WRT54G2 intermittent connection...

Hey everyone,

Yesterday I was at FutureShop and impulse-bought a wireless router that was on sale. I didn't do a lot of research first, and it's definitely biting me now.

It's a Linksys WRT54G2. I have it connected right to my Speedtouch 516 cable modem, and from there it goes to 2 PCs via ethernet cable. After a few minutes (can last up to 15 or 20), we lose connection to whatever internet service we were on (gaming, browsing, etc) and about 60 seconds later, service is restored.

It seems to be the problem detailed in this Cisco thread here:
http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/W...ection-drops-disconnection/td-p/238464/page/5

Here is a quote from the one guy in that thread that seems to have figured something out...

I'm still running the default firmware, but that thread seems to say that the firmware doesn't fix anything even if you update it. Some people have talked about putting DD-WRT on it, but that hasn't returned conclusive results either.

If it helps any, the network seems to go crazy when a new device is introduced. We had 2 PC's connected directly and I tried to connect my PS3 wirelessly. The PS3 was unable to connect, and the 2 PCs lost their internet while the PS3 was trying to get an IP address. Also, I was monitoring the router config page while a disconnect was occuring during an online game. It seemed to be setting DNS1/DNS2 to 0.0.0.0 (which I think is a DHCP refresh/renew?). I don't know much about this stuff. The connection seems more stable when only one device is connected to it.

So, in short... my internet connectivity is highly unstable. We have had up to 4 connected users (2 direct, 2 wireless), but they will all lose connection all at once for a reason I'm unsure of. Lots of other people have had this problem, but I have yet to find a true solution. Does anyone have insight into what might be happening here?


Thanks so much in advance, networking heroes! Let me know what critical information I have missed.

--b

 

Have you checked your lease time on cable and Linksys router?

 

My lease time on the router shows as 0, which apparently means one day. I'll try fiddling with this a bit.

I'm not sure how to access my modem configuration... how is that generally done? Is there a special IP I should be looking for, similar to the 192.16.1.1 of Linksys routers?

 

Found a post on DD-WRT forum...

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=48222&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Claims that changing a few settings solved the problem for one guy:

IP Filters

Max Ports = 4096
TCP/UDP timeouts=120 each

I'll try and find a way to do this with Linksys stock firmware, otherwise I'll install DD-WRT tonight and see if I can figure that out...

 

On my router, I type 192.1638.2.1 in a web browser (where you would type www.majorgeeks) and I can access my router IOS. Where are you checking your lease time at? On my PC, mine looks to be 24 hours or so. On my router, my lease it 1440 mins. Or 24 hours... :-D

To find the IP of your router, Click on Start-Run-CMD, which should open up a command box. Type in 'ipconfig' without the '. The IP after Default Gateway should be your router's IP.

admin or Administrator shold be the default login, and the password is usually blank, '1234' or 'admin' (again, without the ').

I don't think it would hurt anything to try what they did in the link you provided. Just write down the value of the setting you change, so you can reset them if you need to without reseting the router.