realize your solution makes no sense. the cable modem only cares about the mac of the router because it only wants to bind to one device. you guys are trying to say it’s some charter vs linksys conspiracy and that’s just bs.
if you want to actually be helpful, post your cable modem manufacturer, model, and firmware revision if possible. and do the same for the router.
this has nothing to do with charter.
charter only cares about the modem’s mac, which you can’t change. and i’m pretty sure, because of the way the tcp/ip layer is implemented, that charter cannot see the mac of any device behind your modem. mac addressing is only relevant within the subnet. thus, charter has no clue what type router you’re using behind the modem.
so if this is really something beyond user-error, i would expect it to be a bug in the modem or router firmware.
if everyone here would post that kind of information then you might actually figure out what the issue is. however, most people that have posted haven’t even mentioned their cable modem.
Thanks for the tips, I simply cannot stand Charter’s customer service
It does have to do with Charter. Read my prevous 2 messages above. My router stopped working when Charter implemented an upgrade. Prior to that my router worked fine. My charter cable modem (Motorola Surfboard Model SB5120) works fine with another Netgear and another Motorola router I happen to have laying around without having to spoof the mac address. The only way the Linksys WRT54GL router (both with original firmware and ww-drt) will work is with the spoofed mac address. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. I’m just saying it’s an incompatibility. I don’t really care about figuring out why, I just wanted to let other people who might be seeing the same problem know of a possible solution.
charter implemented an upgrade? if you can explain what that even means, or how this ‘upgrade’ could affect a device that is on the other side of the modem, i’m all ears. your solution may solve the problem but i don’t think you really know what the problem is.
maybe they’re pushing firmware updates to the modem? but, i have the same modem and a linksys router and have had no trouble.
yes, i am a nerd. i wonder what the actual problem is. don’t listen to what tech support says. i doubt they know when or if an ‘upgrade’ happens. ask them to explain what ‘upgrade’ means. if there was such an incompatible upgrade, surely it would be fixed promptly. an overwhelming number of people use linksys routers. i would expect this page to be a lot busier if that were really the case.
nax,
I follow what you said, but…
I had the exact same problem; had to clone PC’s MAC to Linksys router. THEN i-net connectivity worked. My cable modem does NOT have a reset button, so I can’t try what you suggested (reset it.) Yes, I tried to power cycle cable modem several times to no avail. My cable modem is a “Charter” modem (ie rented from them), with model NO: U10C018 on bottom. It does have a USB interface, but I don’t know how to use that. What you say could be right, but the person above who bought a second Linksys and experienced same issue leads me to think they have a case too. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but two linksys routers with two different MAC addresses does raise my eyebrows. ALSO, I switched back and forth between my PC and my Linksys trying to get it to work. Each time my PC worked, but Linksys did NOT — I never did any cable modem reset when I connected my PC; like I said there is no reset button. I wish I could get a good comment on what’s going on here.
there may be an web-based administration pages you can access on the modem, much like the router, that would have an option to release the binding it’s doing to the mac address. there HAS to be some way to reset that binding. consider if you were renting the modem and gave it back to them, they would have to reset this binding to be able to rent the modem to someone else.
to get to that administration page you’ll need to know the internal ip address of the modem. you can find that by going to the routers administration page (probably http://192.168.1.1) and then looking for a status line that says something like “WAN Gateway”. then go to http://wan.gateway.address.here and see if there are any configuration pages for the modem. if your router/modem aren’t working together already, plug the modem into a pc directly and once it’s up and running, do start/run/cmd type ipconfig, hit enter, and use the default gateway address.
oh yea.. and that’s another problem you can run into when hooking up a router to a cable modem.. they should be on different subnets. if your modem is giving out addresses in the 192.168.1.* range, and your router is set to use that range also, then things will get confused. the simplest way to fix this is to you some totally different different subnet on the router. set it to use 192.168.38.* or something like that.
again, there is nothing they are doing on their end to lock the modem to your PC. it’s all in the modem. there really shouldn’t be a problem changing the modem from one PC to another, or hooking in a router to the modem, however, i’ve seen the problem many times where the modem associates itself with one device, PC/router/whatever, and then won’t bind to a new device.
i suppose it is possible that the modem itself is programmed to look at the MAC addresses of devices and try to determine if it is a router.. the thing is.. the mac address can only tell you the manufacturer, not the product. linksys makes plenty of ethernet devices that are not routers, such as network cards.. so.. to blacklist linksys macs in some way would cause them quite a headache in customer support. not to mention, i think that may be illegal. and also, pointless.
Your last line about headaches with customer support is the strongest reason I think there is no war between Charter.net and Linksys; Charter would loose that battle I’m sure.
My own suspicion is maybe I did something to piss off Charter like downloaded something or used a protocol they don’t like, and that got my MAC address on their blacklist.
