Here’s another insufferable explanation of further technical curiosity. I continue to run on the Verizon-supplied G3100 Wi-Fi router for gigabit internet service. Despite my concerns about security, I like being able to check on it from my phone.
Which I did yesterday, when the Epson ET-2985 unexpectedly spit out a piece of paper. Telling the printer in a commanding voice, “Eat your own output!” I have scanned the page.
Signal strength fair? Uh, the router and the printer are only six feet apart in the home office. Pulling out my phone and running the Verizon Home app, I saw the Epson printer was on the 2.4 GHz network. My best guess was the router, which is set to automatically move devices between Wi-Fi channels, must have kicked it off the 5 GHz network for some reason.
As I was looking at that, the app suddenly said the router was offine. Yikes. Yeah, it bounces itself every so often. That’s another complaint I have. I’ve seen error messages in the router’s log in the past that had me chasing down a possible bug in the firmware, but this time I didn’t see the error.
The time was near midnight, so maybe Verizon was running a maintenance routine. What’s interesting to me was the way the printer provided a warning of router trouble.
After everything had settled down, the router’s Wi-Fi signal strength was, as expected, excellent. But note that the printer’s DHCP-assigned IP address changed from .213 to .253. Renewal of .213 must have failed for some reason. Perhaps it wasn’t attempted. I’ll see what I can find in the router’s DHCP log.
I have long envied your setup, but so far haven’t been ambitious enough to emulate it. My father’s DSL service in Arizona was awful. I had it replaced with 20 Mbps ADSL and that worked very well for the remaining time I was staying there.
You probably know this, but I supply my own Ubiquiti router at home, which I can check on remotely, and recently swapped my in-laws’ router for an eBay purchased Dream Machine router, which I can now check on (and administer) remotely. The distressing thing I have learned is just how unstable their DSL connection is.