Loosing internet when the USB HDD is plugged into router

[infamous_pb]

For the past week, I've been having some intermittent internet connectivity. It would either cease (no pages would load at all) or it would slow down to a crawl (I would run speed tests and it would range from half speed to hardly any speed at all). The problem has been happening more and more now. With the modem plugged directly to my desktop, it works fine. I tried unplugging everything (USB and Ethernet) from the router and tried one device at a time. When I plug in my USB HDD (Seagate SRD00F2 2TB) into the router, after about 15-30mins, the internet problems come. As soon as I unplug the USB HDD from the router, the problems go away. I’ve replicated this scenario and the same thing happens each time. If I power off/on the router, it would be fine for about 15-30 mins and the same thing happens again unless I unplug the USB HDD from the router. What could be the cause of this?

I’ve tried various firmware versions and it does the same thing on each (5.354, 4.354, 4.270, and Merlin’s 270.26).

Is this a router problem or a USB HDD problem? Is something shorting something out?

Any help would be great.

 

[RMerlin]

For the past week, I've been having some intermittent internet connectivity. It would either cease (no pages would load at all) or it would slow down to a crawl (I would run speed tests and it would range from half speed to hardly any speed at all). The problem has been happening more and more now. With the modem plugged directly to my desktop, it works fine. I tried unplugging everything (USB and Ethernet) from the router and tried one device at a time. When I plug in my USB HDD (Seagate SRD00F2 2TB) into the router, after about 15-30mins, the internet problems come. As soon as I unplug the USB HDD from the router, the problems go away. I’ve replicated this scenario and the same thing happens each time. If I power off/on the router, it would be fine for about 15-30 mins and the same thing happens again unless I unplug the USB HDD from the router. What could be the cause of this?

I’ve tried various firmware versions and it does the same thing on each (5.354, 4.354, 4.270, and Merlin’s 270.26).

Is this a router problem or a USB HDD problem? Is something shorting something out?

Any help would be great.

Make sure you don't have Download Master installed. Otherwise, you are ending up sharing that disk's content over the eMule network, so within minutes your link probably gets saturated.

 

[infamous_pb]

Make sure you don't have Download Master installed. Otherwise, you are ending up sharing that disk's content over the eMule network, so within minutes your link probably gets saturated.

Oh?! But... I liked Download Master
I'll try uninstalling it and see what happens. Is there any way to have Download Master and disable eMule? I only use Download Master for torrents.

 

[RMerlin]

Oh?! But... I liked Download Master
I'll try uninstalling it and see what happens. Is there any way to have Download Master and disable eMule? I only use Download Master for torrents.

You could try overwriting the aMule binary with a symlink to /bin/true. That way it shouldn't prevent the Download Master service from starting, it just won't run aMule itself. I haven't tested this myself however. I don't have DM installed so I cannot tell you the exact filename to overwrite either, sorry.

That would also need to be repeated anytime you upgraded Download Master.

Another method would be to configure aMule to use 127.0.0.1 as its server, so it won't connect. Then, try to have your WAN IP changed (can often be done by leaving your modem off for 5-10 mins, but that will vary between ISPs). That might not totally prevent people from randomly trying to connect to you however, it just won't make you advertise your IP availability to the network.

Asus really needs to add an option to disable aMule, cause right now it makes Download Master half-unusable. And quite frankly, almost nobody uses that network anymore, unless they are looking for a good source of malware and other junk.

 

[infamous_pb]

Its been a few hours since I've uninstalled Download Master and so far so good! No more slow browsing! Thanks RMerlin!

You wouldn't happen to know of any other program that can be installed on a USB HDD to download torrents without a computer to be on?

 

[RMerlin]

Its been a few hours since I've uninstalled Download Master and so far so good! No more slow browsing! Thanks RMerlin!

You wouldn't happen to know of any other program that can be installed on a USB HDD to download torrents without a computer to be on?

Check the various posts on this forum about how to install Transmission through either Optware or Entware. Transmission is the same Bittorrent client used by Asus in Download Master, except the versions available on Entware and Optware are more recent, and will use a different web interface.