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Why Do We Have To Restart Routers?
jaypaulw writes "I've owned a WRT54G, some cheap D-Link home Wi-Fi/firewall/routers, and now an Apple Airport Extreme (100/10 ethernet ports). In the context of the discussion about the worst uses of Windows — installation in places where an embedded device is superior — I've gotten to wondering why it's necessary to reboot these devices so frequently, like every few days. It seems like routers, purpose-built with an embedded OS, should be the most stable devices on my network."
You're doing it wrong.
US Robotics 8054 (USR8054). At least it has the decency to reset itself though throughout the day. Saves some manual labor I suppose.
It shouldn't be necessary to do that.
Usually, though, it would be either a problem in the firmware leading to instability or a change in routing, DNS, or DHCP assignments that the router can't handle live for some reason. It could also be possible that the firmware allows no changes at all to the running configuration, forcing a restart for any change made in an attempt at making it less hackable.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
I base this on absolutely nothing, but my primary suspect is the cheapskate power supplies that these devices come with. However I've never cared enough to test it out.
Fast, Stable, Cheap - pick two.
restart my Airport Extreme is when I update the firmware. Otherwise it stays up and works without problems. I don't understand the question I guess.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
because they want you to buy the more expensive one without the crippled software?
actually I've never had to reboot my router
I'm guessing what you actually need to do is reset the connection to your modem or release and renew DHCP, Every router I've used allows you to login to a web based configuration and do these things.
If your having to restart yours every couple of days...something is wrong. The one here at the house has been up for last 173 days. I checked the main router at work and its been up almost 300 days.
Why DO you have to reboot your routers? Mine, including a WR54GT almost never require rebooting. Occasionally, after a power outage, it's necessary, but not very often. Maybe once or twice a year, and I live in Panama, where power interruptions come fairly frequently.
More than 60,000 Windows programs won't run on Linux.
I think that things like power fluctuations are more to blame for frequently needing to reset those devices.
I have a pair of Apple Airport routers, and the only time they get rebooted is when I change settings and restart them. That happens whenever I want to let another computer use my network, about every couple of months.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I got my Belkin router about 4 years ago it runs great I can get about 3-6 weeks uptime before I have to manually pull the power cord because it crashes.
Its still going good and strong though!
I have a WRT54G wireless router, and I never have to restart it... ever... ever. It's very stable. Except when the power goes out.
The only time I've ever had an issue with my AE base station is after a brown out - for some odd reason, it will not work after a brown out and does require a restart. Any other time, though, I have never had a problem with the AE base station... and mine's refurbished!
Bought a Buffalo router and flashed it with DD-WRT. The only time the thing reset was when the power went out. If you're restarting your router every few days, I'd suggest looking into your config for the problem.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
If only "restarting things" would work in other areas of life, such as restarting your current job if it sucks, or restarting your marriage. Oh wait we already have that, its called divorce and getting fired.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
TCP connection timeouts on some routers default to 3600 seconds or one hour. So, when you use some Bittorrent or such, opening lots of connections, your router keeps these connections (even after disconnection) in its memory for up to an hour. It fills up and your router grinds to a halt, opening connections very slowly.
There's other timeouts too, but I'm not sure exactly what they do. Firmware like HyperWRT lets you change these timeouts to something much shorter, like 90 seconds, which typically prevents lock-ups like that.
(I'm actually not 100% sure that this is the sole cause for router lock-ups)
Frankly, I think it might have more to do with the client you may be using to access the router for some reason.
Ever since I switched from XP to Ubuntu about 18 months ago, I've had to reboot the router maybe 3 times. When I was running XP, I rebooted it at least once a week.
Not to be a dick, but I use a wrt54g with tomato firmware and it's about the most stable and powerful (QOS is great on it) router anywhere close to the consumer price range.
I never have to restart my DSL router or Vonage router either, and I've kept all this stuff up 24/7 often with heavy use for years at a time.
If you're restarting networking stuff all the time, perhaps you've misconfigured it...
WRT54G are awesome, reliable routers, and should be fine going indefinitely without being rebooted. I can't speak for the other kind (though personally I have my doubts about Apple networking hardware) but they should be just fine too.
It may be that you are saturating your bandwith, perhaps with torrent downloads, and that is why your connection needs to be reset periodically. It's not your routers fault, though.
A good question. I don't have to reboot that often, but sometimes that's what cures my problems.
However, I can't honestly say that means that the problem is with the router. It could be with devices upstream or downstream - rebooting the router may be the trick that resets the state machine for the connected device.
I never have to reboot my TiVo, my cell phone, my PSP, my STBs etc...
The hardware on your router might be failing, power supply or whatever. I had the same problem with a DSL modem once, it eventually just outright died. The new one I bought (netgear DG834G) hasn't had to be reset once.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
A router is like any other device it has limits. If you surpass those limits then that may be the reason you need to power cycle it.
I've owned numerous models of the WRT54G(s) and I did not have to reboot it every couple of days.
These devices can handle a limited number of connections due to RAM and CPU usage, you may be exceeding the limits of the device and it may be time for you to upgrade to a device that is more capable to handle what you throw at it.
Also remember that most of these devices are fan-less so you'll need to ensure they are in a cool place otherwise they may overheat.
Most routers are cheap. (Apple's is overpriced-cheap; the point stands.) A bunch of them are free after rebates. Considering that, it's a wonder they keep running for more than 5 minutes. They come off the same assembly lines as those Norcent (who?) $15 DVD players.
You can buy reliable routers of course, from the C company, or the N company, or the J company, or a couple others. That's what corporations buy. What I wonder, though, is whether there's a middle ground: a "pro-sumer" router. Maybe somebody has got some suggestions.
Over the last 10 years, I've owned a couple netgear and linksys wifi routers and they have all been the lowest maintenance devices in my home network. I can't recall ever having to kick-start one of this devices for misbehavior. They've all been left on 24/7 and are only restarted after power outages or when I accidentally kick the plug out of the wall socket.
Either you or I must be way out on the tails of the bell curve.
There's usually nothing wrong with the hardware, just the software/firmware. Trying using some third party firmware like DD-WRT on the WRT54G. YMMV, but I can't recall the last time I had to reboot mine.
I have never had to restart any of my routers.
Well, aside from a firmware upgrade.
I mean, seriously.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
The only times I've had problems with a router has been with the firmware of my old cable STB that also acted as a modem (it would just drop the connection/DHCP lease at random and the only thing that seemed to fix it was a reboot of both STB and router). Since I got a new modem I haven't had any trouble. I can't remember the last time I had to restart my WRT56G because it wasn't working.
However, before you write off your devices, you might try to see if there are more current firmware revisions that will make them a bit more resilient.
Even if that "fixes" the rebooting problem. You still ought to periodically check to see if there have been critical security bugs that have been addressed and rolled into newer firmware revs. Just because it's a black box doesn't mean you can just turn it on and forget about it. The black hats never sleep.
Cheers,
I use a D-Link EBR-2310. I have never had to reboot it. It just continues to work day in and day out.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
I used to have to restart my Airport Extreme every once in a while, but after updating its firmware that's no longer necessary. According to InterMapper it has been running for 84 days without a restart, and if memory serves the reason it was reset 84 days ago was to do some recabling.
It's cheap, fast development... Not bothering to pay attention to correctness, not watching for memory leaks, etc., etc.
It shouldn't be that way, of course. I got an old K6-2 system, underclocked it to 100MHz, removed CPU fan and replaced the PSU fan with a very slow and quiet model to make a nearly-silent 8watt system. Then installed OpenBSD on a 32MB CF card (stripped of unnecessary binaries for size, but otherwise completely normal), and have been using that for years. It will run indefinitely, without a reboot. My record for uptime so far is 5 months, and it's only that short because of power outages, and I don't feel the need for a UPS for my router...
There's nothing about being "an embedded OS" that should make it any more or less stable.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My router is only rebooted when the house loses power... on average about once a year or so.
...the expectations of the user. Newsflash: when you buy cheap crap it is going to perform like cheap crap.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I had a WRT54GX for years that never needed a reset, until I started using BitTorrent. Then its 4KB (?) connections table would fill up and the device would hang. Had to build an OpenBSD firewall to handle the many active and inactive connections you get with BT.
I've had a few wireless routers which borked themselves far too often (one particular netcomm model which I had to have replaced 3 times before giving up entirely on it). Now it seems to me after using these things for many years that the wireless chipsets in particular are vulnerable to overheating, and once they do so, they malfunction and the software crashes. So its less the embedded OS software itself and more faulty hardware in my experience. (In summer I still need to take an icepack out of the freezer and stick it on my ADSL modem if I don't want my internet to crash)
For my old linksys WRT54G (the cheaper K kind), I had to reboot it every couple of days.
My new D-Link N DIR-655...never once have I had to reboot it in 6 months I've had it.
I've used some Zyxel router that needed restarting every few days until I found out the maximum amount of open connections and bandwidth it could take then it usually only crashed once a month.
Now I've got an old PII with a CF as HDD running monowall and maximum uptime so far is about two months. It would appear that the modem is more flaky than the router so I've restarted it needlessly a few times. I'm inclined to think it's hardware causing problems when the router crashes on its own. It's a bare motherbord sitting ontop a cabinet with four NIC's (I had an abundance of NIC's but no switch) and it gets a bit jangled from time to time in its exposed position. I'm amazed that it works at all.
Try to limit the amount of open connections if you're running bittorrent and maybe the bandwidth too. If that doesn't help you should probably build your own router. m0n0wall works for me and I've heard good things about IPCop.
I've used SMC routers in the past, then switched to Zyxel router now(the home routers, not the expensive ones). and in my experience, I have never intetionally reboot them, only when I update the firmware (that happen maybe once every 6 month?) my routers are always up and running and never rebooted.. but on the other hand, I used to own a D-Link router for my folk's place. that router lasted maybe 1 week before replaced by SMC.. (reboots and resets randomly)
I just use a cheap Pentium 2 running Windows XP with Internet Connection Sharing. Disabled the automatic updates and firewalled it properly over 18 months ago, and haven't had to touch the machine since.
My router at home only needs to be rebooted when you're changing admin priveleges or re-assigning the router's IP. But one day I went to a friends house and while trying to figure out how to connect to the Internet, and tried several times to give myself a proper IP. Each time I did, I disconnected my friend's roommate while he was playing WoW. Apparently he was in the middle of a big group mission. I had no idea until the fifth disconnect.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Torrents with a large number of peers (1000+), or any p2p app that you allow to maintain thousands of peer connections, will put your home router at risk of crashing -- they simply were not specified for that kind of load. It has nothing to do with bandwidth, and everything to do with the router's limited memory and such (in combination with buggy embedded software).
Old Netgear routers were notorious for crashing even with a relatively small number (in the hundreds) of connections. But even top name brands like Linksys have this problem if you crank up the number of connections high enough. Place limits on the apps by going into the config/preferences. The defaults are usually quite reasonable or even a little too high, but a lot of people think it's an artificial limitation so they crank them up. Don't do that unless you have an industrial-grade router at home, or if you're willing to flash your firmware with unofficial fixes.
When my free to use wifi is overcrowded and not letting me in..
Sent from my desktop computer
I've got 5 WRT54G's running DD-WRT out in the desert in enclosures. They routinely operate in temperatures in excess of 110 degrees, and usually have a bunch of users on them. They currently have an uptime of nearly 2 months, the last time they were down is when I upgraded their firmware. The WRT54G in my closet, also running DD-WRT, never crashes. And I download a LOT of torrents!
-Bill
load dd-wrt on your linksys wrt54g. the only time you will reboot it is when you accidentally unplug it. ive had 50 days of uptime and i would have more if i didn't accidentally unplug it. all thanks to linux.
I have had both of them and rarely, once a month? or less, reset them.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I have a WRTG54 that I haven't restarted once in the year I've lived in my current home save for a power outage. If using aftermarket firmware is possible with your router it may be a good idea.
I was having problems with my wrt54g when iphones were connected to it. I upgraded the firmware (by downloading it from the net), and the problem went away.
Historically. Old Linksys boxes needed to be rebooted often.
They never fixed the bugs, and if you wanted a new feature, that meant purchasing a new box. (That was the business model, I guess)
I gave up on them.
Then Linksys came out with a Linux based router. WRT54G.
Of course Linux did not mean the support or bug fixing would be better. They used an old version of Linux with various proprietary junk on top.
The best support you get is with open-source.
Overwrite whatever Linksys installs with a truely open system:
OpenWRT. I have been running White Russion 0.9 since it came out and only have downtime with firmware updates.
(there are other wrt firmwares besides openwrt, but most are not really open).
My Netgear 624 never had to be rebooted...until it stopped working after 13 months. My Netgear 824, only two months old, granted has never been rebooted except for the three firmware updates in a 3 day period. My Netgear PS121 print server has had to be restarted (to flush the print queue) a few times. My Surfboard SB4100 cable modem I don't think was rebooted since 2001. I replaced it two months ago for a faster one. My Centillium MTA-1 TA has never had to be rebooted in 2 years. My Vonage V-Portal has never had to be rebooted.
I also have a Linksys BEFS class 'b' router that hasn't been rebooted in more than 2 years and a Belkin F5230-4 that's never HAD to be rebooted though it has been accidentally shut off quite a bit.
It could also be the modem/transceiver (cable or DSL). I had a crappy Westell router/modem that Verizon gave to me that would always need resetting. I got a WRT54G and hooked that up to the Westell (set it to act as only a modem at that point) and it still had similar problems. For some reason, rebooting the Linksys would fix it, even though the problem was the modem. I ended up pulling the old 10 year old DSL modem out of the closet and hooked that up to the Linksys and everything's been running perfectly for over 8 months now.
This guy's the limit!
Most of the devices that you mentioned don't give you details of the status of the OS (cpu, memory, port utilization, et cetera). This is the kind of relationship you have with a black-box. You can put a bug request in, and maybe even send them logs or core dumps, if the device supports it.
I've only run openwrt or some other open-source firmware for a while now, and I have been happy with performance and the fact that I can see what is going on on the device I own.
My current setup is:
OpenWrt White Russian - With X-Wrt Extensions 0.9
Linux 2.4.30 #1 Thu Feb 22 13:58:48 EST 2007
Linksys WRTSL54GS
Broadcom BCM947XX
My usage is:
1 Mac, two Linux laptops, one Windows desktop and a Linux server. Moderate bittorrent usage (both Azureus and rtorrent), in addition to frequent outbound ssh connections (X11, rsync, vnc), Citrix and SSL/IPSec VPNs. Absolutely no uPnP or Rendezvous.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
I'm running DD-WRT 23v2 on two Buffalo WHR-HP-54G routers, and I never have to reset them. However, I did have to update their configuration from the default settings in order to make them reliably stable. With the default settings, I would have to reset them occasionally. I changed the "maximum ports" from the default of 512 to 4096, and changed TCP and UDP timeouts from the default of 3600 seconds to 120 seconds. The reason for this (as stated in the DD-WRT help documentation) is that P2P apps often open many ports without closing them properly. These settings allow the router to handle that kind of usage much better.