I can’t find anything about a “WAN Gateway” on my Linksys router now that it’s working. I really doubt Charter would want anyone to monkey with the cable modem configuration anyway. Just for fun, I’ll give you some of my router settings:
Firmware Version: v7.50.5 build 002, Jan. 9, 2008
Current Time: Mon, Sep 08 2008 12:40:44
MAC Address: 00:17:07:4C:53:6A
Router Name: WRT54GS
Host Name:
Domain Name:
Internet
Configuration Type
Login Type: Automatic Configuration – DHCP
IP Address: 24.176.208.135
Subnet Mask: 255.255.254.0
Default Gateway: 24.176.208.1
DNS 1: 24.205.1.14
DNS 2: 66.215.64.14
DNS 3:
MTU: 1500
TRACERT FROM MY ROUTER TO GOOGLE:
traceroute to http://www.google.com (74.125.19.99) ,30 hops max,40 byte packet
1 10.232.64.1 (10.232.64.1) 10. 0 ms <10.0 ms 10. 0 ms
2 71.80.190.201 (71.80.190.201) <10.0 ms <10.0 ms <10.0 ms
3 71.80.190.73 (71.80.190.73) 10. 0 ms <10.0 ms <10.0 ms
4 71.80.190.185 (71.80.190.185) <10.0 ms 10. 0 ms <10.0 ms
5 66.215.0.150 (66.215.0.150) 10. 0 ms <10.0 ms <10.0 ms
6 208.46.190.193 (208.46.190.193) 10. 0 ms 10. 0 ms 10. 0 ms
7 205.171.32.33 (205.171.32.33) 10. 0 ms 10. 0 ms 10. 0 ms
8 67.14.12.58 (67.14.12.58) 20. 0 ms 10. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
9 205.171.214.30 (205.171.214.30) 10. 0 ms 10. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
10 72.165.46.18 (72.165.46.18) 20. 0 ms 20. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
11 216.239.49.250 (216.239.49.250) 20. 0 ms 40. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
12 209.85.251.94 (209.85.251.94) 20. 0 ms 30. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
13 74.125.19.99 (74.125.19.99) 20. 0 ms 20. 0 ms 20. 0 ms
oh yea.. most cable modems do ‘ip passthrough’. so there isn’t a second subnet. i’m not sure if there is any configuration page or not, but you might try going to http://10.232.64.1 and see if anything comes up.
honestly, i don’t know what it is, but something else is going on besides charter vs. linksys.
i’m really surprised that reset buttons on the modem are missing or not working for people.
Well, I don’t think we’re going to figure this out. However, you did spur me to seriously consider the cable modem, and I finally found the manual here: http://support.cox.com/sdccommon/asp/contentredirect.asp?sprt_cid=74fc51f6-2b3c-4a96-a6b7-90e4e321738a
Come to find out you manage the thing at 192.168.100.1 Still, there is no software reset option.
Thanks for your thoughts. Danny
Yeah, so I just started having this problem as well. I have a Linksys WRT300N and a Motorola SB5101 from Charter.
I started having problems with dropoffs in my connection with Charter and called them up, they sent a tech out, and replaced my old modem with this one. At that point my router was still functioning correctly IIRC, then a couple days later it stopped functioning altogether.
I can get to the router admin page successfully (192.168.100.1) and there is of course no reset button on the box (other than a shutdown button which does nothing. Once in the Configuration of the modem however (there is no user/password to get into it) I was able to reset it to Factory Defaults.
Even after resetting it to Defaults my router wouldn’t work with it. Everything would come up but the modem didn’t give my router an address. The firmware I am using on the router (DD-WRT v24-sp1 (07/27/08) mini) wouldn’t seem to be the problem, since others are apparently having this problem pre-WRT firmware. However I intend to install the virgin Linksys firmware back on again to see what happens. Also, people are saying the Tomato firmware is more supported/stable, I intend to check that one out too.
Lastly, I have a netgear router that has been sitting in a box in my garage (relatively new one) that imo sucks, pulling it out and plugging it in with no re-config at all IMMEDIATELY fixed the problem… Double U Tee Eff.
Anyway, I am going to do some more searching as this blog is fairly old, should be able to find something newer on this issue, the one thing I can utterly confirm is that Charter Internet is absolutely horrible and I will never EVERY purchase or recommend them, though I doubt they care an iota.
Joe
Heya @Joe! Sorry to hear about your troubles! =:/ I’d suggest plugging your computer straight into the cable modem and getting it to connect to the Internet. If that works, plug the cable modem back into your router, but tell the router to clone the MAC address of your PC that was able to connect to the internet via being plugged straight into the cable modem. That’s basically what I have to do now with Charter. Annoying as hell, but it seems to work. *shrug*
Docsis has a setting called max-cpe (customer premises equipment, the stuff you plug into the cable modem itself). This settings is usually valid for up to 4 different mac addresses (some ISPs allow less). Unplugging the modem for a short period of time should trigger it to request a new config and reset the cpe’s already stored (this information is kept locally on your cable modem, not by the ISP). So really, you should never have to clone a mac address from a previous device. I am kind of surprised people are still running into this problem, Charter has disabled the cpe restriction in the state of Michigan at least and I would like to think other cable service providers are as well.
