Diagnosing Suns Connection Issues

Diagnosing Suns Connection Issues

While there is no way to diagnose everyone's connection issues in one document, here are the basic things you can check to find where your problems might be...

RECEIVER CAN CONNECT FOR SOFTWARE UPDATES BUT NO S.U.N.S. CONNECTION
This is usually a good indication that your router is blocking UDP access to your receiver.

The easiest way to fix this is usually to access your routers firewall configuration and change the configuration to Low level protection or No protection. Just be sure that the Windows firewall is enabled on all computers connected to the router before doing this.

You may also have to open UDP Port 80 on some routers.

There are some ISPs out there that block all UDP connections. This is usually only apparent when all other methods of connecting have been tried. There is nothing you can do about this except to complain to your ISP and/or change your ISP.

KEEP YOUR CONNECTION ALIVE
While it shouldn't be needed, some ISPs kill your connection if they don't see TCP traffic for a certain amount of time (usually anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour). If your router has a "Keep Alive" or "Keep Connected" function, enable it.

This will usually stop the ISP from killing your connection and the router having to re-establish it's internet connection.

Some ISPs will still kill your connection to obtain a new IP address every few days. This can not be stopped. But, it is far better to have this happen every few days than every few minutes or hours.

HARDWIRED? DISABLE THE WIRELESS PART OF YOUR ROUTER
If you are hardwired to your wireless router, go into your router setup and disable the wireless portion of the router. The wireless part takes up processing time on your router and could slow down wired connections.

NAT ENABLED ON YOUR ROUTER?
If you have NAT enabled on your router UDP may not work at all, as there are problems with some versions of firmware in routers that keep them from handling UDP in the translation tables, and this becomes worse with more computers on your network.

LOOK AT YOUR NETWORK
Personal routers such as LinkSys, NetGear, etc. are generally very slow devices which really cannot handle a lot of traffic from several systems at the same time. Typically, you should restrict your local network to 5 systems or less.

FILE SHARING PROGRAMS CAN KILL CONNECTIONS
If you run any file sharing program on a regular basis, most people might as well get use to the fact that they will always be eating up bandwidth on your network connection.

Turning off those programs after they have been running for any period of time at all does not stop the users on the Internet from pounding on your connection.

This will cause lost packets and just generally lousy connections to the internet.

Testing shows, that after the file sharing program has been running longer than 3 hours, it takes over 24 hours for your internet connection to return to normal.

When you have a dynamic IP address (as many users do), you can also inherit an IP address from a user who had been running one of these programs and also inherit the flooded connection, even if you have never run one of these programs.

WATCH YOUR COMPUTER CONNECTIONS
When your computer is sitting idle without the web browser or mail system open, there should not be any activity on your network connection.

To see if there is activity, click on Start, Settings, Network Connections. In the window that comes up, Right click on your network connection and select Properties. Check the "Show icon in notification area when connected" check box and click OK.

If either of the mini computer screens on the icon shown in the task bar is lighting up, some program on your computer is using bandwidth. If both screens are constantly lit up, something is REALLY using bandwidth and what it is needs to be investigated.

The other way to check is to simply look at the lights on your router. If one is constantly flashing, then something is accessing the internet on that connection. If there is no activity on a connection, the light will be a steady light, not flashing.

CHECK THE COMPUTERS ON THE NETWORK
If you are having a ton of trouble with your internet connection for your receiver, you may need to look at the computers that are on your network. They may be connecting to auto-update software, or something else is auto connecting for some reason.

On a good, clean XP system there should only be about 18 to 25 background processes running, as reported in the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del, under the "Processes" tab).

Windows XP, by default, has several processes which run in background, that can cause odd problems with UDP based communications as well as security issues.

For XP users:
Go to your Control Panel and double-click the "Administrative Tools" ICON. Then double-click the "Services" ICON.

This will show you a list of processes Windows will run or start at boot time. Some will show as "Running". To alter the state of any of the listed processes, simply right-click on it, and select "Properties" from the pop-up menu.

The processes that access the internet that you can safely "Disable" are as follows:

Automatic Updates (this is one nasty program and can eat a ton of bandwidth at times)
Internet Connection Sharing (NOTE: unless you use your computer so that other computers access the Internet through it)
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Messenger
Remote Registry Service
Routing and Remote Access (unless your computer is also acting as a router for the LAN)
Telnet (unless you want to be able to telnet to your computer from a remote location......not recommended to leave enabled)

All others are at your discretion, but take care! Windows will allow you to shut off services that can keep your computer from booting. The ones you must not touch have RPC in the name.

Note that computers such as Dell, HP and others come with over 60 processes running. Some of which access Dell and HP for updates automatically. It is up to the individual user to establish what programs are bandwidth hogs and shut them down.

I hope this post helps some people track down the problems they are having connecting or staying connected to S.U.N.S.



Note that the above makes the assumption that you can already connect to S.U.N.S but are having trouble keeping the connection

thanks nighthawk

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