It's really easy enough that your grandma could do it. :)
Seriously, Tomato has a very clean interface that just does what you would expect. I'd toy with it a bit if I were you.
Best place to get a feel for the QOS settings is probably a screenshot of the interface.
The last router I had that really worked was a trusty old Linksys BEFSR41. This is not the same router that's going by that model number today. The hardware has completely changed and the new one I bought when my old one finally died was absolute trash. Since then I've been through all the major manufacturers, and they all have issues locking up, resetting, and other weird crap. I finally got fed up and converted an old Pentium (floating point bug included!) into a router running Smoothwall. It's the most stable router I've ever had.
I really have no idea why the purpose made stuff doesn't work. Many people say the issue is that the routing table fills up, or they run out of memory, or something to that effect. But my ancient Pentium with 32 MB of RAM doesn't seem to have that issue, and most of the top end Linksys boxes are coming with 16 or 32 MB of RAM, though the cheap ones only come with 8. Still, Smoothwall indicates most of my RAM is being used as disk cache - not for running anything in particular. So, I don't think RAM's really the issue. It's obviously a software related issue of some sort: flashed Linksys routers with one of the custom firmwares are apparently quite nice.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
I had several "consumer" grade routers before finally finding the Dlink gamer lounge.
I've never been happier. I've had it for almost 2 years and I never have to reset it. The wireless always works, the gigabit is nice and the "Gamefuel" QOS is fairly effective.
The $100+ linksys routers aren't much improved over their $50 brethren, but the $100+ Dlink most certainly is.
crappy firmware. I flashed my WRT54G V4 with Tomato and haven't looked back. Also haven't had to reboot it in the past year or so that I've been using it, other than the occasional update. Tomato's developer obviously knows what he's doing: compared to the stock Linksys firmware he's lightyears ahead. And he's just one guy, you'd think a company with the resources of Linksys could do an even better job.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is due to a combination of poor programming, and poor hardware designs.
Most properly designed routers have a hardware watchdog timer, which must be periodically written to in order to prevent an automatic reboot.
When I cut my teeth on Embedded/Small system programming, decades ago, we were taught the reboot button is a bad thing.
In fact, for our final project , we had to design a "mission critical" system, where the reset button was DISABLED. Instructors would initiate a prohibited condition, and the software had to automatically reboot and restart from a SAFE [not default] state.
Any system which did not enter a SAFE state, FAILED [and so did the student].
They don't teach classes like that anymore, in favor of things like Java, which lets students forget about the "hard" stuff.
Its all fine and dandy to have a nice real-time OS, but it isn't worth anything if the core programs its running are programmed by a bunch of java jockeys used to letting other people do the "hard stuff".
Because we need new IP-adresses for Rapidshare and the other filehosters.
In 1996, I had a PowerMac 4400 (overkill, but one of the few Macs into which you could stick multiple Ethernet cards, 100Base-T on the network) running Vicom Internet Gateway (had Parental Controls and all sorts of nice features). I used to restart that machine every now and then. When the Linksys BEFSR41 arrived, it freed up the PowerMac and I would reboot it every few months just for fun (paired with an original Shark Fin cable modem from LANcity -- seldom restarted that either -- as it was in the basement and the router was in the attic). Eventually bought a Linksys WRT54GS (v2) to use the Parental Controls feature (not perfect, but mostly did what I needed, though that feature is being discontinued). Never restarted that much either (paired originally with a 3Com 3CR29210, later with a D-Link DCM-202, and these days with a Motorola SB5101). This is all on a network with several TiVos, a Win/XP machine, a handful of Macs (mostly MacOS X these days), and an AirPort Express (2 client laptops) and I still don't need to restart it. You probably need to figure out just what is failing by doing some network sniffing? Maybe it's related to the ISP? I've had this gear hooked up to RCN's cable for 7 years with few issues (with the gear itself).
Every so often I need to unplug our WRT54G. When it powers up again it behaves itself for several days. The Netgear model we had was even worse. The only router we had that did not require rebooting was an ancient Apple Airport.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
I still think it's sad we're seeing Linux routers coming out as much as they do. I can understand from the uPnP prospective to use Linux, but I really don't like having the applications on my computers control which ports people can and cant access (doesn't that defeat the purpose of a firewall nearly??).
I've wanted to setup a cheap embedded OpenBSD router for ages now (with a web interface and such) that I can give to my friends knowing they're getting security AND stability together. However, the manufacturer support just isn't there.. I finally decided to setup a mini-itx OpenBSD system which runs great on flash, but even though it's small (in my view) the average user won't agree.
I hope some manufacturers like Linksys decide to change some of their embedded OS', unless of course this is exactly what they want .. Less stability so people are forced to upgrade to Enterprise Class equipment?
I used to use a PC as a router. Anything with 2 network interfaces will do. One connected to the "internet" or greater network, 1 for the internal network.
Configure Linux:
Set up your OS security (port blocking, disable remote accounts, etc).
Configure IP Tables (was IP Chains):
Set up your network security (some overlap with the above). This is also where you do your intranet packet forwarding (xlating 10.1.1.1 to a real ip on a specific port)
Configure /sbin/route
Set up your routing table (if necessary).
Optional configuration:
Set up your network monitoring (both sides), maybe a traffic shaper to make sure those downloaders dont cripple your connection
After awhile I realized I didn't want a big box sitting in the corner getting dust and occasionally having a hardware failure (7 years of using a box for routing!) and switched to the ever-popular WL500g and havent had a problem for 2 years (DHCP leasing keeps the undesireable wardrivers from connecting through it)
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Firmware: DD-WRT v24 (05/24/08) std Time: 19:20:22 up 20 days, 6:30, load average: 0.15, 0.10, 0.02 I've had it for a little over a month now, and it's only been down due to power outages.
"...Sleep comes like a drug in God's country Sad eyes, crooked crosses in God's country..."
Before my Buffalo routers, I had several different (three or four) BEFSR41/BEFSR81 model Linksys routers. I always had problems with the Linksys ones. BEFSR81 v3 wouldn't let me play Counterstrike, for example, due to a known incompatibility with Steam. Users complained on DSLReports.com for months with no fix, I don't know if they ever fixed it. I had a BEFSR41 with a gimpy power connection, so I had to duct-tape the power cord to the router such that it would put strain on the power connector, letting it remain powered on. Most of my Linksys routers would not let me run two VPN connections simultaneously, which is a common issue with routers (due to NAT issues). If I connected a second VPN session with one already active, the first one almost always got disconnected. I had one Linksys router that seemed to let me run two sessions simultaneously most of the time. All of my Linksys routers ran warm (hot if you stacked them), each of them usually sucking at least 20-25 watts while idling.
My Buffalo routers running DD-WRT are exactly what I always wanted...they are very reliable. I've never had any problem running dual VPN sessions with them, and they only use 3 to 5 watts of power. It was hard for me to give up on Linksys after being loyal to them for so many years, but I don't regret switching to Buffalo/DD-WRT one bit. If anything, I regret not switching sooner.
I bought a $39 Buffalo wifi router and left the factory stock firmware (BSD-based) intact. I've *never* had to reset it due to a hang or crash or any problem. It's a juggernaut.... runs forever as long as you feed it power. Been running continuously almost a year now, it's been plugged into a UPS and running flawlessly since I made some config changes last summer. It replaced a Linksys router that was a complete piece of shit that needed rebooted about once a week.
Too bad you can't buy the Buffalos new anymore.
Who is "we" that have to restart routers all time, heh? My router works great and glorious and never needing restarting. Last one and one before is same. Router from capitalist pig Apple is original wireless router and it never is needing restarting.
Maybe you should get a multimeter and check to see if is flaw in power in your house, da?
..like everything does
They are both big fucking pieces of shit. Is it the hardware? Nope. It's the firmware coded by people who were drunk, on drugs and asleep at the same time. It's that fucking bad. I normally don't get pissed that often but the firmware for these routers are abominable. One router (a SMC VWBR7004) had such disgusting firmware that I had to reboot the router every 15 minutes. Yeah, every, 15, minutes. The update that came 2(two!) painstaking years later was not much better. It refuses to work with Vista if I have upnp on and it will reset my router if my Vista tries to do anything to the network(including starting up and shutting down)I hate the firmware and the persons who coded this should get a major kick in the balls. The second router I bought was another piece of shit. I am currently looking for a good router and I am looking towards the flashable Linksys routers so I can have some decent and open firmware on it. All in all, my experiences with routers have left me totally disgusted with them and I think that the people who are responsible for the product should be subjected to the same shit I have. It will serve them right.
By the way, does anyone have good tips for a new router?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Speak for yourself :)
Maybe if I new how to read the "uptime" on the thing, I would have gotten more motivated.
Ok, the router software - likely ripd, xorp, quagga or zebra for any domestic ADSL router - might crash, but the worst that will happen then is that you don't learn new routes. Since DSL providers don't tend to switch their internal IP addresses very often, that should not impact any existing subnet. It means tunnels can't be generated on-the-fly, it also means your next-door neighbor can't connect their LAN party to your wireless connection, but it shouldn't impact you in the slightest.
The next question, however, is how on Earth are you noticing the router needs rebooting? The kernel is quite capable of rebooting itself under many (but not all) soft lockups. Linux provides several such mechanisms for doing just that. A simple watchdog circuit, using a bistable circuit, a couple of capacitors, a relay and a trigger line that has to change state, could be added by a manufacturer for maybe a couple of dollars. It probably doesn't even need to be that complex.
When it does reboot, LinuxBIOS is under 3 seconds and I don't imagine OpenBIOS is that much slower. Intel's Tiano probably is, but it's open source so you can rip out anything that's useless. Therefore, recovery times should be barely detectable to an end user. (Most websites vary in download times by more than 3 seconds between visits. Unless you're playing Netrek or WoW at that precise moment, I seriously doubt you'll notice a 3 second outage.)
Finally, however, why isn't the router using carrier-grade software? Again, carrier-grade Linux exists, which should give you 5N uptimes in the worst possible case. Domestic routers are not worst-possible. Even data centers rarely get the kind of stress that could be expected to force an unrecoverable state. If your router is not overheating, has plenty of RAM, and needs rebooting more than once every other year, there is something seriously defective in the software or hardware.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you live in an apartment where everybody has one, you just might be in a noise storm. I rarely have to restart my 54g. I am not an expert, but my $.02 is
1. Get rid of your 2.4Ghz phone. I actually bought my neighbors a new phone because they caused me problems.
2. Latest firmware
3. At least wpa security
4. use *stumbler and pick the least used channel in your area of 1,6, and 11
5. Try CTS protection mode if you find a lot of other APs
6. Turn up your DTIM (mine is 100) if you don't do much broadcast traffic.
7. Turn up your beacon interval (mine is 1,000) to save power on the laptop (some reports of up to 14% battery savings)
Wireless is just flakey, even our pimp daddy cisco equipment at the university has the occasional hiccup.
I had problems with my previous Linksys WRT54G's in the past- having to reboot them as you describe. I replaced one with a *stock* WRT54GL and it runs for months and months, and I have never had to reboot it. Based on that experience, I purchased many more GL's and they have also run for months and months, 24 hours a day, not a single one has needed rebooting.
Of course, your mileage may vary...
I have to restart those two maybe twice a year, or when I'm changing settings or upgrading the firmware. They seem to play nice together. For the record, it's the AirPort that seems to need the restart on those odd occasions, but I do them both just to make sure.
Because routers lack the ghost of the dead graduate student that performs that function in Windows.
My Friend had a wireless B router that would randomly lock up on him every day or so. The funny thing was that the Wired part of it never stopped working just the wireless. We through so many different firmware revisions and it never seemed to fix it. I guess it could have been bad wireless hardware but rebooting it always made it good for another day.
Linksys WRT54GL with Tomato Firmware. It never needs to reboot, except when I feel like updating the firmware to a newer version.
FTM, I never had to reboot its predecessor either, a Linksys BEFSR41, and it was in service for several years before I decided I wanted wireless.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I have a similar setup on my Linksys WRT54GS. With the factory software it would lock up every other week -- wouldn't pass traffic and I couldn't log into it. Had to pull power to reset it. I loaded DD-WRT (23v2) and set it as you described and it has never failed to pass traffic, although every 3-4 months I can't access it from the Web GUI for some reason. I can still telnet into it though, so I just login from there and reset it.
I have a second WRT54GS (on it's own subnet providing open access to anyone in the area) and it's never locked me out of the GUI, although it doesn't pass nearly the traffic mine does.
I used to have a Blitzz router/AP that required rebooting every 3.5 days, regular as clockwork, regardless of traffic or number of connections. Pitched it in the dumpster when I got the second WRT54GS.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I haven't restarted mine in many months. Maybe its more related to the modem its attached to. I've found that cable modems in general get stupid after a while, But my DSL modem has only been reset for power outages and That one lighting strike
I had the same issue of restarting network hardware. I ended up wasting a lot of time swapping out gear until I realized what all the swapped hardware had in common: the power supply. Perhaps my house was susceptible to mini-brownouts which were resetting the hardware. I got a UPS and connected it to my modem, router, and access point. Never had a problem since. -ST
Looks like Cisco has something in this category. It's about $329 on Amazon.
My FreeBSD router/firewall/email server/web server/dns server/etc was shut down *once* last year to vacuum out the accumulated dust. Other than that, it was never shut down or rebooted.
Cheap "embedded" devices like routers and NAS-es routinely have extremely bad hardware. The competition apparently is so fierce that cutting corners of everything, from basic motherboard-like functionality to network and disk controllers is ubiquitous.
I'm occasionally doing hardware reviews for a local IT magazine and it's unbelievable what you can actually buy today as a bona-fide good equipment even from "brand name" companies. CPUs are usually ARM or AMD GEODE (You think VIA is slow? Think again. - Not to say there isn't a place for slow CPUs, only that this isn't it.), network controllers are cheap Realtek's and I don't know what they use for disk controllers (probably parts of the CPUs "companion" chipset) but it sucks.
I've seen "gigabit" network controllers on NASes that actually negotiate gigabit speed, although they are connected to buses and CPUs that break a sweat even at 100Mbit/s speeds. NASes that accept 4 drives cannot service reads on even one drive at more than 15 MB/s - introducing RAID (especially RAID 5) into this setup slows things to a crawl.
Practically all of these devices use Linux, because it's free (as in beer). They usually (I'd say 90%) don't acknowledge or obey the GPL.
It's a sort-of reverse "best scenario" for Open systems (and Open source). The manufacturers have a choice between something like this:
The first choice is represented by "truly" embedded devices like ordinary small, unmanaged Ethernet switches (with which I have suprisingly good experience), but apparently it's too expensive to scale it to "smart" devices that have to support many features so everyone opts for the second one. You can (and this is verified!) build yourself a small managed router or a NAS device like the ones sold at every el-cheapo computer shop with the same cheap generic components, and the resulting device will be just as sucky.
