Actiontec producing Broadcast Storm?
BadSector
Newbie

About 5 days ago, around 1/28/11 I noticed my internet connection slow down to a crawl.  After doing a wireshark capture I noticed taht the router was shooting out ARP requests, WAN MoCA renews for netmask and IP's, discovery protocols bouncing all over and other anomolies like the ones listed.  Has anyone noticed their Routers lighting up like a christmas tree for no good reason?????  I can't pin down why the router would all of a sudden want to do DNS, ARP and discoveries constantly.  Any ideas??

Thanks!!

Mike Sz.....

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Re: Actiontec producing Broadcast Storm?
lasagna
Community Leader
Community Leader

The router always does that with STB's on the network.   While it looks like a lot of traffic, if you look more closely, you'll see it's not really a lot of traffic.   The protocols are chatty and you see lots of packets, but in the grand scheme of things it's all local traffic on the network and not all that much data -- certainly not impacting on traffic to/from the internet.

If you don't agree, turn off and unplug all of the STB's in your house for a bit and watch how the traffic profile changes on the local network and how it most likely has no impact on internet traffic thruput.

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Re: Actiontec producing Broadcast Storm?
BadSector
Newbie

Yes, I did look at that, and you're right, broadcasts and discoveries are chatty and typically do not affect overall bandwidth usage, but this Router is sending out hundreds of thousands of packets in a minute, WAY over what would be expected, especially with an ARP table with 7 listings.  It is also broadcasting over the external network, it's NOT internal only traffic.  Anyway, verizon sent me a new router, so I'm going to find out real quick.  I have a feeling all of the broadcast storms will disappear.  Thanks for the input, always appreciated.

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