DNS issue appears after 8-12 hours of AOT-4221SR router runtime - Restarting fixes the problem temporarily

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t0xic0der

t0xic0der

Messages
9
Location
Pune, MH
ISP
Airtel XStream Fiber
Hi everyone,

I have been a lurker on IBF for some time now and decided to create an account when I finally faced an issue that I could not find answers to. Please bear with my inexperience and let me know if more information is needed from my end. I have been a subscriber to Airtel XStream Fiber for around 4 months and the experience has been usually great for the first 8 to 12 hours of the router runtime. Once the router runtime crosses that mark, the network starts feeling sluggish and many popular sites start reporting DNS_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED issues. Even the router's admin page becomes inaccessible so I am literally forced to unplug and replug the router and the issue temporarily goes away. I have changed my router thrice - first I had the Dragon Path 707GR1 first which I switched over to Nokia G140WF and then finally to the Sercomm AOT-4221SR - but to no avail which makes me think that it is probably not an issue with the router itself.

Here's some more information on my setup -
  • I have a TP-Link Archer C80 AC1900 router, running in Access Point Mode, attached to the Sercomm AOT-4221SR router using an ethernet cable. The DHCP Server on the latter is disabled while the one on the former is enabled as it provides a better range and speed to the devices.
  • The DNS is statically set on the Sercomm AOT-4221SR router to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 on the LAN section of the Network page. I am not sure if the settings over there take effect as the DNS is still set to that of the Airtel XStream Fiber as seen on the WAN Status section of the Device Information page.
  • I have changed the addressing scheme from 192.168.1.0/24 to 192.168.0.0/24 for the entire network as one of my internal networks uses the 192.168.1.0/24 addressing scheme - which essentially means that the router admin page is now available on 192.168.0.1 instead of 192.168.1.1.
  • I have tried disabling IPv6 to make the network exclusively IPv4 (as I have seen in many responses on IBF) but that apparently did not solve anything. Also, I did not try IPv6 exclusively because of the obvious reason of multiple websites being still dependent on IPv4 addresses alone even in 2023.
  • I have one Mini PC (Asus PN51-S1) running at least 5 virtual machines at any given point in time, connected to the TP-Link Archer C80 AC1900 router using an ethernet cable and all of these virtual machines are connected to the same using internal bridging on the virtual machine host.
  • Apart from that, I have an average device count of at least 5 concurrent devices connected to the TP-Link Archer C80 AC1900 router wirelessly on the 5 GHz access point and these devices include things like desktops, smart television, smartphones, laptops, Raspberry Pis etc.
  • I have tried to reach out to the Airtel technician folks numerous times but all they have managed to do every single time was to reset the router or simply ask me to restart it myself. I know that restarting the router frequently will remove the sluggishness but I would not call that a solution.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
 
@nishantt6969 the thing is that I have faced the same issue with the two other routers that I had before. What are the chances that switching this router off for a new one will solve the problem?

@Lolita_Magnum I could host a bind server in one of those virtual machines but I do not think that can bypass the upstream DNS enforced by Airtel's vendor locked-in router configuration. Correct me if I am mistaken.

Thanks both for your prompt responses!
 
@nishantt6969, here's an excerpt from my post.

I have changed my router thrice - first I had the Dragon Path 707GR1 first which I switched over to Nokia G140WF and then finally to the Sercomm AOT-4221SR - but to no avail which makes me think that it is probably not an issue with the router itself.
Click to expand...
 
I want to provide an update on the situation.

Apparently, the router goes unresponsive entirely and the reason I get the DNS_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error is that my client device (a desktop computer) is connected to another network using ethernet. This network is self-contained and is not connected to the open internet. When the router goes unresponsive, this becomes the "fallback network" of sorts and as that network is isolated - I get a DNS_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error.

To further confirm this occurrence, I coerced the AirTel engineers to change my upstream DNS from their custom DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 4.2.2.2. It temporarily looked like the problem was solved after a reboot for the changes to take effect. But it is after some hours I check the reachability to the router as well as the normal internet performance that I figured that the problem was not resolved and still needed attention.

The original problem now is of the Sercomm AOT-4221SR router becoming unresponsive entirely after a period of 8-12 hours of uptime.
 
You can specifically ask the engineer to change your ONT device to a different model. See if that helps
 
@t0xic0der what do you mean by unresponsive? Have you tried manually adding DNS on the OS level?

off topic: Why did @nishantt6969 get banned?
 
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