It has an indicator light that displays the connection status, and it indicates when the modem has acquired the ip address.

According to page 13 of the user's manual, there's nothing about the LEDs that tells you it has a valid ip address. It will tell you that it is 'registered', but that's a step or two before getting an address.

From Toshiba link:

This would only be possible if the modem is acting as a router. It is almost certainly responsible for your initial 192.168.x.x IP assignment. Now, how it gets assigned it's own IP--that may well be through DHCP from your ISP, but if that's the case, then it is taking some time for the modem to get the IP. It MUST have a routable IP assigned to it (and I realize you said that the cable modem has a good IP address; but if it is losing connection and you are cycling the power, it is going to have to wait for the DHCP server to re-assign an IP to the modem, even if it turn out to he be same IP) before you can do anything on the internet. I don't really see any way around one of two conclusions: the delay is natural and to be expected from your ISP, or else your equipment is faulty. If it is dropping your connection, then that you have faulty equipment somewhere along the chain is a very reasonable assumption. Not all routers are configurable via web interfaces, so that's no great surprise. (Just by the way, PPoE and DHCP aren't mutually exclusive. A PPoE connection will normally receive its IP from a DHCP server unless you have a static IP, for which you normally must pay extra, if you can get it at all. Most cable systems won't supply a static IP.)

In post 11, you indicate that when you choose to manually renew the DHCP lease, which then picks up the IP from the modem. You ask why it doesn't happen faster. Well, I don't know the answer to that, but if it turns out that this works in those cases where you lose the connection, that does seem like a fairly small penalty. If this post means what it sounds like, the modem seems to be getting an IP from the ISP quickly enough but the computer isn't getting it quickly from the router/modem. That -does- refocus the question slightly, although if your modem is dropping the signal, it still seems to indicate some problem with the hardware.

Joe VanZandt

The user manual states:

[when the "Cable" indicator light turns solid green]

"Cable Modem registered and ready to transfer data".

Yes, and some of that data would be an ip address from the DHCP server. If that doesn't happen, you can't get any further.

What's most likely happening is that the modem has registered and thinks it's got a strong enough signal to work, but when it sends for an address, the request or the response doesn't get through.

Believe me, I'm not just guessing here. It's happened to me before, and they did need to replace the cable from the street to the house. They also closed some signal leaks within the house. Call the cable company.

Yes, that is what I have been trying to say from the beginning.


There is also another kind of delay problem (similar to above in level of annoyance, but maybe unrelated) that happens after Mac has regained internet access, involving DNS, that is isolated to Apple Safari:

#3 Cable modem has ip address and Mac has picked it up, but Safari still cannot load webpages (timeout error "safari could not find server"). This is a DNS-related problem. But, it seems to be a problem with Safari and the Mac OS. If I use Eudora, it will "try harder" and find DNS. Then Safari will work OK on the next page. It seems to be a Safari or OS problem, because the webpages that can't find DNS still can't find DNS, even if Eudora and other webpages are OK. Note that when I say "webpage" I am talking about separate Safari browser windows, even if they are the same URL.

It's the same problem. If you have a weak signal, Safari may time out sooner than Eudora. That doesn't mean there's a problem with Safari. It just points again at a problem between the modem and the cable company. If you really don't want to call them, check for any coax cables that are plugged into wall sockets, but not a tv/cable modem. The resulting signal leak could be causing the problem.

I spoke with ISP today.

They confirmed that what I have been saying is mostly correct.

The cable modem indicator light accurately shows whether or not the cable modem is connected to the internet. It does not receive a DHCP ip address, however; the address is manually assigned by the ISP and does not change. If the light is solid, the modem is connected to the internet.

The cable modem assigns a DHCP ip address to the Mac, so in that regard it behaves like a router. The ISP told me that the mac should recognize the ip address immediately when the modem light goes solid, and not have the delays I have experienced.

The physical connection to the ISP is very good. It is not a weak signal. Throughput is 50% higher than the contracted bandwidth and there is no packet loss.

The momentary outages are suspected to be due to bad physical connector on cable modem, so I am investigating that.

The ISP confirmed that releasing and renewing the Mac's DHCP lease would be a way to force the Mac to quickly regain internet access, and also confirmed that the manual step should not be necessary- the Mac should quickly and automatically resume internet access when the cable modem indicator light goes solid.

The connection delays as described above in #1, #2 and #3 still appear to be Mac-related problems.

Me, too! More than once, with different ISP's. It is a pain, most definitely.

But that is different than what is happening here.

Chiming in late here, but I have a similar problem with my home network as well. I have 3 Macs on my home network. I have a dual 500 G4, a MDD G4 1.25Ghz, and a macbook pro. Now my macbook pro and my PCs (win xp sp2 and my linux box) all surf the net at a very fast rate. My MDD G4 takes forever to load pages and for it to connect. I don't get it.

I have safari, firefox and camino installed on it and all of them run sluggish. It has 1gig of RAM in it (my MDD). It also has a clean install of OS X 10.4 that is also very up to date.

I think that it is a mac problem, and that perhaps its firmware or driver related that causes these slow ethernet connections. My macbook pro runs on wireless and it runs faster than my MDD G4 which is wired directly to my router.

I haven't yet found a fix for it and it is very annoying since my G4 should be able to surf the net fast like all my other PCs. My dual 500 G4 is kind of sluggish in general but its older, so that doesn't bother me. It runs how I expect it to run. The MDD G4 on the other hand should run tiger and web browsers no problem.

