Memory says that during the pandemic I worked from home with a network connection as steady as if I had been at the office and the computer had been connected by cable to the building network. Perhaps memory exaggerates.
We mostly returned to the office in mid-2021. For a while I did not work much from home, then presently I would work from home a day or two each week. At some point I found that the network connection to work--a virtual private network or VPN--just wasn't as stable. I put up with it, though.
Recently, I found that I was disconnected too often, and I started writing down the times of disconnection. These were almost exactly an hour apart. Today, after one of the disconnections, I noticed a message about the underlying network, and I had a look at the PC's networking setup with ipconfig /all. I was greatly interested to see that my DHCP lease was of one hour. (Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP is a method by which a server can manage the network configuration of many client machines.) I'm used to DHCP lease durations measured in days, not hours.
On logging into our router, I found that the DHCP lease duration was indeed set to 3600 seconds, one hour. I bumped it up to eight hours, restarted the computer, and found that I now had a lease of eight hours. I predict that my next day working from home will be less frustrating.
I assume that our ISP, which provided the unit that serves as both router and cable modem, set the configuration as I saw it. I wonder what they were thinking to set the lease duration so low.
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