Creating a router or a NAS just like the above but with "proper" hardware (a Duron 800 MHz based system will be excellent) won't even cost you significantly more, but will deliver orders of magnitude better performance.
-- Sig down
These are cheapo consumer routers, right? I've never messed with a Cisco, but I bet it doesn't get hung that often. I bet it costs more than $40 too.
Now, in theory that's not a real excuse. The firmware in these things can't be that complicated, and if you just ran some kind of Linux based router on them, they would rapidly improve to the point where they didn't do that. The community would find a fix. I know some of these things can run Linux; but then there's the old "time vs. money" hassle of having to install Linux on the thing. It seems to me, if the company that makes the thing knows it can run Linux, they might as well just support it. After all, they're not in the software business, so it's hard for them to argue that the GPL hurts their business model.
Maybe the real answer is: because of the suits.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I had the same problem with a D-Link ISDN router. I just assumed that the router's bit bucket got full after a while and I had to reset it to empty the bit bucket ;)
I wrote a little perl script to telnet into the router and do the reboot and then added the script to cron so the router got rebooted every night at a time when I thought I could afford to take the down time. I have an old, partial version of the script if you think it would be of any help.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Interestingly, I have a somewhat related issue. Every so often, we'll say a week, although the time varies, my parents' Vista laptop decides it no longer wishes to connect to the WiFi router in the house. Rebooting the laptop, oddly enough, rarely resolves the issue -- at least, right away. Two reboots or more and all is well. Alternatively, power cycling the WiFi router makes things work again right away.
The odd part being, my own WiFi connection never experiences such problems. I'm too lazy to track down the exact problem, but I'm guessing it's Vista or a bad Vista driver over the router.
Moral of the story. Don't just be looking at the router as the cause; it can just as easily be the WiFi driver/adapter itself that's at fault.
I run OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54GS. Up 403 days right now.
Is your router on surge protection? I've noticed anecdotally that it makes a huge difference in the router's reliability and longevity, especially for cheap routers.
i have used my hacked up wrt54G, version 2.1 motherboard, for years. in fact every time i do replace it i am disappointed by the fact that a new router is worse. my franken wrt54G was made from the parts of 3 others (motherboard, new antennas and new powersupply). it has lasted me the last few years. i have been using the DD-WRT and have good results. the only problem i have is i have to test my xbox connection for it to work. i only reboot on power loss and update of firmware.
Well, to give you an idea of the type of embedded hardware that is sometimes used in these routers... I was recently given the task of evaluating some Dsl chipsets because we wanted to add a native dsl port to one of our low end routers. It was really interesting, many of the chipsets had notices that said stuff like "The front-end needs to be reset every 24 hours to prevent an unrecoverable hardware failure".
Granted not all of this hardware is like this but much of it has known issues like this. Since this is home hardware the companies that make this hardware don't really care if you have to reboot it often.
I have a Netscreen (Juniper) 5GT Wireless.
I use BT every day, heaps of sessions, you name it. I have two SSID's, the one we use that's not rate limited and the one the public can use that's rate limited.
Current uptime is 183 days without a single issue.
You get what you pay for!
Tim
They reset me regularly at no extra charge!
it does sometimes after a brown out or very short blackout. But beyond that it runs and runs and runs.
Rob Miracle http://www.robmiracle.com
I have the Linsys WRT54G, and a good variety of devices that hang off both the physical ports (a couple of Dell PCs) and the wireless interface (a couple iPhones, an AirportExpress in client-mode, a Wii, a wireless printer, several wireless notebooks). I can go endlessly w/o rebooting the router *except* when I've been recently accessing my corporate network via VPN over the wireless interface. I do this on occasion and usually it's not long after I've been online that *other* devices in my household can no longer see the router. Interestingly enough, the notebook with the VPN connection never complains. Anyway, that's been my experience.
Several years ago I was using these devices as my primary home network gateway, and experiencing the same issues. This lead me over time to replace the firewall/routing portion of the device with a home-made linux router on commodity computer hardware. My Linksys has hardly ever required rebooting since. While this is far from a good diagnostic of the problem, it definitely seemed that, at least in my case, it was the firewalling portion (particularly on high-bandwidth or connection count apps) that was crippling the device.
Sorry, at those prices you're not going to get the same engineering, manufacturing tolerances, and software testing as on a Juniper or Cisco enterprise router.
They say the mind is the first thing to
Yeah, I don't run any alternative firmware. However, I also don't have any problems. Why? Well, I'd rather spend extra on eBay for commercial-grade stuff at mostly-affordable prices than use consumer-grade garbage.
My "router" is a Cisco 3620 (4500 before that), and I never have to reboot it. (ok, I know its overkill, but it works.)
My WAP is *not*, I repeat *not* a router. It is, however, a Netgear ProSafe WG302. Definitely commercial-grade (~$300 retail, I got it off eBay for $100). It runs a Linux-based factory-provided firmware, supports multiple SSIDs via VLANs, and I have zero problems with it.
You're talking about consumer / home networking devices. I thought the article was going to really be about *routers.*
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
... so I've got the same router as you (maybe a different revision, mine's old with the larger memory)... anyways, I **never** restart my router!.. maybe once a year?
I had a Belkin F5D5231-4 on my home network for a few years, since the day I bought it I had to restart it on a daily basis. I even installed a timer to cycle it in the middle of the night. Belkin never issued a firmware update different than the original. I finally got fed up with the piece of crap and installed a WRT54G v5, which is not compatible with Tomato, but is compatible with DD-WRT. DD-WRT is stable, I've had no problems since, and even retired my timer!!
PS- I took the Belkin out back and shot it!! Good riddance.
I've had great experience with the Linksys WRT-54GL loaded with dd-wrt firmware. I've only had to reboot it once every 4-5 months, usually due to a power outage. Not as stable as a Cisco catalyst, but hey, it was only $60 from Newegg.com.
The QoS feature is great if you use VoIP or play games :)
The most common causes of frequently needed reboots are:
1. NAT exhaustion -- some device on the network (maybe a bittorrent client, maybe someone with a viral infection) is shooting out a lot of connections, and the firewall runs out of NAT ports
2. Network loops -- your lan network and your dmz network both have the same switch (what's the damn point in having a DMZ if you want to do this), and our firewall isn't tolerating a mac address on multiple ports
3. Crappy PPPoe providers -- Every time we code around the evil caused by PPPoe negotiation, some fresh evil is perpetrated. I'd blame it on the *ells, but we have this problem anywhere pppoe is in use.
4. Corrupted configuration -- I can't blame this on anyone but our devs. They can't seem to write a decent engine to convert configurations
Hardware failure isn't on this list for a reason. Damn near any time we replace a firewall for reboots, the new one magically develops the same problem.
Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the old Linksys routers I've had the displeasure of using, they liked to die on torrent traffic. I don't know the exact details, but if I tried to run torrents, the router would gradually slow down and eventually lock up within an hour or so.
I guessed it was trying to do connection tracking, filling up its tables and stupidly dying from the heavy connection load of torrent traffic. DD-WRT firmware seemed to fix this, though I certainly didn't test it much.
What gets me is I have this crappy old Pentium-90 with 32mb ram, that I've used as a NAT box for.. oh I dunno, at least 6-7 years now. It has perfect uptime, no noticeable slowdowns, and despite having a hard drive, it's been pretty resilient to power outages and my breaker-busting kilowatt workstation.
Why can't these skinless bastards (Linksys) take what I have on that dusty old PC, shove it on a cellphone-sized device with bunch of ethernet jacks, and deliver a "router" that actually works ? The technology is decades old, all you need is Linux + iptables and a simple web interface.
There's a company that sells kits, which I hope someone can name for me, built around either a P5 or ARM processor on a tiny board - kind of like the Gumstix, but the one I'm thinking of is specifically built for network appliances... they have multiple ethernet jacks and I think they even sell Linksys-router shaped enclosures for them. Anyone with iptables experience should be able to build a bulletproof NAT box into one of those kits. Perhaps the problem (for Linksys), is they couldn't build such a quality device for the cheap-ass $30 market they've dug themselves into.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You should give some details on what problem you face if you don't restart your router.
The most common problem I have experienced with routers is that they did not write a robust DHCP software and it eventually stops giving out IP addresses.
I currently have a Linksys BFEW1154 (wireless B, so kind of old) router and sometimes I will see that it doesn't reuse a IP address and just keeps giving new ones. At one point it stops giving out IPs altogether and I have to reset it. At that point I notice I can still use the internet ok as long as I use static ip on the client. -Kawsar
kawsark.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Take the cover off, put a fan on it. You'll see the difference. On that note, D-Link, Linksys, etc. are consumer crap -- get a Snapgear or build your own with BSD.
body massage!
Thanks for this post. Consumer-grade networking products are the bane of my existence. I think I'll try Tomato, once I find out whether it will support VoIP for Vonage service. For WAPs, I've about given up. I spent nearly as much as one can on consumer, getting a Linksys WAP4400N WAP, and it still has a shotty signal. I'll likely be purchasing a Cisco WAP using my company's discount, its signal is amazing, and just what I need to stream video to the HTPC upstairs.
I had to think for a few minutes to remember which router I owned. After I configured it the way I wanted I have not needed to reboot or login to it for any reason. I have a D-link DIR 655 http://support.dlink.com/products/view.asp?productid=DIR-655. After trying several routers to replace the one that finally fried after two years I settled on this D-link.
I'm still using my old Linksys BEFSR41 (v1), and it has to be rebooted about very 3 months when the isp assigns new ip's. Otherwise it's trouble free, unlike the newer version of the same router I set up for a friend on the same cable system. I think I'll start haunting eBay to find a backup of the same version number.
Reboot a router!
Why, what are you doing to it?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I've virtually never had to reboot home routers. I think an old Linksys router I had was mildly problematic. However, currently I have the Verizon FIOS router and a Cisco wireless router and never have to reboot either. They're both connected into a UPS. Prior to getting FIOS tv I had a Cisco SOHO router and it never needed to be rebooted either.
I may seem somewhat elitist to be running Cisco routers at home, but besides their purchase having been part of the Cisco courses I've been taking in college, I feel you really do get what you pay for. You can drop $50 (or $30) on a cheap router, but I guarantee my $300 Cisco router will be more configurable, more scalable and most stable than your cheap router. When you're paying $50/month or more for your internet service, I don't think dropping a decent amount of cash on your network equipment is that big a deal.
Satis clankiller.com
OK, never is a bit of an overstatement. Every once in a while I update the PIX OS and need to reboot to apply the new software.
I picked up a 515E for next to nothing on ebay. Sure, you need to learn the PIX architecture and OS to make effective use of the thing, but it is solid as a rock.
There are plenty of books written on the PIX firewall appliances. Pickup a used PIX on ebay, buy a book, and throw away your $49.00 nat/firewall/router.
-ted
Daily? You've got something wrong. My router is in the furnace room with all the other utility equipment and I pretty much just ignore it. In fact, I ignore all of the network equipment - it's all working flawlessly with zero attention. 2 WAPs (one private, one public,) a router, a print server, and a cable modem.
I had a D-Link for years and have now switched to a little Soekris system running m0n0wall.
None of my routers have had any wireless capabilities - my routers are routers, and my WAPs are WAPs, and that's how I like it. One device for each task is my philosophy.
The only time I ever have to reboot anything is after a power or other internet outage. Then there sometimes is a little dance of "unplug cable modem, power off router, plug in cable modem, wait for all the lights to return to good state, turn on router" to get things working again. Aside from a vain attempt a couple days ago (internet really was out) I haven't done that in months at least.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
To maximize the time you go without rebooting, password protect your network. The "hop-ons" you get speed up the memory leaks.
DEV
I have an WRT54G. I got it a couple years ago. I had issues with it when running BT but eventually Linksys released an updated firmware. In the release notes (I forget which version the firmware was but it was released in February of 2007 I believe) it specifically mentioned fixing issues with BT. The WRT54G had issues with not properly sharing bandwidth across more than about 16 connections and we all know that BT clients open many more than that. Throughput slowed to a crawl when running BT. If your issue is your TCP connection table as others have mentioned that new firmware may be your fix assuming you still have a WRT54G. As for other brands, I can't say what would require them to be rebooted every so often, other than cheap design/manufacturing practices.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I bought of the first Apple Airport Extremes (10/100 ports) too. Originally I had to reboot it every few days. I gave up and switched to DD-WRT on an old WRT54G, which worked great (except no 802.11n).
Recently my WRT54G died and I switched back to the Airport Extreme. I upgraded it to the latest Apple firmware, and now it's been running for weeks without a reboot. It appears the new firmware has solved some problems.
it's simple, most router keep tcpip connections alive for 3600 sec or more (especially d-link one), so each time you establish a connection on a bittorrent client your router open a new one. After a few hours, sometimes a day or a few ones, it can become a problem very quickly as you might imagine. Just install dd-wrt or tomato and drop the timeout to 360sec, it'll do the job.
gah. apple fanboys suck.
I used to use both of them, but got tired of them rebooting themselves on heavy usage.
If they sat idle, the were fine but push some packets thru and they couldn't hold up.
Since then i went to a PC based solution ( currently Pfsense which does all that i need, but im sure the rest are just as good. Migrated from monowall due to lack of wifi support back then and before that IPcop )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've had a WRT54G for nearly 4 years, powered up 24/7. I've had to restart it maybe a dozen times in those 4 years. I don't know that I've ever gone through a period where I was restarting it "every few days."
Look at the rest of your environment, especially power.
I have a 24port switch I picked up off ebay for $15. This thing is an old business class switch which is rack mounted. I never have to reboot it. The times I have rebooted it, I have found the problem to be with one of the computers.
The reboot thing is just a quick answer to the problem. For every problem there is a quick answer and a perminant answer. I think your perminant answer is to buy a better router. ...
I don't know if it's a similar problem or not but I had a DI-624 a few years ago that rebooted constantly and I sent it in under warranty and got another one. Then that one started acting up and through multiple levels of tech support they finally determined that my 2.4 GHz wireless phone was setting too close to the router and since wifi was also at 2.4 GHz they recommended switching to a different channel. That fixed the problem for me.
I had over 100 days uptime at one point on my Soekris OpenBSD router. http://www.caseybanner.ca/2007/08/19/hackback-1-soekris-router/. I think that winning streak lost out to accidental nudging of the power bar. However recently there has been some hardware issues (nic died), and I've been using a Linksys BEFW114 (or something) wireless B router. I've had to reboot it because it just locks up after a while.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
my switch:
sw1.lan uptime is 71 weeks, 4 days, 14 hours, 16 minutes
System returned to ROM by power-on
System image file is "flash:c2900XL-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC3b.bin"
and the linux system i use as a core router:
21:35:12 up 441 days, 13:43, 1 users, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.00
As I recall, I did reboot the core router system most recent for some reason, most likely a kernel update. But before that, a storm knocked out my power for around 8 hours, which exceeded my backup capabilities.
