I have a D-Link router for my home Wi-Fi network. Everyday at least once the internet suddenly goes down. I am simply not able to connect to the Wi-Fi network.
If I just restart the router, it starts working. To debug the issue I logged into the admin panel and noticed the time was set to something in 2002. I have set it to the correct time. Will wait to see if that fixes the problem.
In the meanwhile I want to know what can go bad when the router has been set to show an incorrect time? What are the kinds of problems expected?
My Wi-Fi was working just fine most of the time, but sometimes it lost the connection. Could this be linked to the incorrect time setting?
55 Answers
Generally router functions are not affected by having the wrong time as long as the time is consistent. Problems will occur is the time is being randomly reset. So if your router boots up and thinks it's 2002, it will run quite happily, pretty much forever, as long as the time doesn't suddenly change.
Also, even if it does change via NTP, leases etc will be correctly adjusted as a time reset by NTP is a normal expected event and most times are stored as offsets/differences so won't need altering anyway (a time counting down a given number of seconds will continue to count down).
- Leases are allocated based on a time difference, so as long as the time is consistent this won't be a problem
- The WAN assignment will similarly be a time difference, so shouldn't suddenly expire
- Running NTP on the router will, obviously, not work correctly is the router's time is wrong, but, if this was the case you'd have noticed it sooner
- Logs will we incorrectly timestamped, but presumably you haven't been checking these (if they exist)
- If your router has NAS features, the file timestamps may or may not be affected, depending on the exact implmentation, since often the connecting client sets the date/time on files directly
Overall, having the wrong time on the router shouldn't affect your wifi connections, but it's probably a good idea to set it correctly, ideally via an NTP setting.
A more significant problem may be if the time on your router randomly resets as this may indicate that the router has a fault.
0A faulty firmware update may cause a router to behave this way. You may wish to manually upgrade the firmware in you router configuration, if the following potential problems cannot be resolved:
You may see lease expiration issues. A simple workaround for that is to reserve the appropriate LAN IP addresses in your router config for each LAN device.
If the router's WAN IP address is dynamically assigned by your internet provider, a router's DHCP address assignment may be affected. Routers having connectivity issues may be experiencing this. You should try using another NTP server in your router's configuration.
If you have any services like NTP running on the router, the incorrect time and date is assumed by LAN clients.
Your logs will be incorrectly time stamped.
If your router has any NAS features (like a USB port where you can plug in a USB hard drive to be shared with the network via SMB), then your file creation/modification time stamps will be wrong.
Scheduled crontab events on the router may never trigger.
I believe I had a similar problem with an incorrect clock setting. My router had a time setting for a different time zone (one hour difference). I do not know exactly how the error caused a problem, but since I corrected it I have had much more stable internet connections.
I suspect the DHCP server was having problems trying to assess which clock was correct, because the clock on my laptop was not in sync with the clock on the router.
This is not just an opinion because before I changed the clock I had a lot of problems. The last few days however my internet connection has been much more stable.
I found the time on my router to be wrong when I was troubleshooting why my wifi speed was slow and fluctuating, this affected only the 2.4g wifi and not the 5g wifi on the router so the problem was local. I was assuming it could be interference but after setting the time right a moment ago, the speed was immediately much higher and less fluctuating, I dont know why but I hope it lasts! I did 2 speed tests before adjusting, then 3 more after and the speed changed from around 5 Mbps to around 29 Mbps. I had this problem for months now, changing channels etc didn't help much.
1Just a heads up from a career IT Sys/Net/Sec Admin. Time set correctly in any device means everything to how efficiently it works or if it works at all. Depending on the device, it will either rely more or less that its time is in sync with its peers. Not only time, but date, Time zone and daylight savings settings too.
Your typical ADSL/fibre/Ethernet router does use time to sync DHCP and login authentication with your ISP. If you use SSL certificates and VPNs etc for privacy, then its even more critical.
Simply put, to answer the question several things happen:
- If your time slews by more than 5 minutes then you authentication expires. Connection is dropped by the ISP.
- Again, your time can be set to the exact second, but if not in the right hour or date a whole bunch of backend too and fro "stuff" happens to validate that the connection is indeed authorized. This "stuff" chews up both compute power and bandwidth, slowing down firewall rule processing and application levels working round the timedate slew take much longer to validate and pass on data.
- Your devices find things on the Internet by Domain Name resolution. This associates a human readable name with a computer identifiable IP address. Time plays a big part in this as these mapping records have a time to live. Your router keeps a cache of any DNS records previously looked up, to speed things up for next time, but if its TimeDate is out then whatever is cached is discarded as expired, and what ever is looked up again from the domains SOA DNSes is always invalid. Result: You can ping IPs but never resolve websites on a "Stupid Smart Device, e.g. Roko, A.C. Ryan, Smart Blu-Ray Player", to confuse the issue some devices use Google DNS IPs as backups so they are able to resolve and work "e.g. Smart phones" on the same home network. You check for hours, can't get it right and blame the Roko, or whatever, where as its simply incorrect time and date on your router.
- Access control / time based firewall rules, i think this self explanatory. If its set to allow access to xyz during this time and that time and the routers time is wrong well...
- Parental control, again can cause friction if you're the type that wants to make sure that your children are only accessing the internet during certain times and or want to see/log where and what they visited at what time. (yes, medium to high-end routers have this) Incorrect router time and date settings will cause family friction where either they can not access the internet or they appear to be at home downloading stuff when the time logged indicates they should be at school.
- Over all intrusion monitoring and privacy protection. If time and date is wrong then it becomes very difficult to trace events and where the intrusion came from.
