Well, as an I.T. guy, I see a lot of stuff, but I met a new one and had to share.

Since about last Thursday, my Internet (cable modem service via Time Warner). Intermittent connectivity issues (it stays connected but I'm having lots of packet losses). Such as, I PING Yahoo, I'm lucky if it resolves to an IP address. I tried the norm, power cycle my modem, router, PC. No luck. Since I was having issues resolving name to IP, I tried some other DNS servers (they are responsible for finding the IP associated with Yahoo). That appeared to improve things, but short term.
Last night, had a guy from the cable company out, he checked signal strength on each segment of coax going from my modem out. No issues. He did replaced a filter at the pole and changed what port I was on. Of course, while he was there, all was good.

Long story short, still issues. I got a BIG tip when I found the amount of packets received by my router from the modem were just off the charts crazy!!! I think my IP from my ISP was being hit with a denial of service attack!! This actually makes more sense!
Power cycling and releasing/renewing the IP was not working (I kept getting the same IP leased to me). So, I used a feature I never had to use. On my router, I told it to use the MAC address of my PC to face the Internet (spoof a different MAC address). This forced my ISP to lease a different IP to me (and give me time to let the lease on that other one expire, which means, someone else will end up with it).
After spoofing a different MAC addy, I got a different IP and so far, all back to normal!!!

That was crazy. I can honestly say, I've never had that experience before!!

FYI - For those who don't know, a MAC is a hardware address, unique to every network device (it is also used for the server handing out IP addresses to keep track of who the IP leases belong to). The original reason home routers had the ability to spoof a make is because early broadband days, many ISPs did not want people using routers and would bind your service to the MAC on your PC (if you used a different MAC, you got no service). This was a way around that problem.

 

Were you downloading or viewing questionable content (copy right etc) isp's are getting crazy on that right now. Also even have a p2p software or torrent sharing could cause them to do that. Some times its automated. I have had to do this a few times on my friends computer beacuse his brothers dowbload a lot of.... ehhhh... stuff...

 

Interesting for sure, usually when you reset you routers you pick up a new IP address. Wonder where the dos attack was coming from.

 

Jason:
I have noooo idea what you said/talked about....
But glad you got it finally resolved...

 

Negative. Besides, if that was the cause for it, I would have thought the girl I spoke with on Sunday would have had that as an item to mention. But I attempted to do a "quick" filter of malware by taking a clean machine and making that the ONLY one on the Internet.
By the fact my router reported for little packets sent over the cable modem but a TON being received in about a 2-5 minute snap shot, this suggests something outside is trying to break in or simply kill my connection.

Resetting the router/modem and getting a different IP depends on the DHCP configuration on the ISP. The lease rules can be set that if it drops, it's released. Appears Time Warner has a 24 hour lease time according to the data from my router. What was odd, when I was on the router's admin page, when I released the IP, it should then go back to the available pool. Then when I re-newed it, I should have received a new leased IP, instead I kept getting the same IP (which makes me think the release did not go back to the ISP DHCP server for some reason, again, might be a config option (to not allow an early release of the IP, not sure I've ever seen such an option, but who knows).

No worries David. Sometimes I get a little out of control with the shop talk. Bottom line, I'm not sure any of the "average" techs my ISP have for phone and onsite support would have figured this out. Since I own my own cable modem, they just have to ensure the connection is good to the modem, after that, the rest is ALL me. I was so close to ordering another modem. Apparently, that would have been pre-mature.