Internet is down: what happened to my home network?

[Sill]

My home network is run on a WiFi connection over a current generation Airport Extreme. On this network, I have a current iMac, two printers, several iDevices and an AppleTV.

This morning, our internet connection went down. Its still down, 10 hours later. Oddly, none of the devices can talk to each other. The AppleTV can't pull up movies from the iMac over Infuse, even though the iMac is listed as a share in every device in the house that we have Infuse loaded on. Printers can't print - the printer doesn't show up, and the printer manager hangs and can't be quit without forcing it.

So, where is my network, and why does it quit working when there isn't a network connection? I'm assuming there's some kind of setting that needs to be changed.

 

[chabig]

Reboot your Airport Extreme. If that doesn't fix it, you probably need a new router. Internet being down shouldn't affect your local network.

 

[Sill]

Reboot your Airport Extreme. If that doesn't fix it, you probably need a new router. Internet being down shouldn't affect your local network.

That worked perfectly. Thanks very much. Infuse came up on the Apple TV and I was able to play a show from the local library.

Now the only issue is that the iMac won't support two simultaneous connections. I can't have my Wifi network in place while I'm using my iPhone X as a hotspot for the iMac. I selected the hotspot to post this reply and my Wifi network went away.

Do you have any workarounds that will let me keep the hotspot working on the computer while I'm using my local network?

 

[techwarrior]

If your network in back in service, what reason would you have for a hotspot?

When you connect to hotspot, iPhone acts as a router and assigns an address to your Mac but iPhone has a LTE connection (WAN) and shares it with devices that connect to the iPhone network. It never uses hotspot to share a WiFi connection.

Any device connecting to the internet via hotspot would need to go through the internet, then back to your Airport network to connect to your home devices. Since Airport blocks incoming connections from the internet, you are effectively on opposite sides of the globe.

Working as designed to keep you secure.

It would require static routes for the Mac to use both connections.

 

[Sill]

If your network in back in service, what reason would you have for a hotspot?

My network is back in service, but my internet is still down. I have to switch over to the iPhoneX as a hotspot in order to get this page, or any other site, up on my iMac. I'm trying to find out of there is a way to keep the iMac working on the iPhone X hotspot for internet access, meanwhile keeping the Airport Extreme active as a home network router so I can send movies from the iMac to the AppleTV. Does that make sense?

When you connect to hotspot, iPhone acts as a router and assigns an address to your Mac but iPhone has a LTE connection (WAN) and shares it with devices that connect to the iPhone network. It never uses hotspot to share a WiFi connection.

I'm not trying to share Wifi over hotspot. I'm trying to get the iMac to use the iPhone for the internet access, and the Airport Extreme to be the hub of the home device network.

Any device connecting to the internet via hotspot would need to go through the internet, then back to your Airport network to connect to your home devices. Since Airport blocks incoming connections from the internet, you are effectively on opposite sides of the globe.

Working as designed to keep you secure.

It would require static routes for the Mac to use both connections.

I'm not trying to pass the internet to the rest of the house via Airport Extreme. I'm not trying to do anything like that. I just want the iMac to access both the home network as well as the hotspot. I see no reason why security would enter into that. Its two entirely separate channels.

 

[techwarrior]

Your Mac is connected to a different network that your other devices. You would need static routes to convince your Mac to use the LAN connection for the address range of your LAN, but it is pretty involved.

By security I mean routers protect your devices from direct access from the internet, that is why the LAN devices are not visible. Let’s assume iPhone is connected to LTE but not WiFi, your LAN is not visible. When you connect to WiFi your phone connects voice services to LTE and data to WiFi. It was specifically designed for this.

Macs are not designed to connect to two different networks. Generally, this is a routers job. But it can if static routes are configured as its core is basically Unix which can be used for router OS. But Apple assumes (probably rightly so) that you should not be setting up static routes unless you know what you’re doing so GUI doesn’t have the settings, like probably 75% of the Unix underpinnings of the MacOS.

Do a search on how to enable static routes on Mac, there are a number of how to articles out there. You will be using command line programs, using sudo to gain root privileges, and need to have a good grasp of networking details. But, this would presumably be a temp situation so do you really want to go to the trouble.