Because you touch yourself at night.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Admittedly, this is on the stock firmware, but I used to have a D-Link 540 router, and every time some setting was changed in the firmware, the router rebooted itself. Automatically.
Most bittorrent apps let you lower the number of active connections. I usually halve or quarter the defaults. Most of your bandwidth is going to come from a limited number of sources anyway.
I use OpenBSD for the router duties of my network. I reboot it once a year, when I install a new version of OpenBSD. If you have to reboot your router more frequently, it may be the symptom of a deeper problem.
Mostly you've gotten crap responses that can be summarized as "get a real router." Sheesh, if people have no clue or anything useful to say, they ought to STFU. But, this is Slashdot. Fortunately, you got at least one clueful response.
That was from the guy who suggested it could be a power problem. I have a WRT54G that I bought in 2003. It does internal routing on my network, and is downstream for a USR 8xxx (something) that's even older than the Linksys. I've used them in five locations now with no problems at all, and the current connection is 15 megabits down and 512 kbits up. Load is sporadic, but can saturate the inbound link. Mostly downloads via http, but sometimes ISOs over BT. I regularly VPN (Cisco client) to my office with no problems.
These devices are on UPS and always have been. I think you really need to take a look at the power quality. If your gear isn't on UPS, dig one up somewhere and plug them into it and see if that helps out.
If it doesn't, also take a look at what kind of traffic is on your network, as some have suggested. It could be that something from the inside is causing the stability issues. Finally, there is merit to the idea of separating the wireless from the routing, although for most people that should be fine. My current setup has it separated, but I used to use the WRT54G as my gateway device and that setup was also problem-free.
And for you "Shoulda got a real router" trolls, I *work* for Cisco and even I don't bother using a Cisco for my home network edge (I have a 2621 taking up space on my shelf, though); it's just not necessary. Sure, the 2621 is better than the Linksys (for many values of "better"), but it's simply not necessary for a home network.
Good luck, and maybe you could post again with more info about your network. That would help with troubleshooting.
You don't have to.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Stop buying shitty routers and you might have better experiences...I've used Netscreens (the old NS5/NS10s long since discontinued since Juniper bought them, but solid VPN/Firewall/Routers) for over 8 years - have easily had uptimes of over a year on some of them, and I've only ONCE needed to 'reboot' one (and that was after an especially bad lightning storm that nuked its UPS). It's not just the software/firmware/OS that leads to this (although it is a good part of it), but the actual physical components too.
Buy a WRT54GL instead.
http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Cisco-WRT54GL-Wireless-G-Broadband-Compatible/dp/B000BTL0OA/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1215914133&sr=8-1
root@gw:~$ uptime
21:58:57 up 151 days, 7:08, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
root@gw:~$
wrt-x running on wrt54gs v1, we have a bunch of them, and Ive had them stay up for over a year without rebooting...
I've got an old PII that I picked up secondhand for $20 and installed a spare nic and linux on. It runs pppoe and an iptables firewall. It only goes down when the power goes out.
I've had Netgear, Linksys and Dlink and they all needed frequent reboots and they all died after about a year. My Belkin wifi/switch almost never needs rebooting and it's been running constantly for 4 years. It was also the cheapest of the lot.
running DDWRT on a WRT54GL; 4 laptops via wi-fi and almost 24/7 torrent uploads. I did have to reboot when using 'stock' Linksys firmware (only when running uTorrent).
I am seeing no D-Link routers listed on the Tomato page and certainly no N routers. Can someone elaborate? I'd love to find a more capable router...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I had an old linksys router that didn't seem to work properly all of a sudden. After looking into it a bit I realized that I had mixed up a couple power supplies so it wasn't getting enough voltage. After plugging in the correct power supply it worked great again. Not so oddly enough.
I've been using a Linksys NR041 (costs about $30) for years and have never had a problem with it. It's a pretty basic router that does what I need it to (block and forward ports). Maybe the issue with more expensive consumer routers is that they're half assed versions of expensive routers. I'd rather have a basic router that does just enough but works than a half assed router that wants to pretend it can do things.
I do have a Conext UPS that everything is plugged into so that takes care of any power fluxuation issues.
Work Safe Porn
A bit off the subject. But why not power it off at night to conserve energy?
Or because it's easier to tell people to simply restart the router then it is to explain to them the dhcp release/renew process.
Discuss.
I have the Multitech (http://www.multitech.com) routers and these are semi-Linux based routers, and like a lot of the Linux systems out there, they stay up for ungodly long periods of time and only get rebooted when power outages exceed the UPS, or I kick em for some reason.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Your router can only keep track of a limited number of states. If you are using an embedded device with lesser hardware, and trying to run bit torrent for too long, it will surely die. You open up so many connections and close them, the memory begins to get fragmented and you eventually run out. A router with more memory may suite you better. All my connections are managed by a pfsense firewall with 256 MB memory. Its not much, but its stands up to a lot more traffic than a linksys...
...with routers from at least three different manufacturers. Haven't needed it since putting a UPS in place.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
# This script will send an ICMP ping to a target host. If the ping fails to
# echo back, it will then execute BottleRocket (br) to send a X10 power off and
# power on to the specified device via a X10 Firecracker module.
use strict;
use Net::Ping;
my $testHost = '4.2.2.1';
my $x10Device = 'A1';
my $serialPort = '/dev/ttyUSB0';
my $br = '/usr/bin/br';
my $ping = Net::Ping->new("icmp");
if(!$ping->ping($testHost)) {
print "Ping test to $testHost failed.\n";
print "Powering off device $x10Device.\n";
for(my $i=0; $i<3; ++$i) {
system("$br -x $serialPort -f $x10Device");
}
sleep(5);
print "Powering on device $x10Device.\n";
for(my $i=0; $i<3; ++$i) {
system("$br -r 5 -x $serialPort -n $x10Device");
}
}
$ping->close;
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I use a WRT54G and up until about a month ago I had to manually restart the router at least once per day. I called tech support for Charter Communications, and they looked at the history/signal strength of the line. They immediately noticed fluctuations in the line, and sent a technician to investigate. They replaced the line from the box on the street to the connection going in to the house, and now I have not had to restart the router since.
Unfortunately after 15 years as a network engineer for ISP's and telcos, that's pretty much it when it comes to small routers.
Turnout of new models per vendor is on average 6-10 a year. In many of these cases, they run different OS's. Needless to say, at that rate I'm quite surprised that they work at all.
I could keep on the rant detailing nonsense of several small router vendors, but I'll skip for now :-).
Marko.
My Zyxel Prestige 314 doesn't need to be rebooted. The only reason it doesn't have an uptime of several years is because of power failures.
The tubes get clogged from every couple of days...this is by design.
It ran through here; it sli-it slimed me!
...as I'm moving things around and accidentally kill it's power. It's an old Linksys BEFSR41v3 that runs utterly reliably, and has been, 24/7, for years.
I hear a lot of people complaining about this during the summer months. Heat is a big issue for some of these little boxes.
I haven't had to reboot my WRT54G running DD-WRT since I stuck some small heatsinks on pretty much every chip inside. I think they were the small copper heatsinks meant for video card RAM, but they work great for routers. I used to have a fan stuck on top, but I found it to be unnecessary w/ the heatsinks in place now.
I have to wonder - just what is it doing that you feel rebooting every few days is the proper remedy?
I run OpenWRT and never reboot my device (save when a power outage forces me to), but even stock firmware should be quite stable for most people. Rebooting the device is not normal, and either your device is defective or you have another problem elsewhere in your configuration (that's coincidentally fixed when you reboot the NAT device).
I have a Cisco 678 DSL router and a Cisco PIX 501 sitting behind that. I haven't rebooted either of those in over a year, probably lots longer than that. I have them on a backup battery, so even if the power goes out, they stay up long enough. I seriously can't remember the last time I ever needed to reboot them. My linksys WRT54G though freaks out from time to time for my wireless, that bothers me. However, even that goes atleast 6 months without issue at one time.
I also have the experience that routers has to be restarted quite often. But my Apple Airport Express could at least go for half a year until I needed to restart it.
If you look at user ratings of routers on Amazon you will see a clear pattern, lots of people give 5 starts, almost the same amount of people gives one start, nothing in between. So *something* is wrong, I'm just not sure what it is making the same router model to cause such pain for some users while others have no trouble at all.
Constant lockups, power cycles, and constantly losing DNS service... It was batshit insane.
Sometimes a firmware update can help. Not always but I do find it worthwhile updating the firmware and it has fixed problems for me in the past.. Having it on a UPS helps too; make sure you shield the data cables as well as the power cables. There are a few linksys units however that simply never seem to work reliably. My father has one. Just can't seem to hold a reliable connection for some reason. Mine on the other hand works damn near flawlessly.
I've Cisco routers that have never been rebooted except to load up patches. At the moment, I've a 63xx router that's been up for the last two years.
I also have an AIX system that hasn't been patched or rebooted in the last 4 years. (an internal system. Yeah, it should be updated, but as of now, nothing that is horrible and accesable via the firewall rules.)
There was a story going around about a netware system that got walled up behind sheet rock and ran for years and years without anyone being able to even touch the server. I doubt it on a personal level just on power alone (where can you find power that NEVER drops over many years? I'd sure like to know...) I could see that a system wouldn't have a critical hardware failure over 6+ years, I just don't see that same system being able to stay up without power problems.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Every couple of days? I think that's an exaggeration. But I can't deny that I have to occasionally (say, once a month?) reboot my WRT54G because it seems to get out of sync with my cable modem.
But at any rate, lemme ask you this:
How much did you pay for your WRT54? $60? There's your answer. You can pay upwards of ~$2000 for a decent 6-port router (I know -- I have a nice Fortigate at my office). This kind of device never needs to be rebooted.
(I'm not trying to troll ... This is just how things are in life. Don't be surprised if the $50 commodity hardware you bought at Best Buy doesn't offer 99.999% uptime.)
I think the problem is a combination of a lot of what's already been mentioned..
1) Cheap pieces of crap. You can pick these up for what, $10 after rebates sometimes. I just don't think the quality control is there in these 'home routers'. For one thing, have you ever spoken with their technical support? Horrible. If you call them because you're having issues with the wireless connection, half of the time they will try to pass the call off onto your ISP. Of course, it's your ISP's fault somehow, even if your hardwired computers work fine, and the router IS connecting to the internet fine, it's just not working over wireless. "Your modem isn't bridged, call your ISP." That's a common "out" for them.
2) D-Link doesn't work well with PPPPOE. Why? Because by default, it's set to "Connect on Demand". It's SUPPOSED to pick the connection back up, but for reasons unknown, doesn't. If you manually log into the router and connect, it's fine. Setting it to "Always on" seems to do the trick in most cases. Unfortunately most average users are oblivious to the number 192.168.0.1.
3) Both D-Link, and Linksys (and a lot of other brands), as mentioned, are sensitive to fluctuations in power. So sensitive in fact, that during a surge/brownout/whatever they will completely LOSE their settings. If your ISP uses the PPPOE protocol, and you need to authenticate your connection, this means re-setting up the router. Again, as mentioned, a good UPS is a must with these cheap home routers.
4) P2P. Using P2P software can quickly turn your connection to shit. Not sure if the routers and running out of memory due to the sheer volume of connections hitting it or what, but turning off P2P software completely or limiting the number of connections in the software's options seems to help a LOT. Also, turn off that UPNP garbage and properly forward required ports to the computer in need.
BTW I'm running Tomato on a WRT54GL (on a UPS) and have had have zero issues. No restart of the router is needed.
http://www.pfsense.com/ ftw
-
Yep - same router, same issues. Sometimes the wireless network will simply disappear. And I'm plugged into a power conditioner, for the record. Sometimes, I'll go to post a file to a site in Dreamweaver, and it'll respond "waiting for server"... time to reboot, in either case. Have updated firmware and everything - no dice. Sigh. M.
It's not just routers that get confused or stuck.
We've had to toggle power to a NetComm NB5 ADSL2+ modem, up to several times per day.
Contacting NetComm & the client's ISP for advice (most recent being: for a simple ADSL-1 connection, limit the NB5 to using only G.DMT, when connecting) has yet to yield a solution.
Workaround:
Even before trying that ISP-provided tip, we installed a 24-hour timer-switch, setting it to toggle -only- the modem's power several times a day (hoping to catch it before it stops working by itself, to minimize down-time):
1. just before client's start of business day,
2. sometime after their close of business day, and
3. around 2 am, just in case.
(We could also monitor the availability of the Internet connection, and - if needed - add more power-toggles to the timer switch's list, up to a reasonable maximum.)
The power stays Off for 15 minutes, at each timer-set power-toggle, but client's Internet availability has risen to "On -most- hours of the day MINUS 45 minutes (on the current schedule)" without regular (several times per day) human intervention.
Hardare cost: Au $5.00 for a cheap (if noisy) 24-hour timer-switch.
Although now thought to be unrelated:
Problem: a simple VoIP-phone failed -once- in the 2 or 3 weeks since the installation of the above "workaround."
W'around: toggling its ATA's power restored the single-line VoIP-phone availability.
Of course, YMMV.
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I have never had to reboot my old NetGear (a loooooong time ago when I didn't know any better and used one of those), I've never rebooted my IPCop - infact the before I moved (this less than a week ago) it had something like 160 days uptime and the previous downtime was due to a power outage.
My old Cisco 1601 that used to use to connect my servers to the Internet via a DSL circut had never had to be rebooted.
You've got something wrong I suspect.
Illiterate? Write for free help!
Uh, Season 6, Ep12 ...check hulu
They had the linksys router-resetting issue down perfect.
You know you've got a product issue when a randy cartoon takes it on.
"Why Do We Have To Restart Routers?" Because they are still little computers with shabby OSs. lol
I had ongoing problems with routers needing rebooting and happened to mention it to an EDN editor. He said it's a common heat problem: remove the cover and install heatsinks on the hotest chips. I checked the chips with an IR thermometer, and two of them were over 140F with covers off. I used heatsink epoxy (silver filled) to attach small, finned heatsinks, left the cover off and haven't had a problem since -- approx 18 mos ago.
its not cheap but I think its worth it. the hardware, that is. the software is free (freebsd m0n0wall).
a high res photo of mine:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works/1655498926/sizes/o/
link to its product page: http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm
its fanless, its very low power, its fast booting, it uses throw-away (seriously!) compact flash cards to boot from and the model I have has quite a few ethernet ports (admittedly, 10/100 and not gig-e; but its a wan gateway, not really a lan-router).
its gui is nice and clean, it pretty much works and the system's uptime is months and months. I think the last time my UPS ran down when the power failed, that's the last time the thing needed a reboot.
there is also a wireless option for this (it has a regular pci slot, too).
soekris is a small company and I do recommend people consider them for their embedded networking devices. (I'm just a customer, but I'm local and I drove down to where the comany is located and bought my unit in person. it was cool to see such a small operation turn out such a nice set of small fanless bsd-capable systems.)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I am like the previous poster. My Linksys WRT54G (Ver 3.0.3) has not been rebooted for a couple of years. I too didn't understand what the original poster was talking about, saying he reboots his router every couple of days. If you have a router that won't run more than a couple of days, I'd say you should get your money back. If enough people returned shoddy merchandise, the manufacturer would improve it (and might raise the price, but it would be worth it).
