Eircom Router Zyxel P-660HW-T1 v3 and Windows 8 problems

rmacm

My sister got a new laptop with Windows 8 on it, initially she had some trouble connecting to the internet e.g. it would work for maybe an hour or so but eventually stop. I took a look and the laptop seemed ok (was getting a valid IP address via DHCP etc) but wasn't able to ping anything on the internet.

Other devices connected to the same router worked fine, I rebooted the router and the laptop worked ok again for an hour or so. I checked the logs on the router and found some messages like this:

IP x.x.x.x exceeds max number of sessions per host

A quick google revealed that you can increase the max number of NAT/Firewall sessions allowed per user so I increased it from 1024 which I thought was high enough to 4096 which removes the limit according to the router documentation.

Has anyone ever come across this issue before particularly with Windows 8? Is it normal that Windows 8 opens so many sessions? I've ran several scans with Windows Defender so I don't think the machine is infected with any malware but still I think it is slightly weird behaviour.

Spear

Have you tried disabling IP v6 and seeing if that saves on the session count?

rmacm

Good idea, will give it a go tomorrow. Not even sure if the router supports IPv6 anyway but will disable it on the Windows 8 machine anyway and see what happens.

cbyrne11

rmacm wrote: »

Good idea, will give it a go tomorrow. Not even sure if the router supports IPv6 anyway but will disable it on the Windows 8 machine anyway and see what happens.

Hi, sorry I know this is a few months old, just wondering if that worked, have the same problem with a windows 8 laptop, only seems to happen with eircom router, upc one in my old house was fine.

Have changed the max number of sessions on the Nat number to 4096 but still seeing this on the log.

rmacm

Hi

Disabling IPv6 seemed to do the trick for that particular problem. The laptop was a bit knackered also I think, constantly rebooted unfortunately I didn't have time to troubleshoot it before it was time to head back to work after xmas.

cbyrne11

rmacm wrote: »

Hi

Disabling IPv6 seemed to do the trick for that particular problem. The laptop was a bit knackered also I think, constantly rebooted unfortunately I didn't have time to troubleshoot it before it was time to head back to work after xmas.

I'll try that later, I think it's an issue with the routers that eircom give out though, I had no problem with UPC, and searching the internet a lot of people seem to have had the same problem with these zyxel routers that eircom give out! seem to have been happening since windows 7 was released.

rmacm

cbyrne11 wrote: »

I'll try that later, I think it's an issue with the routers that eircom give out though, I had no problem with UPC, and searching the internet a lot of people seem to have had the same problem with these zyxel routers that eircom give out! seem to have been happening since windows 7 was released.

Hmm weird whenever I visit home I don't tend to have any issues using it with Windows 7 granted I might have IPv6 disabled there also. Granted I tend to use Linux mostly so I may not have noticed.

cbyrne11

rmacm wrote: »

Hmm weird whenever I visit home I don't tend to have any issues using it with Windows 7 granted I might have IPv6 disabled there also. Granted I tend to use Linux mostly so I may not have noticed.

Tried that last night and it doesn't seemed to have worked, managed to narrow it down a bit more, it's fine until I watch something on Netflix, I can watch one episode and then it will crash and I have to restart the Router, I checked netstat on command prompt and it only shows about 15-20 connections so don't understand how I'm exceeded the max number of connections.

Maybe it's something to do with microsoft silverlight.