Hi. I've got a weird one. At first I thought my Linksys WRT3200ACM was faulty (since it did have very dim LEDs, and was probably sold for a reason, but it wasn't cheap either, bought on an online auction about 3 years ago).
This was about a year ago when I noticed that it would just drop out for no reason, and it wouldn't turn back on for several minutes, regardless if I rebooted it or not, so that led me to believe it was going bad. Otherwise I didn't have any other issues, no drops in speeds or something like that.
I got myself another one just like it, which I got for cheap this time (I bought is as a replacement for my other router), and at first it worked flawlessly, but then a week or so later it started showing the same symptoms, so this time I suspected my VPN to be the culprit, maybe some "maintenance" they didn't want shown as "Offline" on their otherwise near perfect 99.x% uptime score or something. I asked them, and they were clueless and didn't help much.
So, I pretty much ignored it and kept going, and occasionally it did go down, and sometimes it could be weeks between these issues even, so I brushed it off as just being something spooky going on.
Until a few days ago, as I was doing some maintenance on my server, which caused me to close down qBittorrent on both the server and my Workstation since I was balancing my drives.
Once that was done, something peculiar happened that I didn't see before. The second I opened up qBittorrent on my workstation, the connection just upped and died.
Hell of a coincident I thought, so I started looking. Sure enough, it took nearly 10 minutes for it to get back online again (Reboot regardless, weirdly enough).
I did shut down qB during this wait.
I tried again, same thing, instantly killing my connection.
I tried again, same exact thing, and the odds of that being connection related is pretty darn slim, so I have narrowed down the problem to being qB.
But, here's the weird part. I run the exact same version on my server. This don't crash the connection.
But, the exception is that I'm running a VPN client software on that, so it's basically a VPN tunnel through the router.
The router is actually running WireGuard as a safenet and also since I'm using my phone and the occasional random computer and whatnot.
This all makes sense that qB would go through this tunnel and not directly through the router.
But, here's the weird part: I installed the VPN software client on my workstation, and made sure it ran normally. No problems.
But, the second I opened qB the router died and another 10 minutes was wasted waiting for it to come back again.
I can't for the life of me figure this one out.
I did check qB's settings for connectivity and specifically selected the VPN connection, so it shouldn't go any other way to connect to the outside world.
Both machines has two Ethernet connectors, but the server is only connected to one network, my workstation is on two different networks, but has no gateway specified for the other network so not to connect to the Internet through this. My second router is on that network, also running OpenWRT + WireGuard, but no routing between the two from the inside. That is just connected to the LAN port just as the rest of the PCs.
There's nothing else in the way, and everything else is working, it's just qB that's doing this weird thing on this machine. I probably could downgrade qB and maybe that'll fix it, but I would love to know what's causing this issue.
I'm using qBittorrent Enhanced Edition v5.3.10 so it's not the regular one.
I keep getting stuck on that even despite being on VPN, it still crashes the router... Doesn't make sense!
Any thoughts anyone?
I forgot to mention also that with qB still running, the connection comes back after a few minutes, maybe 10 or so, and after that it seems to be stable.
Perhaps some dips in speed or latency as some pages are slow to load (web), but it could be the VPN too. Haven't looked into it yet) at times, but overall I get fair speeds and so.