*Blacklisting is absurd and Linksys mac bans is even more absurd. Hard to understand how conspiracy theories fits into providing network availability. ISPs like Charter run huge networks and require a lot of resources, these kind of thoughts do not register in their business plans for sure.
*Tech support will not help you if you have service up to your cable modem directly. Any devices that exist beyond this point are considered customer premises equipment and you are the network admin over you own network:P – seriously not a hard concept to understand.
cisco1811, finally, a reasonable answer.
so if you attach enough different devices to some cable modems over a short enough period of time it will fill up the cpe slots and deny new mac addresses?
what was the point in that?
I use Charter, and have Airlink router with DD-WRT firmware on it. I have a Linksys Cable modem, and I wanted to use a matching Linksys router. The Airlink router remained up and stable with the Linksys Cable modem at first setup. I have an old Linksys WRT54G v2 and put DD-WRT on it, cloned my laptop Mac Address as I did with the Airlink at first set up, but the connection would not remain stable. I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS v7.2 and it did the same thing. Both Linksys routers would only hold the Charter connection approx 1 hr, until I hard reset the Linksys Cable Modem, and only had the Linksys WRT54G v2 router connected to the cable modem. About 3 minutes later, I connected the rest of the network to my Linksys router. So far the connection has been stable for 5.5 hrs. I think resetting the cable modem via the ‘reset’ button took care of it.
Hey Jason,
This is a bit late, but I’ve also found my linksys router to have stopped working. There appears to be a charter update that’s forcing out home routers. I noticed my wireless led started to flicker and this new type of signal is something that is knocking out my router. I did manage to get it working, got it cloned, flashed to DD-WRT but I still find I need to powercycle a hell of a lot more than I used to.
Luckily in the 3yrs I’ve lived in my city Frontier has moved in. This means I can cancel with Charter which I did tonight and go over to a competitor. I found moving from CA to MN the competition was non-existent. Charter had the monopoly and could treat customers like shit basically. Over the 2 yrs have hiked my rate up consistently so I found I was paying $85-$100 for phone and internet at one point. CA on the other hand had 5 or 6 companies offering service, I was in the high desert but had FIOS at $20 a month.
So moral of the story is, mess with customers at your peril as they’ll move elsewhere.
PS
I found Charter is trying to rent out routers at an additional $5 a month fee, which explains the move to blocking home routers. A lot of other people are also seeing this if you google!
Hey Mark! Ugh! Sorry to hear that. I wish I had a choice other than Charter. Things have been working very well since I slapped DD-WRT on my WRT54GL, though, so I’m satisfied for the moment. =:)
Used to think I was pretty okay at getting wifi to work. Started to happen to me when I began streaming 3 concurrent netflix movies. Suddenly my router stops working and charter tell me linksys isn’t supported blah blah. All I know is the router had worked flawlessly (with the once in a while powercycle) for 2.5 yrs.
Anyhow I’ll try Frontier and see how they fare, $10 less, slightly slower, but they provide a linksys all in one router modem, so we’ll see how I get on!!
Cheers for cheering me up Jason, your misery was good company!
Same exact problem here. Just switched to Charter (you may hate them, but AT&T DSL is worse) and couldn’t get a connection to work through my Linksys router. Tech that hooked up the cable modem in my house said the same as the others, which is that there was a problem with the router and they can’t do anything about that. I understand that, I wouldn’t want some TelCo tech working on my home equipment anyway. I’ve been running WW-DRT on my router for a couple of years now and had zero connection problems with the DSL. The only thing that changed is the cable modem. I have the same model of cable modem mentioned before and it doesn’t have a reset button. I can get to the config page via 192.168.100.1, but it’s purely informational. No settings can be changed. A direct connection to a PC worked, so I ended up having to clone the PC MAC in WW-DRT. So far I’ve had a solid connection for almost 24 hours. When signing up for Charter, they did offer there own router/wi-fi combo device.
Not too quick to blame one side or the other, but customers shouldn’t have to work around things like this.
Thanks for the info everyone!
Explains why my old linksys wiresless router won’t work any more, regarding Charter rolling out …’DHCP servers would stop handing out IP addresses to Linksys routers.’ when I moved, they installed their ‘newer’ modem. And I can’t get mine to work anymore. I tried the MAC clone…not working. Damn!
So I decided I wanted the charter wireless…they want to charge me another $50 to come out an install what will take them 5 min. Not!!