Innerspace causes internet to disconnect.

For the past week or so I have been having weird problems with my wireless internet. Seemingly at random my internet would stop being fully functional, the weird thing is that my internet would not disconnect completely. It would only be unable to establish new connections, so I would not be disconnected, online games such as eve and communication programs like mumble and discord would continue working fine, both sending and receiving. However if I restarted any of those programs or tried to open a new website I would get a "not connected to the internet" message even when other internet programs were still functioning. Windows also flags the connection as having 'no internet access' as well.

Through a long process of trouble shooting and trial and error I narrowed down the cause to the inner space program. If I open the service my internet will experience problems in about an hour, without fail but if I do not open it then my internet will work flawlessly for days on end. I have done a full reinstall of innerspace/isboxer and the problem persisted.

This is a really weird problem and haven't been able to find any info on it through google, etc. It has been really grinding me down and has been infuriating because I have to do a full system restart in order to fix it.

Any help would be appreciated, even just an idea on what could cause this kind of network behaviour because I am stumped.

Windows 10
Wifi card ; Intel wifi link 1000 BGN
router/modem: TP link archer d9

Cheers

[bob]

It is highly unlikely to be Inner Space causing it, as Inner Space does not install any kind of filter driver to your NIC. It does use your network like any other service, i.e. it will open a port back to the auth servers when you launch a game profile (or ISBoxer character set/slot), and then close it. If you happen to run multiPC then it will listen on the specific port (usually 10101), but this wont affect the other 65534 ports. Besides for that kind of issue, it should be more than just you experiencing it.

The most likely breakdown of internet services like this is some else which is preventing your NIC filter drivers (e.g. the TCP driver, QOS Schedular) from working, or another filter driver which happens to be running or even the most likely, some kind of Internet Security program.

I have had services which exhibited similar behaviour where they stopped new connections, but serviced anything existing, which sadly turned out to be something completely unrelated to the symptoms, where the network traffic was failing to buffer due to an inability to write to disk, due to incorrect configuration of the disk. Just showed me that sometimes it is not what you think.

I think your best course of action at this point would be to get a Diagnostic for crashes (yep, I know it is not crashing) on the InnerSpace.exe process (yes, I know I said it wasn't likely to be Inner Space too, but this will show us if anything is hooking it).


Also, it is probably worth noting that Inner Space and mumble and discord's overlay systems may not play nicely with Inner Space/ISBoxer and it is recommended to disable them while multiboxing. This applies to a few other notable software items.

p.s. I also get a similar problem on my setup at home on the wireless. I switched to wired connection to make it go away. BT have yet to acknowledge it, but from my testing, once I push about 4GB through the HomeHub5, it falls over until I reboot it or my computer (basically I need to drop and reset the connection between my PC and the router).

Thank you for the reply.

I really hope inner space/isboxer isn't causing it as I really enjoy using the software. I don't use any of the overlay features of mumble/discord.

I did the crash diagnostic for:
Innerspace, http://pastebin.com/j0DWUEuN
ISboxer, http://pastebin.com/xE51VDwW

[bob]

As expected there is nothing that really stands out there other than it looks like you're on a laptop.

But, I think you'll have to go the hard yards to find out what is going on.
The best option would be to monitor your ports when you get this issue, using something like nbtstat or tcpview; see if something is out of place, or even monitor a new connection attempt. Try and open a port to an external connection and see what happens. How far through the handshake does it get. Maybe even run an analyser to see where it gets. Check out the connection services, what is actually running, and maybe even dump the stack for the NIC to see what is hooked into it.

If this is a bit beyond your scope of knowledge, then then you will probably need to go the other route and shut stuff down. You've obviously already shut down Inner Space and your problem doesn't occur, but as there are several thousand other users not having this issue with Inner Space even if it runs for days/weeks/months on end (my home machine which hasn't been restarted for over a month now, and Inner Space has been running all the time, it doesn't exhibit a problem like you've described). I suspect it is not Inner Space causing the issue, it is just a symptom. In other words, it is something specific to your setup.

The most obvious choice, as already pointed out previously, Internet Security software, although I can't see any running in the diagnostics, but it might also be Antivirus heuristics (the prediction of nefarious activity). As a test you could remove these (Avast in your case), and see if the problem goes away (and yes you need to remove them to properly test, disabling does not fully disable).

Beyond that the the list goes on of things to close/shutdown:
XBoxStat
ScpToolkit
Discord
Mumble
Dragon

Then if you still get the issue at this point, maybe check the energy management and make sure that is not deciding your hardware is not in use. Mainly because your issue as described, unless you see something obvious, like thousands of tcp sockets hanging around in a close_wait state, then it is actually more likely to be some kind of driver issue.

[MiRai]

Through a long process of trouble shooting and trial and error I narrowed down the cause to the inner space program. If I open the service my internet will experience problems in about an hour, without fail but if I do not open it then my internet will work flawlessly for days on end. I have done a full reinstall of innerspace/isboxer and the problem persisted.

I apologize if I missed something in this thread while quickly glancing over it, but do you mean that simply opening Inner Space and letting it idle in your system tray is what's causing the issue, or that actively multiboxing with Inner Space is the cause? Multiboxing will obviously send X times as much data as number of clients you're running, which is something that can "overload" a wireless connection regardless of how much bandwidth any wireless devices say they're capable of. If this is what seems to be the problem, then it's not all that unusual, and, unfortunately, all we can suggest is to use a wired connection instead.

Thankyou bob for your help, I guess I have a lot of trouble shooting ahead of me to get to the bottom of this. I haven't done much of what you are suggesting before but I am sure I can work it out over a weekend with google's help.


MiRai you may be correct however the issue occurs even when I only launch 1 client through isboxer.