I work for a WISP and an electrical contractor - where we do custom home theaters and smart homes. I have run into this issue numerous times with different brands, and calls to D-Link and Linksys techs confirmed something for me: the routers are designed to handle "normal" home network traffic - if the bandwidth passing through the routers is too high, and too constant, the router will lock up. Both Linksys and D-Link recommended I get enterprise-level routers for high volume routing (like home theater setups passing video to multiple TVs, or heavy torrent users).
I bought a Linksys router for about $50 from Wal-Mart, over three years ago, and it's worked fine ever since. I think I reset it a couple times, but in each case I later determined the problem was something else.
I left it on when I left the country for six months (so other users on the system could continue to access the net), and when I came back it was still working fine.
Any equipment worth running well, is worth putting on a decent UPS with AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation). A good UPS isn't expensive, but it will turn the seriously ugly power in many homes (like drops below 100v when the A/C or the fridge kicks on) into a perfectly nice 120v at a smooth 60hz and keep it pegged there.
Personally, I find less reboots required for devices and appliances, much longer life of server components, and overall increased stability.
I've been using an SMC reouter for the past few years, alternately with Comcast & with Verizon DSL. Internally, we have a linux laptop (Debian Etch 2.6.20) and two mac G5s. The macs & laptop take turns losing network- interestingly often not at the same time.
I hardly ever have to reboot the router. I do have to restart the Comcast cable modem about once a month (they actually recommend this) and I occasionally have to restart networking on one or more of the user boxes. Looking at my resolv.conf I found that Comcast changes nameservers on occasion even when the external IP stays the same. Weirdly, the SMC picks up the new info, but doesn't pass it on to the boxes unless I do a dhcp reset.
The other weird thing that I've seen with Comcast is that it occasionally converts some of the IP name resolutions for sites I use most often to IN-ADDR.ARPA addresses. It does this often enough with some of my most-used sites that I manually added them into my /etc/hosts.
Since doing that, I find that I "lose" network less often. I suspect that many of the incidents I had experienced as network failures were actually name resolution failures.
Be Bold! BoldEverything Interactive
I haven't had to reboot my routers (WRT54G) in the last 3 years, except for the occasional firmware upgrade.
Heat... I've had many home routers over the years, and most of them failed when they got too hot. Summer can aggravate the problem. The most features a router packs the more likely it is to heat up and fail as well. So disabling any unused features can help a lot. Especially things like disabling WiFi can reduce the heat generated greatly. You can disable most features in the router's configuration page... the less enabled, the better your router is likely to perform and less problems you will have.
I had a Linksys router at home that needed rebooting two or three times a month on average. I switched it with an Apple Airport Extreme, and since then I haven't needed to reboot (though it rebooted during a software upgrade). Its been seven months since I upgraded and couldn't be happier. Also have a Linksys in the office; I reboot that one about twice a week.
I have a dlink router and i had to restart it all the time when i was usin the crappy modem provided by the isp but havent had to once since i got a good modem
i have my router and modem installed on a powerbar with a timer. the timer is setup so that the power get cycled once a day (when we're all sleeping) and we never know about it. actually started out using this as an energy-saving trick, as our home computers are never being used between 1am and 8am... so why leave a router and dsl modem switched on?
highly recommended for all home office users!
Linksys went for GPL, produced a good hardware, but had to stop doing it for some reason. That's how the business model works, because you won't buy an expensive router. So there is no reason for vendor to produce a good quality router. So you'll decide to buy a better router, but it'll have another bug, like getting hot or something. Then you'll try get even better one, "NG" model, all for vendor's benefit. Then you'll post it on the slashdot. Conclusion: It's a customer's fault.
We've set up about 1800 "home" routers over a several year period. I agree power is a big problem. Good firmware on decent chipset's will handle it fine though. After using most every brand on the market it boils down to Linksys WRT54G (Broadcom chipset) with DD-WRT or Tomato for firmware. The stock firmware is trouble. The GL's are cool with DD, but not necessary. The V8's are cheaper and run DD-WRT Micro flawlessly (even with crappy power) I have hundred's of WRT54G Version 8's in use now with negligible problems. The Buffalo WHR's were great too back when you could get 'em.
I've installed 4 routers. Not a single on has needed rebooting. all $50 wonders. The oldest one has run continuously for 3 years, only rebooting with power failures ( maybe 2-3 over the time period) and never needing service. I did buy a linksys that out of the box never worked, but that's sort of different.
I have a Linux box as router. It reached 400 days uptime at one point and was then shut-down because of a kernel upgrade. So basically, Linux has wat it takes. The question is whether the installation on the particular router is done right.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a Netopia DSL Modem/Router... it gets restarted only when the power is out.
If this post has multiple meanings, and one of those pisses you off, I meant the other one.
In my experience, it's a combination of things. First, the consumer-grade stuff is very cheaply built, especially when it comes to the power supply section. I had to rebuild the power supply section on my old Linksys a couple times before I retired it. Secondly, the firmware tends to be buggy and limited; for some people it may work fine all the time, but it may lock up or reset on you if you push it too hard. I've got an Airlink-101 I bought used, which I loaded D-Link firmware onto (because it was less buggy that way). If I let uTorrent (a BitTorrent client) have all the connections it wants, it'll overload the router's firmware and make it reset. Even without that though, it still resets every so often, for no apparent reason. *shrug* It's a real crapshoot really. I'd have to say, you get what you pay for, really. If you want high reliability, get something designed for commercial use, not for home use, and plan on paying a few hundred dollars for it. Either that or get a FitPC or something physically tiny that is very low-power, run some flavor of Linux on it, and set up the OS to use it as your gateway. That's what I'm planning on doing because of the same sorts of issues that you're having. It may seem like a lot of trouble, but it would also give you the ability to customize the software running on it to include things like a small web server or SSH daemon if those things are useful to you (they are to me).
1) Manufacturing fault - not every router is identical and I wouldn't be surprised if the hardware in sub-£50 hardware isn't top-of-the-range (e.g. memory that just had enough banks working even though it's specc'ed to be more etc. - this has been going on back as far as the ZX Spectrum, a quote from the wiki article: "To reduce the price, the 32 KB extension used eight faulty 64 kilobit chips with only one half of their capacity working and/or available.", and Intel/AMD are still doing the same thing with multi-core chips). Things fail randomly too. That's life.
2) Environment - Power, heat, humidity, physical shock, cabling specifications, static-shocks, etc. Any and all of these can fluctuate in any location, let alone if you are talking about a million units in different people's houses. They won't behave the same in every location.
3) Crap software - The firmware isn't designed to NASA longevity standards. It's designed for home users to get on broadband once a day to check their email. Live with it, or replace it with one of the Open Source ones. This is why hard P2P use craps out most basic hardware - the software isn't built to cope. This has been true since the very first broadband modems/routers came out.
4) It's you - Personally, I've seen identical hardware, from identical batches, of very expensive models go into two people's houses. One person will treat it kindly, site it well, treat it with care upon unpacking, basically treat it as a sensitive electrical device (hell, sometimes they're so frightened of damaging the thing that they go overboard). The other will throw it around, plug the thing on/off/on/off while testing it, site it poorly, drop it, leave it in damp locations etc. without even realising they've done it.
No. 1 is a fact of life. Pay more = get more. No. 2 = Avoidable to some degree. No. 3 = Completely avoidable, but you may have to try something other than the default firmware.
No matter what hardware you're talking about, No. 4 will hit you if you are like that. I've seen home PC's that have been running for less than a year which people ASSURE me have received no damage, been locked away from the kids, etc. and yet the hard drive registers SMART failures for sheer number of bad sectors. Identical batch harddrives in identical PC's in other people's homes last forever without a single error.
Personally, my WRT54GS has been working fantastically for about a year now. Over that, in fact. Bog-standard firmware (I think it's even out of date, because I just used the factory firmware). Used every single day by many wireless clients, tons of traffic of every kind goes through it. Periods of dozens of config changes an hour, periods of months of unattended operation. Periods of massive wireless interference, periods of none. No crashes, no weird behaviour. Real power cycles, software power cycles, brown-outs, black-outs, no problem. I have it on a UPS now but it ran for ages without one. About the only problem I have with it is that I forget to put the 's' in https:/// whenever I try to access its configuration page.
Similarly for my ADSL Router (some cheap Conexant thing, doesn't even have a brand name on it, think it's eTec). That's been going for nearly five years now. It carried itself well through several speed upgrades, several changes of location (by many, many miles), half a dozen powercuts, several ISP faults (where the connection died but the router stayed up and endlessly tried to reconnect).
And my brother's equipment (printers, print servers, ADSL Routers, ancient wireless access points).
And all of the cheap rubbish they buy in work (including three consumer wireless ADSL routers on different Wifi channels, used as a mobile hotspot for a laptop trolley).
In actual fact, the only things that I've seen actually lock hard on a regular basis or a predictable one are:
Several very expensive Ethernet switches that lock REALLY hard if you get a network loop that goes un
I've got a USR 5461 and I found that it would do hard-locks when I did network-intensive tasks (scp, sshfs, etc...). I ended up melting a hole in the top of the casing and popping a little southbridge heatsink on it, with a little fan run off the 5v from the USB port. Now it runs like a charm!
Restarting them wakes the hamster up. I like my electric starter I rigged up. A word of warning drop the voltage to 9 volts. The 12 volt one tended to cook the little suckers and getting the smell of fried hamster out of your server is a real mess.
I've got many routers in use (Cisco 1600, 2600, 3600, Asus WL500g, USR 5461, Netgear 302, etc...) and none of them ever need rebooting, and yes, most of them are on a UPS. Title should be "Why do my cheap-ass Apple, D-Link, and Linksys routers suck? After all, I only purchased the cheapest model available."
You might find this useful to read this before your next rant: JSR 1: Real-time Specification for Java
All good colleges still teach the "hard" stuff.
Multiple routers on UPS here Dlink, linksys, and others all run without reboot until update or reconfig is required. Not sure why others might need reboots.\ cheers
I have a Belkin. Cheapest wireless router I could find, about 4 years ago. I can't remember the last time I had to restart it. Actually, I don't think I've _ever_ had to restart it. Even through service interruptions, it always picks back up right where it left off.
We have a Cisco on our corporate network that has an uptime of over 7 years. Who says you have to reboot them?
I don't recall the last time I had to boot any of my little routers. A Linksys WTRG54L and a Netgear WGT have been humming along for months.
There's more to it than this.
I have a WRT54G myself, and even considering the notorious "three day connection keepalive", I can count the number of restarts I've required on two hands.
That said, I highly recommend putting Tomato on it.
Because I went thru 5 months of hell, with endless USR techs, supervisors, and finally the VP of their wireless products line getting straightened out a problem with the 8054, where if a wireless phone was on the same channel (2.4GHz, US channel spectrum), the router would reset, hang, reset, hang.. and not change channels without a user manually changing it. Unfortunately, when rebooted the phones did automagically change channels, thus making a nice, vicious cycle. This was eventually fixed thru a firmware update, though I haven't reverse engineered the "new" firmware (it was a couple years ago) to figure out what the change was or how it was fixed. I haven't had that issue any longer (Now the issue is that after 5+ years of use, the router is dead. On their salary range, I doubt they are employing anyone with Jesus' power of Router Resurrection) Today, "Do you have a 2.4GHz wireless phone" is the first question I ask friends when I hear of a wireless router that reboots frequently.
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So when you show up to the movie theatre and a coke is $9 is that coke really worth more than the $1.50 two-liter of coke at the grocery store?
And when you go to fill up you gas tank is the 87 octane gas from the station across the street really that much better because it is marked up 10 cents per a gallon?
Or when you go to the electronics store does the logitech zfx990 optical wireless laser gaming mouse with blue-metal design really that much different than the logitech 200 optical mouse?
And how about some desktop ram where one stick of 1gb is selling from some fancy company like OCZ for $60 bucks with aluminum heat spreaders yet an equivalent 1gb stick from no-marketing distributer is selling for $40 (yet when you take the ram back home they have the same memory chips...)?
The best example of all: are monster audio cables really that much better than a coat hanger?
In general you could say that the more expensive something is, the higher the quality. But this is not always true. A common business practice is to exploit marketing strategies to target special high margin markets. That is someone at monster cable thought that there existed a market of idiots who would pay top dollar for a product that was not necessarily better than the other products on the market. But as long as they had a perception of being better and a price to back it up, then people in this target market would pay up.
The same can be said about cheap products that are advertised to be a "cheap product" when really the margin is low or even negative on the product. Companies sometimes do this to enter a new market first or slurp up market share before the competition can. A good example of this is the original xbox.
But sometimes there are products which end up on the market under priced because businesses didn't do adequate research or a different market (that wasn't targeted) realizes the potential of the product. A good example here is the original Sonic Impact t-amp which was marketed as a portable two speaker amplifier that could run on batteries. Audiophiles eventually came across the amp priced at about $60 (more today since the company realized it was worth more) and initially thought the product might be junk. But when they evaluated the amplifier they found that it could compete with top quality audiophile hardware. While the amplifier didn't have the power to drive a block party, for a living room it was more than enough.
If you want a more popular example you could go back in time to the time when Japanese entered the U.S. automobile and motorcycle market. The price of the Japanese imports were substantially lower yet the quality of the product was better. Harley Davidson almost failed as a company when the Japanese entered the market with their cheaper, more reliable, and sporty bicycles. Harleys suffered in quality because their production lines were flawed (a Harley back then was essentially hand-crafted and new workers were trained on the spot rather than being told to follow documented practices or processes). This resulted in an overpriced product with poor quality compared to the Japanese offerings. Harleys have changed since the company restructured itself and caught up with Japanese manufacturing methods. But it is just another example of price not being a good indicator of quality.
Finally businesses can use these same concepts to increase sales if they're smart. A good example here is a supermarket (I forget the name) that actively tries to listen to customer feedback. When they sold fish, they would package the fish into Styrofoam containers with plastic shrink wrap. Some of the feedback they got was that the fish they sold "was not fresh like the other fish markets". The guy in charge of buying the fish said that that was a lie and that he bought the fish from the same distributor that all the other markets bought the fish from and knew for a fact that they had just died. So the founders sent an employee to the other fish markets to see
Hey!!! I thought it was ours, too!!! :-)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
So my college was auctioning off its old networking equipment. Much to my surprise, I saw a nortel networks router shell, with the price tag of 25$. Thinking to my geek self that it bore further investigation in the event that it was, in fact, a full fledged router, I investigated. And nearly shit myself when I found it was not only the router, but all the expansion and fiber cards, and dual industrial grade failover sensing power supplies for operating a switched network at above 300,000PPS (packets per second). Shocked, I bought it on the spot. This is the part of my story where I must claim I am in NO WAY responsible for my neighborhoods blackouts that coincide for when I start that beast. And if anyone is interested in taking this off my hands, PLEASE contact me.
