Cannot ping gateway but internet works???
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Hello,
Long time user, sparse poster because all has been working so well until now. Here is the story:My internet provider recently "upgraded" their system (all outside my house) and since then the internet still works but the gateway monitor is showing 100% packet loss. This is for both IPv4 and IPv6 connections received via DHCP.
Digging into this, I find that I am given via DHCP an IPv4 address that looks like xxx.xxx.239.232 and a gateway xxx.xxx.236.1. I tried pinging the gateway and this fails. I can ping xxx.xxx.239.1, which I expected to be the gateway and if I use this as the gateway monitoring address, the reported packet loss goes back to zero.
The same issue exists for IPv6 but I cannot "guess" another monitor address from the IPv6 address.
Question is now whether the internet provider has misconfigured their network after the upgrade or whether this is acceptable and I need to find better monitor addresses. I had always thought that I should be able to ping the gateway.
Thank you.
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@revengineer No doubt things changed with that upgrade. I can't use the IPv6 gateway address so I ran traceroute to google.com and used the next hop out. Perhaps you could try that too. That monitor doesn't have to use the gateway address, only something that will be there and responds to the pings. It's entirely up to the ISP which devices respond to pings, but that has nothing to do with actually passing traffic.
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Yup, that^. The ISPs gateway(s) may not respond to ping and they don't have to. Mine don't either.
I just set external monitoring IPs to get the connection data. Better to set something remote than something unidentified in your subnet that may keep responding even when your ISP has some outage. So many users set 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 for example.
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Thank you both for the responses. This makes sense. I had not thought that ping might be disabled on the gateway. I took @JKnott suggestion to find the first upstream server using tracert. All is well again!