32-bit Xenialpup 7.5 says it's connected to Internet but it's not. Must reboot.

[OldAcer]

Xenialpup 7.5 (32bit with Kernel 4.4.95)

Sometimes my internet connection goes away (http, SSH, and ping all time out, even to numerical addresses both internet and local) but "Network Information" and the ip a command shows the same info as when it was working and the task bar still show the "connected" ikon.

Disconnecting (from task bar) & using Network Wizard to re-establish show "connected" again, but doesn't fix it; a reboot always works.

The actual connection, which always works initially, is eth0 with a Static IP (set manually to an address on 192.168.86.x, with gateway of 192.168.86.1) connected to a Win10 Network Bridge connected by 5GHz WiFi to a Google Mesh local network. (DHCP does not work for this configuration. Google prefers a DNS primary of 192.168.86.1 but it works with 8.8.8.8 etc; DNS is not an issue because the problem exists for IPv4 numerical addresses.)

This problem seems to occur after visiting web sites with hostile/unsupported scripts but not immediately enough to pin down which ones, sometimes within 5 minutes but sometimes after 6+ hours. Can't find my notes on the site which brought it down within 5 minutes; otherwise, using mostly reliable sites like en.wikipedia.com/wiki/. Not completely sure, but I think if no internet connection is used even after 8+ hours, then a new connection will always work. (There is some evidence that the 4.4.95 kernel may corrupt memory after a long time on this Toshiba Satellite A105.)

My question is, what tools or procedures could to used to determine what the actual network problem is?

[ozsouth]

Wow. That's a tricky connection lane. Your win10 may be a cause - it's obviously not serving up DHCP. Its firewall may have a rule to drop connection upon accessing malformed sites. Is there no way you can use wireless (or even ethernet) directly?
Also, the kernel you have is 6.5 years old. It MAY be worth trying a kernel upgrade, but there aren't many recent 32bit NON-PAE ones. I posted a 2 year old one - 4.19.216 here: https://archive.org/download/Puppy_Linu ... AE.tar.bz2

[OldAcer]

not serving up DHCP

Sorry, I should have said "DHCP is not supported" because Microsoft says so.

The reason for the bridge is because of something that changed a few years ago with Google or various websites in how they cause the Google Mesh to cache some things; when connecting directly from Google Mesh to Xenial/Palemoon/Firefox, some scripts or resources take 5, 10, or forever minutes, like it thinks it sent it but it didn't. (No problem with Wifi elsewhere, or the Google Mesh with Windows.) The setup I described always works initially. And I just tried turning off the Linux firewall after loosing the connection, no effect.

At USPS Global Payments (pay.usps.com/pay/checkout.html.?) the connection was lost during their processing, where the first step (shown in the PaleMoon status bar) took about 5 minutes, then the next step took forever, after 1/2 hour total connection time. After rebooting, each step took 2-3 seconds. Usually I discover this issue after many minutes of network inactivity.

[bigpup]

5GHz WiFi could be part of the problem.

A lot more stuff can interfere with the WIFI signal.

If you can do it.

Try using a 2.4GHz signal for a while and see if you still get issues.

Do a scan for WIFI signals in your area and see if you can determine any that are using the same channel you are.

Why is my mesh WiFi so bad?
It's possible you are not within range of a working node in your mesh WiFi or there is some obstacle between you and the closest node with a blue light. Environmental conditions – other electronics, wireless device usage by neighbors on the same WiFi channel - can also cause WiFi interference.

[OldAcer]

The Linux machine does not know about any WiFi signal; as far as I know, the Windows machine does not see any loss in connectivity. I have been unable to find detailed information about how Win10 "network bridge" works exactly, just lots of cook-book instructions. Is there a local IP address associated with the "network bridge adapter" on the Windows machine different from Win10 itself? The local address of the Win10 machine (according to its ipconfig) is 192.168.86.250, but that address doesn't respond to ping from Linux unless the Win10 firewall is turned off, and I didn't think to try that previously, as it seemed that nothing was going out the ethernet. (Incidently, when Xenial is connected directly via 2.4GHz to the Google Mesh network, it is assigned an address in the .86.25-.86.35 range.)

I originally got the Win10 machine to try to figure out, using Wireshark, how the cache issue of the Google Mesh connection causes Xenial to not work with certain websites. But since using the bridge fixed the issue, I have not figured out Wireshark yet.

The present Xenial issue would seem to be a single change of configuration, which should be findable since the rest of Linux still works. What caused that change is different question.

[OldAcer]

An update: after visiting 2 websites with no observable problems for about 1 hr, problem observed: no http, no numerical ping to local-net gateway 192.168.86.1 or anywhere else, BUT established (encrypted) SSH connection continued to work for > 20 minutes (when I rebooted).