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But then again, I never have to reboot mine at work either. That's that plus side of running a Cisco 28xx on a big APC UPS at home. Never had a problem with anything in my home gear rack, but it sure does freak out the various techs that have come out for cable or fiber installs.
Why are there so few people running that kind of setup here? I was surprised by all the people talking about how "my first router" keeps blowing up.
And for everyone who is going to come back to this with the assorted versions of "but my router runs linux so i can do x or x or x on it", well, I hate to tell you, but my "home router" does dns, nat, filtering, runs my home VoIP system, including vm, outbound least cost route selection and firmware distribution, in and outbound VPNs, etc, etc.
My router is an old K6-2 box with 1 single port card, and a 4 port card. Runs Slackware, and has been running for 259 days since it's last reboot.
Also all my network hardware and servers in the basement are tied to a nice big APC 3000VA UPS
and have not had a problem since it was installed.
Also got to love the price I paid, $40.00 for it.
Hey to all that read this. I have the exact same router the WRT54G. I agree that it is a piece of crap. I just RMA'd it, but I have not purchased a new one yet to replace it. Can anyone recommend a good wireless router that doesn't reduce internet speed (which this WRT54G definitely did), needs minimal reboots, and has good range. Please respond. Thanks in advance.
i have to restart my WRT54G every week or two. I almost never reboot my Windows XP boxes.
pathetic.
For those with experience running earlier revisions of Linksys routers, it's known that they are much more stable than the newer and cheaper (component-wise) brethren. While Tomato may be very stable and have a good QoS implementation, it unfortunately shuts out those with Linksys units v5 or newer as described below. Even with it's QoS functionality being questionable at best, at least DD-WRT offers that segment of users a viable choice to using the stock firmware.
Following excerpt on Tomato firmware can be found here:
"This will not work on Linksys WRT54G/GS v5 or newer WRT54G/GS routers."
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Ever. Linksys WRT54GL w/DD-WRT on a small UPS/conditioner. Bullet and proof.
I had the exact same problem with the WR** from Linksys, and other routers (D-Link comes to mind). I now have a Linksys RV042 (it actually says Cisco on it as well), and I have not had to reboot this router once. The problem is it doesn't have WiFi in it, so I do also use a Linksys WAP54G (which is not a router, just an access point) and this also does not require a reboot. I realize this is a little extreme, being that the RV042 is for VPN routing (which I have to use anyways), but it is an excellent answer to the rebooting problem, even if the power lines are "dirty" (note: all of these routers have used the same powerbar & outlet, so that's been constant through the 'testing').
Well you could just use a better power supply. That may, in case of cheap routers, even improve your power efficiency.
Unstable power, as previously mentioned, is the likely culprit in most circumstances where folks have to reboot home broadband routers.
I have an SMC rack mount SOHO broadband router here at home. Twas the only one I could find back when I went looking for an RM consumer grade/price broadband router. Was $80 back in 2004. It's pretty nice, 8 port 10/100 switch, parallel port print server, SPI firewall w/ attack detection, PPPoE, DynDNS, DHCP server, etc. Vxworks based firmware.
I have it powered by an APC RM1400 in the bottom of the rack. I can't state exact uptime with certainty as the firmware doesn't provide uptime, but I know for a fact I've not power cycled or reset the SMC in over 2 years.
I have had to reset my DSL modem at least once in that time frame however. It's a SpeedStream 5260 transparent ethernet bridge, so I can only assume there was some kind of ATM or analog signaling problem between it and the DSLAM that caused it to freeze. That's only happened about 4 or 5 times in the 7 years I've had DSL.
I bought a used Cisco DSL router off eBay. Once I set it up, it only reboots when there's a power failure (once every few months or so). The WRT54G was no end of headaches, until its only job was to bridge the wired network and the wireless netowrk, which is the one function that never seemed to stop working on it. It doesn't do NAT, it doesn't do DHCP, it doesn't route, it doesn't do anything but wireless encryption. I haven't logged into it for maybe two years, though it's probably time to change the network password.
I've seen quite a few embedded systems, and in general most people can't code.
A few can, and a while ago, programming was hard enough that most code was written by one of these few, but now that Java, VB and C# are so wide spread, companies are able to hire bunches of people with marginal programming abilities and get something that looks like it kind of works.
It's easier to imagine if you consider how many people are master artists or musicians and how many people can play an instrument.
In programming there are very similar ratios, but since most people are utterly incapable of differentiating which code is great art and which is someone playing an instrument, they end up hiring the session players (which tend to be much cheaper) every time.
End result? Routers need rebooting every week or so.
I use an NSLU2 as a router and firewall for my home network, and I move more often than I have to reboot it.
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
Here's a suggestion that worked for me. Turn on the "Block WAN Ping" function.
I've got a D-Link D-524 that worked for many years. Like others have said, eventually the power adapter died. Got a WRT45G. Ran fine for 15 minutes, then got slow and was unresponsive after 30 Min. I then had to reboot. The cycle repeated like clockwork. My old D-Link never did that. Called customer support. Nothing other than the usual "reboot & check the plug" kind of response. Submitted e-mail requests. Nothing.
Gave up, got a new D-Link power supply. (They replaced it free; great service!) Now my old D-Link had exactly the same problem! 30 minutes, gets slow, and I have to reboot.
Finally, I recalled something about bad guys using ping to find live machines. I turned on the "Block WAN Ping" setting. After that, the D-Link was fine for months. I suspect the same trick would have made the WRT54G work.
I have no idea WHY it works, only that it does...
1) Most retail or ISP "home networking" routers are built to a low, low price, and you only get what you pay for.
2) The router OS usually does not include (e.g.) a cron job to reboot regularly to force automatic cleanup of queues, etc. Some customers would like this, but it might be considered disruptive, so it's avoided.
3) Even if the manufacturer's power supply is robust, they are often mismatched, whether by ISP techs or home owners, and this causes all sorts of problems including overheating and frequent router resets.
4) [Name of ISP withheld] guidance is NOT to plug an integral modem/router into a power bar or surge protector if possible, since this is supposed to help avoid the problem of the router resetting itself to factory defaults due to a "power surge" (supposedly caused by: lightning, "storm surge", brown-out, or power cut). This mainly affects wireless clients, since customization (SSID, WEP or WPA) gets lost, and you end up with a house full of "wireless orphans".
5) Rightly or wrongly, many High Speed Internet customers seem to be under the impression that their service is supposed to be up and available ALL the time. Looking at their monthly tariffs (often $50 per month or higher) this is not unreasonable, whereas - in practice - most residential Internet equipment (modems and routers) is subject to various additional upstream issues including line breaks, cable head end restarts, upstream router restarts, name server switching (?), and all sorts of other issues I don't even know about. In this environment, having to restart FIRST the modem, and THEN the router cleans up more than 50% of all "can't connect" scenarios, and - these days - you often do NOT have to restart the computers as well. This simple information is not known by the majority of consumers, especially those whose own sense of "entitlement" gives them the mindset to get on the phone and be sarcastic (or worse) at the first sign of any disruption to their (residential service), "because I work from home", etc. Arguably, MOST router restarts are requested by ISP tech support folks while trying to do basic cleanup as a prelude to other troubleshooting.
6) I have some sympathy for folks who happen to live "in a bad spot" in terms of their chosen Internet provider's infrastructure. They just seem to go apoplectic after a while if problems continue.
In conclusion, consumers deserve better, and the industry (both ISPs and router manufacturers) should be providing it.
My Internet recently stopped working, and I had a strange suspicion it might be getting DDoSed. So I ran a packet sniffer, and I found that thousands of ARP packets were coming in every second! I quickly went online since when I had the modem connected to the computer the Internet worked fine, and come to find out getting that many ARP requests is NORMAL on Comcast Internet! That's why the little light on the modem is ALWAYS flashing, even when no ones using the Internet!
It was the router. I reset it and it worked fine.
I had the problem too, on two of those Linksys V4's. The firware they came with is newer than that on linksys's website, so I didn't try to upgrade.
Both of these had an incoming port forwarded to a PC for bittorrent. I also use a number of those same linksyses without such port forwarding: those never had the problem.
Workaround: instead of forwarding that port through the "normal" port forwarding settings, move the setting to the UPNP port forwarding settings page. Froblem fixed, I've never seen it again.
So there seems to be a firmware bug involved (it's not because of the huge number of incoming connections if you're running a bittorrent client, the router can handle those fine.)
I also noticed that if you use standard port forwarding, new incoming connections often seem to cause the router's network interface (local side) to reset. You may see "network cable unplugged" pop up briefly, if it's a windows PC that's connected. After this has happened a number of times, the router will just stop working and require a reboot.
Every once in a while, my IPCop box (Celeron 533MHz, 128MB RAM, 5GB HD, running headless just doing routing to two internal subnets plus VPN when I'm out of town) would become completely unresponsive (HTTPS and SSH would time out, no Internet access). It didn't happen often, but enough to annoy the family. The only thing that would fix it was a hard reboot. I have it reboot once a week and all is well. That was a while ago (well over a year now), and it may have been a bug or quirk that has been fixed since. Either way, it's unintrusive and keeps my intranet humming along.
Peace, Chris
I have to agree, the current Linksys routers are LOUSY. I have a WRT54GS v6 that came with VxWorks and I've installed DD-WRT micro on. In both OSes it was crap -- Wi-Fi randomly dropping out, occasional crashes. It was especially bad on hot days and during heavy network traffic.
Apparently the Broadcom chip inside it was overheating. I ticky-tackied a PC fan to the table next to the router and powered it with a GameCube power brick (12v DC). The problem went away almost entirely, leaving me with a reliable but somewhat noisy router.
Later, I opened the router and placed an old heatsink off a Pentium on the offending chip (run it a while, see which one is hot), and used a piece of plastic wedged into the router's shell to press the heatsink down on the chip. The heatsink had some of that heat-conductive foam glue stuff some OEMs stick it to the CPU with on the bottom. Now (almost a year later) I have no fan next to it and it hasn't crashed or dropped the network yet.
I'm still stuck in the wimpy v6 flash and RAM though...
Like most things that change configuration setting, you don't need to restart the whole system. They just tell you that because its easier then explaining what needs to be restarted. For example here at my University when they show you how to set up your computer to access the full university network they tell you to restart it after registering it on a web site, when in reality all you have to is run ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew (ifdown and ifup in linux). They could explain that to you, or they could just tell you to restart your computer.
They other problem is with bad firmware. With most of the small routers and switches I use for work or personal use I usually check every few months for firmware updates. That something alot of people don't think about, but its does help a lot with bugs in addition to providing new functionality.
Also the Windows problem is a little more wide spread, trust me they aren't using WRTs as enterprise routers, or Dlinks as enterprise switches. Were, as the article you were referring to states Windows is everywhere. It would get really interesting if they started putting Windows on you home router (yea Internet connection sharing) like they have Linux on now, then started moving up the chain to enterprise routing systems(Minesweeper on a Cisco CRS1 anyone)
<rant>
One last thing. We really need to come up with another name for these $40 home "routers". I am sick of having to train new employees and have them call anything from a $5000 enterprise grade switch to a <$10 repeater "routers" </rant>
http://www.southparkzone.com/episodes/1206/Over-Logging.html
I fear the Y2038 bug
I have a Belkin Wireless G ver. 5000. Even setting vuze to only 40 ports, causes the router to lockup in seconds after a few active torrents are opened. I looked in the security log of the router and it was filled with IP Spoofing errors. I went back to azureus 2.5.0.4 and set global connection limit to 200 and haven't had any such problems.
I have a Asus WL530g which plays badly with my wife's Acer laptop. Rebooting the router seemed to help sometimes. However, I work on a Mac laptop, and it never has had this problem. Even when the Acer loses the connection, the Mac keeps working. So it's obvious that the error is on the Acer's side. I'm pretty sure it's something called XPCOM, but it's hard to be sure (XPCOM might lock up because of a deeper problem).
Anyway, my point is: router problems are sometimes not in the router, but in the client...
I have also owned several routers (US Robotics 8003, Philips-Belgacom cpwbs054, Linksys WRT150N) The US Robotics had to be rebooted at least once a day, "open all in tabs" (open multiple website) could not be used or I had to reboot it. The Philips router was very stable for 1.5 years, after that I could not connect to it anymore (only in rescue mode, but I didn't found the boot image to fix the problem, and belgacom didn't want to help me). The Linksys only needs to be rebooted every few days when I have P2P client running. No parameter found to reduce tcpip connection time.
I had a WRT54G, and it needed rebooting once every two to three weeks. The wi-fi element would just stop working. Really irritating.
I eventually scrapped the thing and bought a Netgear, which hasn't failed since I first switched it on several months ago.
Gee. Anyone actually reading the posts is going to notice something unusual...
There are people posting who have a WRT54G that works perfectly, no rebooting, right out of the box. There are people who replace the firmware on the WRT54G and it works perfectly for them.
There are people who own a WRT54G using the original firmware and have to reboot it every week, or few weeks, or every day, or every few days.
This tells me that quite possibly it is not the WRT54G product line that is the problem. It might be different versions that have issues... product runs that proved problematic until a change was made in the hardware or firmware... thus Every WRT54g is different, and while one may require regular rebooting, another might not. But, this would mean that there is no QC.
If we assume that there is actually QC at Cisco/Linksys... then how could there be such different results in the usage of the same product (WRT54G) from person to person? Other factors. Maybe the ISP is alternating dynamic IPs fast... Maybe the person in question that is having issues is torrenting. Maybe one ISP is sending those TCP kill packets causing the issues. Maybe Someone is being hacked (silly, I know). Maybe there are connection issues on the actual cable/phone line. Maybe the modem has to be replaced. Maybe...
However, just the fact that this one brand of router, this WRT54g, apparently has the ability to work perfectly for some people and require regular rebooting for others... should point away from the possibility that it is an inexpensive and thus garbage piece of equipment.
Then again, since it took more than 30 words to get this point across, I doubt many have read far enough to understand my conclusion... that something other than the router might be the cause.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Probably is a bug or something, with original firmware i had to reboot my WRTG54G every 2 weeks, with a custom firmware i just not do that. This is the output of my own WRT54G running Sveasoft custom firmware: ....
BusyBox v1.01 (2005.10.16-13:59+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
zeus:~#uptime
15:44:09 up 95 days, 15:44, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
zeus:~#
I have an old P90 box with Linux for my router. It reboots when the power to the house fails :)
I have a billion combo DSL/ethernet/wireless and it dies at random intervals - sometimes weeks or months apart, sometimes almost daily.
