Balance 20 + external router as AP: brief intermittent loss of internet connectivity

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I bought a used Balance 20 to use as my primary router. One of the ethernet ports is wired into an ethernet port on a TP-Link Archer C9 wireless router. I have DHCP disabled on the Archer and I have assigned the Archer a static LAN address of 192.168.1.253, which is outside of the range of IPs the Peplink is configured to serve via DHCP.

The effect of this setup is that wireless clients can connect to the wifi networks created by the Archer but receive IPs from the Peplink, and use the Peplink as their gateway.

I’m finding that when I connect my PC (Ubuntu Linux 20.04.1) via wifi, my internet connectivity (from the perspective of the PC) drops out every couple hours for about 10-20 seconds – just long enough to be disruptive. When I bypass the Archer by connecting directly to the Peplink via ethernet cable, the PC’s internet connection is solid all day long.

When I used to use the Archer as the only device (wifi / DHCP / gateway), my connection was stable all day, even when I was on wifi.

I’m wondering if anyone here has some experience that would help me in troubleshooting this. Obviously it’s possible the Archer is the problem, but it appears to me that the wifi connection to the Archer is solid and something is wrong in the network communication between it and the Peplink.

Thanks in advance.

2

Test with another computer or a tablet, just for good luck.

Trace when things are bad:

The Balance 20 can do a full trace of all bits on the wire. Perhaps when the computer seems to be offline, immediately start this trace. You’ll need to be familiar with PCAP logs and/or Wireshark.

A less techie trace uses the logs in the router. Setup an outbound firewall rule that logs everything going out from your computer. When it seems to be offline, start the trace. Better still have the trace run all time and have a script do repeated pings every few seconds.

Are there any logs in the TP-Link router that you can look at?

Also look at cpu usage. Peplink has a live display of cpu usage, perhaps the TP-Link does too?

3

I would replace the archer with a Peplink AP. Thanks

1 Like
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@Michael234 @AskTim I’m seeing some evidence that my PC is just intermittently dropping the wifi connection itself from the Archer so I’m going to focus on that for troubleshooting for now (trying other AP devices, logging the local interface, etc) and will report back here if I determine that the problem only exists if the Balance is in the equation. Thanks for your help!

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Peplink product bots have been deployed. :joy: