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EphemeralNight comments on Stupid Questions April 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Okay, so I have a "self-healing" router that ostensibly reboots itself once a week to "allow channel switching" and to "promote network health", and given that this seems to NOT mess up my internet access in one of several ways every tuesday morning only MOST of the time, it has been causing me stress absurdly out of proportion with the actual danger (of being without internet access/my ONLY link to the outside world, for a short time).
So, my question is, what the HECK does "channel switching" or "promoting network health" even mean, and is it actually important enough that I shouldn't just flat out disable my router's "self-healing" feature?
In Germany most internet connection have a clause that requires regular reestablishing with get's you a new IP address. It's in the contracts because the changing IP address makes it harder to run a server behind a home connection.
The advantage of a changing IP address that it's a lot harder to track you for random websites.
It makes sense for the router to choose a time in the night where the connection isn't used to do the reconnecting. Otherwise the ISP would on it's own choose the timing which might be worse.
If your router however does this when you aren't sleeping see if disabling the feature helps.
I think you may have misunderstood. I'm talking about my router, which is a separate device from my modem. I have never observed the router rebooting to fix a problem, and have on several occasions observed the reboot to cause a problem. I just want to know if there is something nonobvious going on that will cause problems if the router does not reboot once a week, keeping in mind that it is a separate device from the cable modem.
"Channel-switching" is referring to the wireless channel. Modern wireless routers will "intelligently" select a wireless channel to communicate over, taking into account features of their environment. For example, if there's high competition with other wireless transmissions on one wireless channel, they'll switch to a less contested one.
"Promoting network health" is a bit of a nebulous thing to say about a home network served by a single router. As a pragmatic observation, rebooting a router can solve a variety of problems it might be experiencing. Most home users can't distinguish local machine problems from problems with the network, and automatic periodic rebooting of the router probably prevents a lot of support calls. If you're happy with rebooting your own router as and when you see fit, I don't see why you shouldn't turn this feature off.