I have been seeing periodic drops in internet access from LAN connected devices lately (last 2 months), and I haven’t been able to figure about exactly what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, and it resolves itself after a few hours.
- I can access the internet from my router
- All devices on LAN can reach each other, both wired and WiFi
- All devices on LAN can reach router, both wired and WiFi
- I haven’t changed anything in router settings
- I haven’t added new devices to my local network
- I can’t find any IP conflicts
- It’s a simple flat network with two APs, a single switch, no VLAN separation


it’s a gl.inet brume2 running openwrt, I SSH into it and can ping outwards to anything and my speed test from the CLI tells me i have 900Mbit available
Ah, gotcha, cool. If it’s OpenWrt and you have shell access, that should make it easier to diagnose. When you are checking that you don’t have connectivity from your local LAN device, you tried pinging the same out-there-on-the-Internet host, and that failed?
Yes I use the same destination fro testing on my laptop and the router.
I think I’ve narrowed it down to a DNS issue, I just don’t know exactly what. I can ping outwards from my laptop when using IPs but not names. But my laptop can reach my DNS.
For whatever reason ISPs tend (at least in here) to be pretty bad at keeping their DNS services up and running and that could cause issues you’re having. Easy test is to switch your laptop DNS servers to cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1) or opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) and see if the problem goes away. Or even faster by doing single queries from terminal, like ‘dig a google.com @1.1.1.1’.
If that helps you can change your router WAN DNS server to something than what operator offers you via DHCP. I personally use opendns servers, but cloudflare or google (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) are common pretty decent choices too.