Hello,
All of a sudden, around 3am on the 21st December, my internet connection through Virgin Media Super Hub 3 stopped working.
End of November I finally gave in and upgraded to the Super Hub 3 from the basic Virgin Media Modem I had clung to all this time (hearing such wonderful endorsement of the Virgin Hubs on forums ) as I was told I would not get the benefit of faster speeds without it (I know the 493AH is only 100MB ports, not 1GB, so I won’t get full benefit without upgrading that, I’m looking to upgrade to an RB1100AHx2 in the near future as I’d like a rackmount one with as many or more network ports), everything seemed alright, it was a fairly straight forward upgrade, had to phone up to “activate it” after that and putting into modem mode, my connection was back up and working with my mikrotik again, probably the following day (knowing how slow Virgin are).
A few weeks humming along, then a couple of nights ago, it stopped, no rhyme or reason, I’d not made any changes to my RB, I did the usual, reboots, resets, etc. I looked at m RB and I saw there was a new Winbox and newer firmware so upgraded just on the off chance, didn’t help.
Plugging a PC directly into the Virgin Media “Super” Hub 3, it gets a public IP and can access the internet, put it back to my RB, it no longer gets an IP, restart the “Hub” and it gets an IP (same one it always gets), still no internet. I notice that I get a /23 subnet for the Mikrotik but a /24 subnet for my PC, which seems a bit odd, wondering if that’s the problem I alter the MAC address on that ethernet port to the next one logical one after those currently in use on my RB, I get a new IP, this one is a /24, try again, nope still can’t get anywhere from the RB. I note it’s the same DHCP server IP address all the time (not unusual, just saying), note I’m referring to the public DHCP information, not talking about local ranges (192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.100.0/24), it’s in Modem Mode and passes a public IP to the RB.
After establishing a connection, I can ping the default gateway given by the DHCP for a while, but then it stops, getting timeouts and the occasional unreachable instead now.
VM tech support obviously go through their script sheet, and have me reset everything, ask if I have Windows 10, etc. etc. urgh… and I get hung up on twice, such quality first line support, can barely operate a telephone, so wish we could get to backoffice/3rd level support for advanced users.
So I’m trying to think up anything else I can do to figure out where this is going wrong… I put a DST NAT rule on to see if that works… unsurprisingly no, but on the Statistics screen, I do see activity, so my RB sees a request coming in over the internet, it just appears to be blocked responding.
Has anyone else had this problem? Is there anything else I can try to narrow this down or have I covered all I can and it’s either some very odd faulty Super Hub 3 or some odd problem with Virgin’s DHCP server/switches/routing, maybe asymmetric routing or some purposeful black hole they’re sending my RB into?
Due to the behavior of the LEDs lights on the Super Hub 3, I believe it has had a firmware upgrade recently as before the lights would be on, but now only a “mode” LED is lit, the others don’t come on unless there’s a problem, and on one support page it says on older firmware they may stay lit but this will change in later firmware.
