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For the past few months, my connection has been dropping for six to twelve hours per day almost every day and I can't tell if it's me, Comcast, or something else. We tried customer support, but of course, they diagnosed it as perfectly fine.

I live in south-eastern Pennsylvania, and there's massive SEPTA train construction going on. We live a few blocks away from a station, so we tried asking if this was the culprit but didn't get a straight answer.

The lights look like this when the connection goes out: 'PC' light flickers occasionally (the yellow ethernet cable is always connected correctly), 'Cable' light goes out, and sending/receiving lights flash at the same time.

This leads me to believe it's the construction, but I'm still not sure and I'm getting really sick of this. Is there a way I can diagnose whether or not this is an issue with Lubuntu?

Thanks.

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    If the connection between the switch/router and computer drops out, then it's probably not Comcast (strange, I know). Does it work fine on Windows? Does the same cable and port on the switch/router end work on another computer?
    – TheWanderer
    Sep 14, 2016 at 23:29
  • When you say "Cable light goes out" are you referring to lights on your cable modem? If so the manufacturer of your cable modem can explain what the lights mean and it's not a Lubuntu issue
    – Elder Geek
    Sep 14, 2016 at 23:37
  • New and probably last update: There's three cables that connect to the box outside, and there's two splitters between all of them. I connected the two cables in the house to new ports, and I think it helped. They're all in cool and dry locations, so it just didn't occur to me that they might have worn out. I'll also be buying a new ethernet cable. Thank you all for your input!
    – user558902
    Sep 18, 2016 at 20:10

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Possibly Ubuntu related, but unlikely.

I suspect hardware failure. I just had this problem and router caused it. You could test. First bypass the router, plug pc direct to ethernet on cable modem. That will rule out router.

Possible your cable modem drops if signal is week. They cannot diagnose that easily. 4 years ago we had that and I had to call technician 3 times before he got there in time to see what was wrong. There was water into the junction box.

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  • Hi everyone, sorry for the late response. The plot has thickened--over the past few days whenever it went out, it would come back in about 5-10 minutes after shutting it off and using the reset button twice. The ethernet to pc light on the modem flickers before it does this weird thing, so I'll try buying a new cable (current is only 3 years old). It also rains a lot here, so it could be the box too. I don't have any Windows machines anymore, sorry. But I will try meccooll's suggestions if it goes out again.
    – user558902
    Sep 17, 2016 at 18:11
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When internet drops do tracepath -n 8.8.8.8 and see how far it'll get. If you don't get anything at all grab your default Gateway from netstat -rn (Line with Destination and Genmast all 0's) and see if you can ping that.

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