murphy wrote:Any time you change what is connected to a cable modem it is required that the cable modem be power cycled. A cable modem remembers the first MAC address that connects after it is powered on and will not let anything else connect. That is how the cable company prevents you from pulling more than one IP address from them. This is why it is necessary to lock the ooma to it's built-in MAC address. If left in automatic mode and it decides to spoof the MAC address of your router after having connected using it's built in MAC address, your access to the internet is immediately terminated.
That makes perfect sense, and I appreciate the information as helpful. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be a complete explanation for my experience. I have the ooma hub set to use the built-in MAC on the MODEM port. And it stays online for hours at a time. I suppose *if* the ooma hub suddenly decided to automatically clone the MAC it sees connected to its HOME port (i.e., ignored my selection of the built-in MAC) then exactly what you describe would happen. And if that were happening, it would be a defect in the ooma hub. Unfortunately, once the ooma hub locks up, I cannot connect to setup.ooma.com (not even via the HOME port), and so I have no way to verify this hypothesis. Sadly, I do not have my own network analyzer.

Meanwhile, I am talking with COX to see if they have a log of any problems on my feed or if they can remotely test my cbale modem.


I am beginning to think that my next steps are (1) manually log the router's upstream MAC before and after outages (I can do this, because I can always connect to the router's status page) and (2) swap out the router, because even if it *says* it's using a fixed MAC, that does not mean it isn't going flaky. If all that fails, then I really will be exchanging my ooma hub.
I may be slow, but I prefer the term "deliberate."

Thanks!
"If a physicist were to say: yes, I'm involved in meter-reading science, we could be pretty sure he was not going to get very far." -- Noam Chomsky