Webcam on - Network Cable disconnect ?

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Bit of wierdness here that i cant seem to solve or find any information about.

My sister has a USB Logitech Quickcam Messenger webcam attached to her machine, however whenever she fres it up, all the machines on the network get a "Network Cable Disconnected" message and momentarily lose their internet connection.

I cant for the life of me work out why either, all machines are running XP Pro and running off a Linksys BEFSX41 Router if that helps at all.

--Jakk:t

[BipolarBill]

Sister again? :p Move out! Get a nice cottage in the Cotswolds. :t

This is really odd. The camera may be flooding the router and tripping the firewall. It is a firewall router, right?

[Cyan]

Linksys routers have many problems, I had the same problem before I upgraded to a Cisco router. Your best bet is to try different firmware or a different router (Netopid or Cisco are recommended top quality, then netgear etc...) The router is overloading and crashing momentarily, there is nothing you can do other than those other two solutions. Mine did it regardless of firewall/port forwarding states.

You can check here for new firmware/fixes that may come along to fix your problem.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/linksys

[r8500]

hmmm, Cisco and netopia routers seem a little over the edge for a basic home network.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Originally posted by BipolarBill

This is really odd. The camera may be flooding the router and tripping the firewall. It is a firewall router, right?

Yeah, as for firmware, i'll look into it, but the last few firmware updates from Linksys have been a bit on the nasty side from what i gather. Also, this didnt seem to happen at all when the camera was installed on the third machine (Celeron @ 450, Windows XP Pro).

As for little Sis, with any luck i'll be relocating to another part of the county in the next few months, the bad news, might have to leave the computer behind :(

--Jakk:t

[Cyan]

If its through a program, different versions and or updates may also solve the problem.

[NDD]

NIC/USB resources conflict ?

[ahurtt]

Hmm, a shot in the dark here. . .is this Linksys a 10/100 ethernet auto-detecting variety? And what is the speed of the NIC in the machine that has the troublesome webcam hooked up to it? If it's also a 10/100 NIC, maybe you could try to throttle it down in the device manager to always use only 10Mbps and perhaps prevent it from overloading the router? It would of course slow down communications to and from this machine on your LAN but I assume you probably have a cable modem as your WAN connection hooked up to this router and you aren't gonna get more than 10Mbps throughput at that bottleneck anyway. Grasping at straws maybe but like I said. . .a shot in the dark.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Originally posted by ahurtt
Hmm, a shot in the dark here. . .is this Linksys a 10/100 ethernet auto-detecting variety?

Nope, its a Via Rhine II onboard, funnily enough the machine did have a Linksys card in it until a few months ago and that worked fine.

I'll try reducing the speed though, when i can get my sister off the dang machine :mad:

--Jakk:t

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Well, reducing the NIC speed hasnt helped any. I've done a quick scan around today for updated drivers and though i found one for the webcam, the issue remains.

However, as you can see from the attached image, there does look to be soem sharing of IRQ's between the USB and NIC, which i might look into (though im loathe to)

--Jakk:t

[BipolarBill]

That's not unusual. Even if it were odd, how could that possibly affect remote PCs?

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Process of elimination really, as i havent got a clue.

Ive been pokign aroudn and it looks as though "cable Disconnect" problems are fairly common with Via Rhine NIC's, however the causes and symptoms are wide ranging and none that ive encountered are anywhere near similar to mine.

I'm just about at the point of chucking in a space PCI-NIC and seeing what that does.

--Jakk:t

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Just to let y'all know, the disconnect was being caused by the router rebooting itself every-time the web-cam connection started.

Upgraded firmware and a few days testing seems to have confirmed the problem is now gone.

--Jakk:t

[NDD]

Originally posted by Bigjakkstaffa
Just to let y'all know, the disconnect was being caused by the router rebooting itself every-time the web-cam connection started.

Upgraded firmware and a few days testing seems to have confirmed the problem is now gone.

--Jakk:t
Dats Weird:confused:
Glad you have it fixed anyway :t :cool:

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Linksys firmware seems to be full of wierdness and oddities no matter what the version.

The version i'm currently using was written by the Linksys user community and is regarded as the most stable version availiable. If part-timers can fix these things you would ecpect the manufacturer to be able to

--Jakk:t