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Oops... The LAN Crashed!
Posted: Mar 30, 2026 8:44 PM (UTC)
Well... you read the title.
I had a bit of an oopsie this week. For some reason my router decided to start giving up the ghost.
The Beginning
It all started about a week ago when I set up my Bitcoin Pruned Node for fun. It worked fine, but soon afterwards, ping times skyrocketed from about ~10ms to 1.1.1.1, all the way to ~500ms. I originally tried disabling the node and soon after the network seemingly stabilized. So, I chalked it up to an overloaded NAT table. Bitcoin uses a lot of long-lived connections to peers, and I had the reasoning that hundreds of connections to nodes, combined with a lot of open tabs on devices in the house might have pushed the NAT table to it's limits. I lowered the connection count to 20 peers, and it worked fine... for a while.
Guys... I don't think this is normal...
2 days ago, shit really hit the fan. The pings not only went to ~1000ms this time, but the Bitcoin node was seemingly not an issue. Disabling it did nothing. I once again suspected NAT, since pings to other devices on the same LAN worked fine, while the outside WAN was unreachable. So I restarted the router, stopped devices, VMs, etc., but nothing worked.
Seemingly at random, the pings stabilized at ~40ms, but quickly rose back up. It wasn't until I removed the router and configured my modem to act as one that the pings stabilized... for some obscure reason. Plugging the router back in, and the pings crashed again. This time with random packet loss for extra taste!
A Solution... kinda
After about 2 days of this back and forth, I decided: "Screw it!" and switch to the modem as the router. It took some reconfiguration to get my homelab up and running again, but it works now.
This is where I am now. I have no clue what was the original issue, and I might just get a new router. Unless this modem can handle all of the traffic.
Well, this was my fun week experience. I probably lost some emails in the process due to the downtime, but oh well. It is what it is.