Why is the activity light on my cable modem blinking?
It is hooked up to my Win2k Server machine. My cable modem activity light is always blinking. I am not sure what is sending data over my modem. I checked my startup and there is nothing out of the ordinary running.
It is hooked up to my Win2k Server machine. My cable modem activity light is always blinking. I am not sure what is sending data over my modem.
I checked my startup and there is nothing out of the ordinary running. I stopped all services which could be causing this, but it still blinks.
Does Win2k server have any services that hits the net all the time? If I shut the box off the blinking stops, so I know it is not data coming into the modem.
Any ideas?
I checked my startup and there is nothing out of the ordinary running. I stopped all services which could be causing this, but it still blinks.
Does Win2k server have any services that hits the net all the time? If I shut the box off the blinking stops, so I know it is not data coming into the modem.
Any ideas?
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Mine is doing it as well still...and that's when the only thing I've got going is AOL IM. I know AOL IM isn't sending that much data, so I gave Time Warner a call. It's been going on a while since I called them, they told me about a month or so ago that they were doing something to their system to prevent viruses or some other b.s. But it still does it...and it gets annoying at night seeing the reflection of the activity light on the hub and modem on the wall.
Could it be that your NIC is autodetecting the speed of the other devices and trying to get the cable modem to accept 100 Mbps speed? The modem only does 10 Mbps, but your card (likely) does 100 Mbps. This is no problem, but many NICs are by default on autodetect, i.e. they are figuring out the highest possible speed constantly. Try setting the NIC to 10 Mbps and see if the blinking stops.
kgeissler, have your firewall block all Internet traffic and see if the modem continues to blink. If so, it may be your ISP polling the modem. It's not uncommon for cable ISPs to do this, even though they should only do it for short periods of time to test their system. Unfortunately, many allow it to happen constantly.
Did I miss something? Your nic will always broadcast traffic. Take a look at a hub or switch. You can see when a broadcast occurs as every light goes off almost at once. Grab an old clunker, install just the OS and the nic. Basically just enough to get on the cable network. You will see the same happen. It is normal behavior. Every packet has info in it for what computer to send the data to. Your PC must read that to see if data is meant for you. Also there is a ton of communications between your pc and the other network devices, like the cable modem. Don't worry about the blinking light.