It's not power problems, since the router runs on a big UPS.
I suspected an overheating problem, so I put the router on a tin can to elevate its air ducts and provide airflow underneath.
I will shortly change to a different one, as this router's pretty long in the tooth and doesn't do ADSL2+, and I'll see whether the new router suffers any reliability problems.
Well, a couple of weeks ago I had to reboot my WRT54G running under OpenWRT because I tweaked some parameters on the wireless cards without correctly bringing it down... and at some point it froze.
This router had more than 350 days of uptime, with near constant use of WiFi (shared with one of my neighboor) + ethernet + PPPoE Internet connection + 3 OpenVPN tunnels.
I'm still amazed by the reliability of this little router !
So, my answer to your question, "Why do we have to restart routers", would be:
1) because your hardware, and/or embeded OS, suck.
2) or, because you reboot it when it's not required
The second point depends on your level of perception or investigation on the problem.
In the case of the OpenWRT I have the ability to connect by SSH and I'm able to see what is happening. With other routers you might not have this level of access to the information you need in order to tell if a reboot will be usefull or not. So, in this cases, the only action possible is the reboot.
So, even if the problem is not on your side, you have no way to tell wether it's your router fault, or just your ISP rebooting his routers :)
For those who have an older 500mhz+ box lying around, I have been using Astaro for my home router. I found a 500mhz Celeron HP and added half a gig of ram. I have gigabit on the lan side and 10/100 on the wan. I haven't rebooted this router since I installed it. Granted it's Linux, so it shouldn't ever need to be rebooted, but it's been rock solid for me, which is far more than I can say for my Linksys, Belkin or Netgear routers I have tried....
A lot of the time it is due to either dry joints, overheating, or static buildup.
If a router needs rebooting every day or so, it's a sign it's on its way out IMO. My Linksys router has started doing that, and now I'm shopping for a replacement. (I used to be able to get around 300 days, solid, out of it.)
The exception is the AirPort base stations. They have an irritating flaw which means they need rebooting every time the internet connection goes down, even for a fraction of a second. This behaviour varies between modems, but it's quite common. It's been around for a while, but AFAIK Apple hasn't released a software update to fix it.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I only reboot my router when the power goes out in my house (a few times a year?). I use a PC Engines WRAP board running monowall and it is rock solid. It is pretty green using only ~1.5W. http://www.pcengines.ch/ Soekris makes similar boards. http://soekris.com/ Monowall rules. http://m0n0.ch/wall/
I started having this problem a few years ago with my admittedly old D-Link 614 router. My solution was to set up an old K6-2 550Mhz machine which was inches from the garbage heap with Smoothwall (get it from smoothwall.org) and replace the POS D-Link with this gem. Needless to say it NEVER crashes, and had at one point over a year of uptime before an extended power failure brought it down.
I highly recommend to anyone who is having problems with crashing routers throw them away and put together a Smoothwall router using an old machine collecting dust in the basement or out of spare parts and the free Smoothwall OS. You'll never look back.
I've had my router several months and I only reset it once when I wanted a new IP.
Typical american consumerist.
search the net for images of these things so you know what to look for.
I've been using the same Nokia M1122 for just under 7 years for my ADSL connection. Once I had the latest firmware loaded on it (within a year of buying it), and whilst I had it attached to a UPS, I think it managed to overrun its uptime counter (~160 days IIRC) 3 times, before I started using bittorrent - then the 1024 entry or so NAPT table would get overrun, and cause a reboot. After limiting the number of bittorrent connections, a lot fewer spontaneous reboots occurred.
Then again, the Nokia M1122 was a NZ$700 ADSL router in 2001.
And with ADSL2+ finally being delivered with Local Loop Unbundling in my area, I'll have to move onto another router so I can "feel the speed" - probably with the associated "crashes" to match.
The reason why routers have to be restarted in a while varies from router to router. Embedded systems aren't as bugg-free as one would think. for example, the WRT54G series have a bug in the firmware that makes it really unstable after a certain amounts of connections have been made since boot-time, which is why it has be to be restarted fairly often if you use things that are very intense on the amount of connections, for example bittorrent. Luckily this can be solved by flashing the WRT54G with the Tomato firmware (that's what i did, it works like a dream now). When it comes to other routers, just make sure you have the newest firmware, since this type of bug affects many routers and brands.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
Same here. The condition that tripped the problem went as follows:
My laptop = Ubuntu (latest)
Wife's laptop = Vista Home Premium.
Both wireless.
We're surfing, everything is running great. I'd hit a site that had lots of images all on one page (think Fark's 'Photoshop this pic' page')
Bang, network goes dead.
I'd restart the router and my box would come back online no problem. Vista would not re-establish a connection. Repair (or whatever it's called in Vista) failed. We'd need to reboot her computer.
Searched the web and found that this same problem happens and seems to be related to the router.
Switched to a Netgear VPN824V3 and the problem has pretty much disappeared.
Four words: Switched Mode Power Supply. Switching supplies are extremely efficient and thus small. You've seen this already, there's one in your computer. That's how they can pack an 800+ watt supply in to something that small. You try and do that with a linear supply and it'll be massive.
Same deal for wall warts. Some companies still use linear supplies, but not many. It is to the point where SMPS is much cheaper to produce. They also have the advantage of being smaller, and running cooler.
You can see the technology at work in amplifiers. Have a look at Rotel's site sometime. Specifically, compare their old RB-1080 vs their new RB-1092. The RB-1080 is about twice the vertical size as the RB-1092 to house some large components (the transformer and the heat sinks mainly). However it outputs only 200 watts per channel where as the 1092 does 500. How? Well the 1080 is an older style amp. It uses a linear power supply, and class AB output. Thus it takes a lot of space and generates a lot of heat to do what it does. Not very efficient. The 1092 is a class D amp. It has a switching power supply and switching outputs. As such it is very efficient and produces little heat.
Now none of that is to say that Dlink isn't including poorly made SMPSes, however the fact that they are so small has nothing to do with their quality. You don't need big if you have efficient.
Must have passed like 2 years since my last post...
Anyway, I have a WRT54GL and it's the router I recommend to all of my customers to get. First thing to do on it is install OpenWRT, never had a problem on it. I have one on my parents home and it works steady ever since I installed it.
Blame it on the crappy software built into these machines, I've never had a problem on them. If you're not too tech savvy then you can try some of the other alternatives (I've heard - or read - some good comments about both Tomato and HyperWRT).
I'm a bit drunk right now as to make a full in-depth tech analysis to the root of the issue but we both God and I knows that all of my OpenWRT-powered devices work as intended.
As a last recomm#@#@#1!!ONE1!!one!!+++ATH NO CARRIER
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
They need rebooted because the routers are crap. I have raised various bug issues with home router companies before and i have never seen a single issue resovled with some of its advanced features that simple dont work. Then i picked one of these up really cheaply from somewhere. Cisco IOS Software, C837 Software (C837-K9O3SY6-M), Version 12.4(5), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc3) router uptime is 12 weeks, 3 days, 2 hours, 8 minutes The last 3 reboot reasons over the last 2 years has been a for power failure ....
I think i have only ever had to reboot the thing once since i got it because it had crashed and that's over a 3 year period
Same deal with the cisco switch i have.
My first "LAN edge" router/firewall, back in the early '90s, was running BSDI, and since Free/Net/OpenBSD came out I've always used an old computer running one of the open source BSDs for this job. You don't need much horsepower for the job... for a long time at ABB I was using old Compaq Desqpro 20e boxes ... 386/20s with 4MB RAM ... and by the time FreeBSD CURRENT outgrew 4MB I had a stack of old DEC Multias with 12-16 MB sitting around. My current firewall is really overkill, a VIA Mini-ITX box, but it uses less power than the ex-desktop K6 it replaced.
As far as embedded systems and reliability goes, there are always lemons, but I have found that once you get a good network device (router, modem, what have you) if you can keep the ambient temperature reasonable they'll pretty much last forever. If you skimp on the air conditioning you'll pay for it in frequent replacements. Depending on the circumstances that might actually be the cheap option, mind you... spending $100/month extra on A/C to protect a $20 router is probably a false economy... especially if the time value of replacing the router is "oh boy, field trip to Frys!".
I use a cheapo DI-524 and it runs for months at a time without a reboot and copes with extremely high bittorrent speeds
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I stronly agree with livewire. I have a UPS on every node of my SOHO LAN and it never has a problem. Comcast on the other hand...
I did power engineering for a safety-of-life system, and we saw a tremendous reduction in failures after we seriously cleaned and stabilized the power.
Like I said, a UPS is cheaper and more effective than getting a prescription for calming your nerves.
I've had the same problem with many simple routers. When you run P2P software inside you'll get lots of connections from outside, each entry requires a NAT table entry which expires slowly. I invested in a small Cisco DSL router which allows me to set the max. size and the expiry time of nat entries. Problem solved. Without the limit on the tables the Cisco would report the overflow after about one day.
I have a WRT54GL with Tomato Firmware. haven't restarted mine since last upgrade (2 Months)...
if you have to restart your router so often it's because its a DLINK router or you are wannabe network dude who cant configure a router...
learn, research and experiment... or else don't complain.
My ZyXel P330W never needs rebooted. I leave it up for months at a time. In fact the only time is gets rebooted is when the power goes out... Oh an I run torrents with a lot of connections and have 2 vista machines, 2 xp machines. One of the pc's is a notebook & vista as well. No problems.
After my D-Link power supply died because of a severe power glitch, I got myself a WRT54G. Well, actually 3 replacements also, they all locked up after I connected an Apple computer to it (Mac OS X I should say because even a Mac OS X VMware image was able to do so). In the end, Lynksys just said: "Yeah, 802.11g should work in theory, but on the box it says we only support Windows, so tough luck for you". After that, I bought a Belkin router, and that's one of the most stable routers I have ever had. I think in 3 years I rebooted it only 2 times.
I have a Linksys router with 10/100 Ethernet and 804.11g and I've had to reboot it only once or twice since I've owned it
I use a WRT54GS, the so-called SpeedBoost version. For fear of bricking it, I read lots of forum posts regarding the 54GS knowing it was not the recommended model for installing DD-WRT onto it. Turns out for the production run of the 54GS, certain chips on the 54GS have been made by three different manufacturers, one of them known to get bricked by a DD-WRT flashing. There is no way to check other than to crack the case open and look and I didn't want to do that. I took the risk.
I was lucky. DD-WRT worked on my 54GS and has done so since November 2007. It is worth reading around. There are often little bits of technical information like this that may be the reason your firmware is unstable.
... you buy piece of shit Linksys equipment.
As far as the WRT54G[L] goes, the default linksys firmware as well as the default ddwrt firmware (as far as I can remember) both have an unreasonably low maximum number of file descriptors allowed at once. For P2P transfers, for example, which use hundreds of file descriptors at once, a limit of, say, 50 maximum file descriptors would make the embedded linux kernel freeze. The solution was to simply up that number to something more reasonable, like 500. After I did that, I never had a problem again with my Linksys WRT54GL.
On WRT54G's, its the firmware. I have a v4 that used to lock up all the time. Ever since flashing it with HyperWRT Thibor firmware, it has worked great.
I have a retail shop that uses verifone ruby cash registers. They won't install one of these w/o a UPS. Those of us that live in rural areas will definitely tell you that brownouts are a major problem. I won't run any devices without a UPS. This gets expensive, but the alternative, which usually involves replacing a PC or other device is much more expensive.
Agreed - the D-link gaming router is great.
Not only does it have a nicely customizable firewall, but the QoS you can do is pretty amazing for a consumer device. Re: bittorrent, I had an old Netopia R314 that used to crap out when I had bittorrent going. Since switching to the D-link router, I haven't noticed ANY issues with connectivity. It helps that I can setup QoS to handle things the way I want (ie: http traffic > bittorrent traffic, etc)
Highly recommended. Plus it's gigabit, which is a nice bonus.
chiming in on ADD A UPS. I had similar problems and finally put all of my network gear on a UPS. WRT54G + cable-modem + vonage router. Reliability is now excellent.
I have a cheap Belkin router (purchased it about 2 years ago) and the only time I have to restart it is when the power fluctuates and knocks my cable modem offline. Usually doing an ipconfig /renew on my Windows boxes fixes the network problems.
Periodic power outages help, too.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Routers are complicated devices. There's a lot of software inside it and it is not a surprise that they get stuck. It is surprise that they don't have some system to reboot themselves, as it is very simple to implement.
My company made routers for our own needs (never sold to wide market). They were Soekris based, with custom Linux distro inside. We had some issues with one wireless driver, so there was a script that monitored wlan interface to see if everything was ok. If there was a problem (in our case, we had known that wlan0 would disappear if driver had failed), script would reboot the device.
It is simple to write such script if you "hunt" for the known specific problem, like we did. But it is reasonably simple to make some small monitoring program that will try to see if everything goes right. Maybe it won't catch 100% of problems, but you can always do at least something.
Real problem is when whole system goes to a freeze. But that is even more easy to solve. Many microcontrollers have "watchdog timer". if the software does not periodically do some required operation with the timer, after predefined time it would reset the controller. Not a perfect solution, but still better than frozen hardware. I think that it would be trivial to add such hardware to routers.
No sig today.
But it seems that "many connections" kill these devices. Many connections, which boil down to: BitTorrent or "too many" devices.
At my house, networked devices are around 30. (4 laptops, 1 PC, 2 Mac minis, PS3, 2 Wifi phones, 4 access points, 3 VOIP ATAs, NSLU2 (asterisk, bluetooth proximity), Xbox 360 (just red-ringed out) ...... and so on. This between 5 members of the family, but I am admittedly responsible for 90% of the smog. Of course I love this planet, so most of the time they are not on at the same time..
Looking at my routers' MAC address list makes me feel like I am in an office of 15.
Anyway. My ISP provided DSL box can keep up with this from 6-24 hours, sometimes crapping out after 4. That is some cheap crap I am forced to pay a Buck for, (Globespan Virata). This box is not even configured to do NAT, as I have a fixed IP router behind it.
So, I reverted back to my old box (which my provider said was incompatible, unreliable, but turned out they killed everyone's connection, gave this lie, so they could push their $1 box on you, for which they do not give password). There is in fact no password, so I can install crap on the whole districts routers, or shut them down.
Anyway, so put my old (and not working) Zyxel box back in (no MAC address restriction for public IP clients is in place), and turns out that the box miraculously works again with the 2+ year old settings on it.
The box is NOT freezing, but it is not doing NAT. So my connection (DSL) is stable again. Rock solid.
Router: bought this nice shiny WRT54G (V8), shich is sadly VxWorks (Vx_IT_DOES_NOT_WORK(S)).
Same thing, reboots in 1-2days, or no net, Then again, with all the machines on, 4 hours and it is toast.
