Something is going on with my Mac Mini, working as a media center in my living room. It is connected through Wi-Fi to a standard carrier-issued fiber router and for a couple of weeks now it is losing its networking marbles more or less every day.
When the problem manifests, as far as I can tell, no web browsing or any Internet related capabilities in that computer, but the Wi-Fi connection is not lost. pings to 8.8.8.8 have like 50% success rate with terrible times (around 500ms roundtrip). Under these conditions, Apple TV+ of course does not work.
Obviously doing the oldest trick in the job (reset the wifi router) works. But here’s the catch! The other computers at home (two iPads, two iPhones, and my own personal Mac Studio) are not affected by this when the Mac Mini is experiencing the issues.
That’s why I believe that there is something going on in the networking stack of the affected computer, but it gets solved when resetting the router. It doesn’t help that when traffic is down, the computer is not receiving connections through Remote Desktop from the other working computer so it’s not exactly comfortable for me to run terminal commands sitting in front of the big TV connected to the Mac Mini.
I have disabled all the “Private Wifi Address” and “Limit IP address tracking” (perhaps this is confusing the router) but it does not solve the issue and the computer will lose its internet connection more or less a day after (also, the unaffected computer has this setting enabled so this can’t be the cause)
Of course I am determined to isolate and solve the root cause of this, otherwise I’ll eat my hat and my Power User badge. Any suggestions or ideas apart from paving and nuking the computer? (Which, honestly, I am ready to do but would prefer not to)