Router Head Scratcher

Had a strange router problem this week, still scratching my head.
While chasing a single device experiencing wifi connectivity problems, decided to power cycle my Orbi router and satellites. Of course, when the router re-booted, nothing worked. So I reset the three Orbi units and did a full setup. Everything looked normal. Speed test on the Orbi app worked fine, and a browser based speedtest was good. All devices seemed to be working fine. Then my wife complained she was having internet problems on her iPad. Turned out TuneInRadio was not working. Checked my iPhone, same thing. Every other online app I checked worked fine, including streaming Netflix. When troubleshooting, noted Orbi app showed router as being offline, but this didn’t make sense. I then connected to VPN on the iPhone. TuneIn began working??? Went through reseting only the Orbi router and setting up again, everything came up great.
Puzzler to me is why TuneIn worked through the VPN, but not directly?

My first thought is that there is a problem with the route from your ISP to TuneIn, or a problem with a router sitting between your ISP and TuneIn. When you used the VPN your connection to TuneIn was different.

My second thought is the the router is blocking traffic to TuneIn, because it was accidentally flagged as malicious (does the Orbi do this?). When you used your VPN your router had no visibility into the traffic and let it through.

If this is still happening try using a different router (if you have one), or plugging your laptop directly into the modem via Ethernet. Does TuneIn work? If so then your router is likely blocking the traffic. If not then it isn’t something you can fix (though you could try getting your ISP to fix it).

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Actually, resetting the router the second time cleared all problems. The post is simply to help me figure out what I was seeing.

Whatever caused the problem was related to the Orbi rebooting in some strange configuration. No changes were made after a standard setup. No blocking was set up. The problem was noted a few hours later. And the fix was to just do the same steps to reset and setup the router.

The problem was DNS Some things worked when the hard coded ip was in or the routing was in cache. The easy way to tell in the future is to ping a DNS Ip and any website. If the IP works but the site doesn’t, the DNS is not working.

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Yep, I was going to suggest DNS.I have my router dealing out different DNS servers than my ISP’s