I’ve been working on developing a router build using EasyTether. The problem I’m being faced with, is it will randomly disconnect me from the internet, generally for around 2 minutes, during which I cannot load any new pages. However, last night I had it disconnect me for over 3 1/2 hours. During that time I did a lot of testing, and here’s all the info I’ve been able to compile about the disconnection bug:
- When I ping the EasyTether interface (192.168.117.1) it takes between 2-12ms. There’s no difference in the ping time or latency if the bug is happening or not.
- I can ping the router and it gives me < 1ms latency. That doesn’t change either.
- It’s not carrier related, because I’ve had it happen with or without a VPN running on the phone. I also turned on the VPN on the my phone during one of the times of disconnection and it didn’t solve the problem.
- Live connections are completely unaffected. During the 3 1/2 hour disconnection last night, I had a Minecraft Server, Zoom Call, and YT Live Video playing. (I started all three services and just left them open waiting for the disconnect bug to happen.) An interesting note on this, is I’ve never had live connections open previously, and I’ve also never had the disconnect bug last for more than 2 minutes. This time I had 3 live connections open, and the disconnect bug lasted until I changed the MTU from 1500 to 1464, which then reset the network connections.
- I’m able to send and receive messages on Slack during the disconnect bug. I was running Fiddler, and Slack is using GET and POST requests. So I’m wondering if possibly it has something to do with the fact that regular webpages are sending a CONNECT request?
- Sometimes I’m able to load google.com. As soon as I have an open google.com connection, I can do as many google searches as I want. But if I try to click a link on the google results page, the links will never load.
- This happens across both AT&T and T-Mobile, with or without a VPN, on different phones. So I know it’s not specifically related to one carrier or hardware device.
- I’ve tried both the OpenSSL and Tiny variant of EasyTether, and that doesn’t seem to make any difference.
- I’ve used a USB 3.0 as well as USB 2.0 to USB-C cable to connect the phone to the router, and that hasn’t made any difference at all.
- I thought it might be a DNS problem, so I changed the DNS Servers in the
WAN interface to use OpenDNS, CloudFlare, and Google, (main and secondary, so 6 total) and that didn’t change anything.
- I changed the MTU from 1500 to 1464 (I read somewhere that helps) and that didn’t change anything.
- EasyTether doesn’t use IPv6 so I used the ImageBuilder and removed the IPv6 support.
- I used WireShark to track the different packets which were failing or having errors. I cannot find any type of difference between the packets during the disconnect and packets not during the disconnect.
- I used Fiddler, and with that I was able to see more requests which didn’t have the 200 http code. However, I’ve never used Fiddler or WireShark before, so I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for, or how that information helps me.
At this point I’m out of ideas. Any input would be appreciated. Hopefully somebody has some idea of what’s going on here.