Look at my post again. Safari browser windows that timeout will never load, even when they are refreshed after new Safari browser windows pointing to the exact same URI load successfully and all other internet access is working perfectly. (Problem #A)

Safari fails to do good DNS lookups after internet access is lost and then restored. Eudora fails to do good DNS lookups if internet access is lost (which is expected), but when internet access is restored, gets successful DNS lookups right away while Safari is still failing. (Problem #B)

Connected to the internet doesn't mean that the modem has an external IP address. You can be connected but not get to the web. I once had a situation where I could get email, which comes from the ISP's server, but not connect to the web. Nothing is ever as straight forward as you'd think it should be!

From your posts, specifically #9, we know this, and we also know that the Mac would not try to get another address. As long as it's able to talk to the router, it thinks it has internet access.


Did you lose your connection while they were checking? If you didn't, anything they saw isn't going to help much. That's the problem with intermittent glitches, and why it's probably going to be necessary for them to send somebody out there.

A definite possibility, but on which side, ethernet or coax?

As I said, as long as the Mac thinks it has internet access (it can talk to the router) it will not try to reconnect. If the modem reconnects to the internet after a delay, the Mac will think it always had a connection.

In Safari, emty the cache: command-option-E. This won't fix the basic problem, but it will make Safari behave more like Eudora.

cwtnospam- thanks again for your helpfulness!

But, with all due respect, I think you may be getting a little confused, or maybe you are just confusing me.

Much of the things that you say are contradicted by my observations, as well as by my ISP. I must again disagree with some of what you say.

If it is helpful I can respond to your comments one-by-one. But it really seems like you are trying to shoehorn my situation to match your experience, but the situation is not very similar at all.

Is anyone else following this thread? Perhaps it would be a good time to hear some fresh ideas or differing opinions about why things are happening as they are.

what are you settings for your ethernet card? Is it set to auto? Try setting it to 100mb full duplex mode and see if that helps.

Slow speed is a different problem from losing the connection. Try entering DNS settings in Network preferences. Sometimes there's a delay where the Mac waits for the router to check with the DNS server if you don't have an address for the Mac to use.

I have noticed this problem on some managed switches. For some reason macs take longer to resolve IPs over DHCP than say a PC sitting right next to it on the same network.

However, when I set my G4 MDD to 1000mb full duplex I got page would not load on all my web browers. The machine itself has gigabit ethernet standard, but my switch on my router is only 10/100. I was able to duplicate this exact problem the OP was having when I set my G4 to 1000mb Full Duplex. no website would load.

I have a Linksys router at home, WRT54GL running DD-WRT SP1 Final firmware.

I haven't been able to fully confirm this, but I believe that Macs don't actually acquire the DNS address, they just keep relying on the router to provide it. I know that if you just use DHCP, no DNS address will apear in the Network preference panel while it does show the router address. Since most routers are designed with PCs in mind, it probably isn't a good idea to rely on them to provide the DNS server for every request. That's why I suggest entering the DNS server address(es) manually.


Which ones? As I understand it:
1) The connection drops randomly for all applications, then returns randomly.
2) Safari caches the error page and pulls that up even after the connection returns for other applications.
3) This is unlikely to be a software problem, since the Mac has nothing to do with the modem remaining connected to the ISP. By the way, I think that manually entering the DNS server addresses on the Mac may help a bit here too because the Mac will rely a little less on the router, but it's not likely to solve the problem.
4) The modem's 'ready' light cannot tell if it's got an IP address from the ISP's DNS server. It can only tell if the modem is connected to the ISP's equipment.
5) Since the Mac connects to the router portion of the modem, it will always get a local IP address (192.168.xxx.xxx) so the Mac will think it's connected to the internet even when the modem has lost it's connection to the ISP.

cwtnospam,



Incorrect. I think you have this backwards. In any case, it is irrelevant here. In my situation, if I have a connection to my ISP, I have a connection to the internet and access to all internet services. That was both confirmed by my ISP, as well as my experience- again, as I have described repeatedly.




Incorrect. That does not describe Mac operation, nor does it match anything I have described above.



Huh? Sorry, but that is gibberish and nonsensical to me.



Not exactly. My internet connection goes down momentarily, on occasion. I manually restore the connection and internet connection is resumed almost immediately to cable modem. After this, it takes a long time for the Mac to get the internet connection. This problem is the subject of this thread.



No. The Safari cache is not involved.



No. It is a Mac-related problem. Again, see previous posts.



No. Again, see previous posts.



No. When the Mac has 192 ip address, and no internet connection, the Mac is very much aware that it has no internet connection, and correctly reports such. However, getting "stuck" on 192 address with no internet connection is one of the problems. The Mac should get an ip address with internet access automatically and quickly, but does not unless a long time has passed or manual intervention renews DCHP lease from the cable modem.



cwtnospam, Could I make a suggestion? Instead of changing the events to match your opinions, please accept the information I have given in detail to describe what is going on. Frequently, it seems you either misunderstand or ignore some of the things I have described in detail above.

I have tried to give only facts and not jump to any wrong conclusions. But, if you disagree with anything I have stated that might be a wrong conclusion, please detail your reason for your opinion.

That way, everyone can understand what you are saying and we can all stay on the same page trying to understand what is causing the problems I am seeing. OK?


Thank you again, cwtnospam, and thank you for your patience with me. :)

Thank you to everyone else reading and posting in this thread, also! I appreciate everyone's help here and hope that we can identify and solve each of the specific problems I have identified and described in this thread...

It was set to auto. I changed it yesterday as you suggested.

It has not changed anything as far as the problems that I am seeing. The same problems remain.

(Throughput is the same in speed tests, but in my imagination it seems that some webpages load faster- but I can't say for sure about that.)