So I went ahead, and bought this $35 WRT54G (Version 1) access point with Linux Pre-installed on Ebay. Lazyness won, and got the pre-installed version, but you can do it yourself as well.
Guess what: The thing has 3 months+ uptimes. I once set some stupidity and it lost some config data, other than that it is rock solid. DD-WRT. NEVER HAVE TO REBOOT. The only downtime comes from the sometimes 3+ hours nightly power failures, for which 6+2 UPSes do not provide enough remedy. Ok, the router is outside on an old UPS that can hold up for an hour and a half with zyxel modem+wrt. I have 2x1000, 3x 750, 1x550, 2x350, and the higher capacity ones are reserved for my ps3, my projector and my Mac computers (a mac mini has 3hours+ on a 1000VA, with a 22' lcd, which I really appreciate.)
The V1 vs V8 is a shocking difference, they replaced the antennas with cheap-o ones, the status leds are now minimal, on the old you had a bunch, giving nice status. Also the memory sizze is a fraction of the original.
What also helps: DEDICATE a ROUTER and a separate CABLE/DSL device. Most of these consumer boxes are designed to nat for Grandma's and Grandpa's 2 laptops. They crap out if you are downloading Pr0n from 150 seeds, play 64-player online matches, and have 15 ssh connections, and work on 3+ workstations while conferencing on VOIP.
I also figured, that cheap access points are pretty stable, if you only use them to provide WIFI, and not do NAT. I have a wrt54gC (the C is the tiny device, the size of a sipura 3102 or PAP-2t). The device is rock solid as an AP, but if you nat 5+ devices over it, it crashes in 3 hours.
I just got a TimeCapsule, and this far it works, but it barely has 5 hour uptime, so I will see. Naturally in AP mode, and no NAT-ting.
Well, just my 5 cents. I used to do net/unix admin for years, but now I stay away from it as I turned to programming full time..... no 2 shifts, no support calls ...... still, I like to keep a complex network and play around ....
Hope that helps you out there with 10+ bit-sucking devices leaching 24-7
I've used enough of these Airport devices that I've (convinced myself that I have?) noticed an interesting pattern in the failure of the hardware. They'll work fine for a year or two, and then one day, DNS stops working. In every case I've seen, the DNS symptom that you mention is almost always the first sign of a hardware failure. They sometimes last a year or more after the initial problem, but the DNS outages which require restarting the unit become more and more frequent. If you let it ride long enough, it eventually happens several times a day. Usually near the end, other failures happen, too. I haven't seen this issue (yet?) with any 802.11n units (Airport Extreme and new Airport Express), only with UFO and the original Express units.
Ive' had (at best) mixed results with any consumer grade firewall/router. A UPS is an excellent start, but your best bet is to avoid them all together, and use that old PC lying in your closet. Put two NICs in it, and download pfsense (google it). You'll never buy another, and you only reboot when the power goes out.
Or maybe the OS on your router? From my DG834:
Yeah, it's unmodified stock firmware, but then it's never crashed or failed on me so I see no reason to change.
I've had a WRT54G (v2.2, the good hardware, before they re-branded it as the WRT54GL) for about 4 years now, and I have had to reset it a grand total of NEVER. It has been completely rock solid for me the whole time I've been using it. All I can say is that it has been the best purchase I have ever made for my network.
I have personally been using broadband for over 10 years. In that time I have lived in 3 different locations and used 5 different providers. During my usage I did notice one common thing. I had to reboot the router when using PPPOE almost daily (yea cron!) but never ever would it be required when using DHCP.
All the DSL providers I was on required use of PPPOE and the cable providers used DHCP. I know I wont ever use PPPOE again unless it is the last provider on the planet.
I have a Netgear WGR614v6 and usually only have to manually restart it once a month. Maybe look into a Netgear? I only paid $40 for it and it has been working great for two years.
I have never rebooted my WRT54G Linksys router since I got rid of my wireless landline phone. Sometimes the frequency used by those phones can interfere with the Linksys wireless. When I had one, I had to reboot very frequently. Also my router is powered through a UPS.
WRT54G was out around early 2003. It had crappy firmware and was cheap enough to buy. Then all the 3rd party firmwares come out and made this the cheapest processional router to buy. I moved to Tenerife and the routers they gave you here lasts few hours of torrents before you have to reboot them. Since I reconfigured the modem to be only a converter between the telephone line and Ethernet to WRT54GL (tomato) I didn't had to reboot once. As for now, I urge all our customers to buy WRT54GL, since you can't get a better router in that price range.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I've found Trendnet's products, while inexpensive, to be decently reliable. The TEW-633GR i have from them (gigabit + wifi-N) sustains constant torrenting for months on end. I also have three of their 8-port gigabit switches, one of which was transferring gigabytes of data while outside it's rated operating temperature range (over 110F in the midday heat) without a hitch. The v8 of the WRT54G is crap (wound up replacing t with an old router I had lying around), but I have a v1 that has never given me trouble. $0.02
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are cruchy and good with ketchup.
You'll probably never read this, there's lots of responses, but I'll post it anyways. I had the same problem, went through d-link, linksys, and netgear routers. All had to be rebooted daily, even when on a UPS. They were only used as access points, all the routing was disabled (NAT, DHCP, and such is all handled by a fedora machine).
Finally bought a 3COM OfficeConnect G+A access point off of eBay for $150 or so. Hasn't been rebooted since installed (7 months).
I've never had to make a habit of rebooting wireless routers. I've run older Silver and white apple airports, a couple of ABS b/g blocks for 2-3 years now, some belkin b/g and I've never had to go and restart them to 'fix' something unless I wanted to blow away the config and do a total reset.
My network gear (DSL or cable modem, switches, firewalls) have always been on UPSes - usually APC auction refurbs or cast-offs with replaced batteries. Think the only things that 'broke' in the last decade were the Silver ABS (bad caps) and a Netgear 8 or 12 port Fe switch.
For the past several years, I have implemented several routers from D-Link, Linksys, Netgear and Allied Telesyn. All the routers have run the manufacturer's firmware at the latest revision. All of the routers, except for the Allied Telesyn, have needed periodic restarts. Some more frequently than others. The symptoms are typical. They either fail in their ability to communicate on the WAN side or they become unreachable on the LAN side as well. In either case, they require a power cycle and for a period of time, all is well again.
Although, I have not conducted any serious experiments, it appears that workload may be effecting the frequency in which the router needs to be restarted. With moderate usage, this is usually around every 2 weeks and is *never* greater than 1 month. The exception was the Allied Telesyn routers, as they never needed to be restarted.
Obviously, strict tests under controlled conditions for an extended period of time would be great. Otherwise, we can only speculate whether these restarts are due to firmware, hardware or a combination the two. Given that the problem is so prevalent that it was a major theme in a South Park episode, you're led to believe that the behavior is common to most routers. Only the engineers working on these devices can give us a an inside look as to what the cause of these problems are.
Anyone out there that's a router hardware or software engineer, please chime in, we'd love to know what's going on.
Due to the increasing trend to cut corners to maximize profits, it's no surprise that most (if not all) consumer-level routers are complete garbage (yay capitalism! ). The solution? Make a fun weekend project out of building your own. All it takes is an old functional computer, Linux (or BSD), a few NICs, and a good Linux (or BSD) router/firewall howto. Or, if you don't want to bother with configuring it yourself, check out projects like m0n0wall. If you really want something slick, check out using one of the many embedded systems on the market. It'll cost you a little more, but you'll have one slick little router. I personally like the Soekris systems for building a router out of. I've been running the Soekris net4521 with Pyramid Linux on it and have never had any issues with stability or lockups.
In the case of the BT Voyager it's because the upstream router forgets the allocated IP address and the downstream router has to request a new one ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
Funny, I think everyone here has had to reboot their router to solve problems in the past.
I have a "consumer-level" router which only needs to be rebooted if I upgrade the firmware (3 years ago) or move house (a year ago). It's a SMC2804WBRP-G wired+wireless router.
It has been booted a few other times in the last 5 years due to power failures. Our UPS only has 30 minutes capacity and sometimes a power-out caused by a lightning storm lasts longer than that. We live in the countryside, so it often takes the lazy sods at the power company some time to restore our power.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
money is on you are running bit torrent / p2p apps that muck with the router due to the way the packet requests are done
programmers have a mentality that crashing is a horrible answer to a bug. In a previous lifetime I wrote router software professionally. When you develop routers you're usually under time pressure because the profit margins are very small and time to market is important. As a consequence bugs that are related to long uptimes are difficult to locate(lots of data flowing through, wedged hardware, memory leaks). The heart of the problem is the difficulty in the industry to get agreement between those who are time driven and those who are quality driven. If you're motivated by time to market you're going to put pressure on your engineering staff to cut quality, if you're motivated by quality you're going to put pressure on those who are time driven. I've met very few software engineers who are comfortable addressing out these balances in developing quality software. In my opinion the most beneficial technical mechanism is to create watchdogs that force reboots the router when things go wrong.
...long story short, since as a customer you don't have much say in how the software/hardware are developed. You do however have an option that fixes the vast majority of all problems - put your router on a christmas tree timer. In the middle of the night have your router (and cable box for that matter) power cycle for five minutes. I'll bet you'll be a much happier surfer
I have had problems with DHCP specifically. It seemed that the WRT54G could only give out a certain number of DHCP addresses before it had to be rebooted. It would still work Ok for devices which had static DHCP addresses, or for machines/devices that had been up for quite a while and still had the DHCP address, but if I restarted a machine or turned one on that had been off for a while, it wouldn't work. This seemed to happen both with the original firmware that came in the WRT54G and also with Sveasoft Alchemy firmware which I used mainly so I could crank up the Tx power and use WDS. So, it could have been in the original firmware since I think Sveasoft started with the open-source release from Linksys. I used to use the WRT54G as the main router with an Apple Airport Express acting to extend the range using WDS. Later I got an Actiontec router from Verizon with my FiOS setup. At that point, I setup the Actiontec as the main router and have it do the DHCP. I then ran a 1GbE cable to where the Apple Airport Express used to be and used the WRT54G as a 2nd router. It now has the DHCP disabled, and I've not had any problems with it. It's also possible that later versions of the firmware from Linksys may have fixed the issue, but I have not had the motivation to experiment with any. YMMV, but you might try setting it up to renew the DHCP addresses as infrequently as possible. Another approach is just to set up all the devices on your network with static IP addresses. This might not be practical if you roam with your wireless device, but you might be able to set up any fixed devices like desktops or servers that don't leave with a static IP to avoid them using up the DHCP limit (assuming my theory is correct). You might also try a newer version of firmware, or one of the open-source replacements like OpenWRT, etc. Even though I still have Sveasoft on my own WRT54G, I personally wouldn't recommend Sveasoft as in my experience it seems to have the same DHCP problem as the original. It's also possible that this is not directly related to DHCP, but could just be a more general memory management issue that DHCP happens to trigger after a while. One final note is that WRT54G does seem to have some sensitivty to supply power. To reset it reliably, I seem to have to unplug it for about 30 seconds minimum before repowering it or else it may not fully reset. That said, it's believable that power glitches could also be to blame for some of the issues. Some other posters have noted similar effects. A power filter may help, but a UPS would be even better if your power tends to go out for just a few seconds at a time.
root@OpenWrt:~# uptime
19:34:29 up 319 days, 21:12
That's a WRT54GS. With OpenWRT, as the prompt says. I think it's been 319 days since I installed that particular firmware.
Then again, I live in Germany. The power grid is quite stable here usually.
Hanno
As many others in the "745 More Comments" have probably said, I've had no problem with my routers not rebooting. I own a WRT54G v2, WRT54GS v1, Buffalo WHR-G54-HP v1, and Asus WL-500W. The WRT54GS has only been restarted when I've upgraded it or when the power has gone out, so that's probably 10-15 times in the past 4 years. The others have had uptimes in the 100 day range because I update them more frequently.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Short of buying proper gear from Cisco (not Linksys) or similar, which I agree is crazy for a home network, I've found Draytek to be the only manufacturer worth trusting. I've been using their hardware for years (even for ISDN routers prior to ADSL) and have *never* experienced a problem. They cost more than Netgear/Dlink/Linksys but are as reliable as you get. The only time they ever get cycled is if I have a power cut or my ISP borks. IMHO you can't beat them.
Best router I've ever bought. Uptime measured in months and QOS that actually works. Plus 802.11N
I've had 3 routers die out of 6 on the home network: one netgear and two linksys. Quite a failure rate; I'd expect these things to last 10+ years.
My first router was a D-Link, then when I upgraded I bought a Linksys which was ditched when Wifi came along for another Linksys WRT54GS (v 4.0).
Both of the Linksys routers I owned had to be rebooted on occasion for whatever reason, after I installed Tomato on the WRT54GS I never had to reboot.
Unfortunately and coincidentally (seeing this post today) last night my router died on me, I had recently updated Tomato and it was humming along nicely for a month or more until last night.
You don't have Charter as an ISP do you?
The first message on the tech line is how to reboot everything when they nuke your connection.
I haven't had any trouble since I switched to a Linksys WRT54GL and installed DD-WRT.
Previously I had a very old WRT54G (version 3 I think) and it couldn't handle bittorrent, it had to be rebooted a lot.
I replaced that with a Netgear WGR614, which worked OK but I found that after a couple of years they died of bad capacitor illness. I fixed the caps a few times but eventually it bought it in a lightning strike.
I tried a DLink (against my better judgement) but it went back to the store in 2 days; DLink should find something to do in the food service industry or something.
I've been on the GL + DDWRT for about 9 months now and I have yet to have to reboot it. It has been rebooted due to power failures or me moving it around but that's it.
I've had really good luck with the mid-level linksys devices like the RV082/RV016. Two+ years between reboots, lots of features.
The problem with Microsoft OS isn't generally the OS--it's bad applications and compatibility. If you only install quality drivers and hardward, a MS system can go months without a reboot. Stop downloading drivers and installing random fixes.
A home user might be using Bittorrent which is going to create a lot of NAT table entries to a lot of different destinations which is really going to chew up available memory.
Even after you stop your transfer you're still going to have sluggish behavior as the router will keep those translations in memory for an extended period (say 1-4 hours).
Most people will just reboot the router and be done with it.
In other instances (where bit torrent isn't the issue); it's probably just poor code running on the router with a memory leak or something along those lines.
I haven't had much trouble with mine in a long time. However most of my internet traffic is just web stuff. and sometimes downloading a big file. But My wireless router is plugged into a wired Vonage router so and i basically have both locked down to a point where people are not allowed in (No open ports, encrypted wireless with hidden names. So it really isn't taking much of a load. And I haven't had to reboot my router in a very long time. You may want to check your computer's wireless. My wifes old iBook was always going down and loosing connection and the only way to get it back was to reboot the router every day or so. But with the same router and her new iMac with my MacBook the Linksys Wireless has been running like a champ sense them.
I would suggest trying different systems with the rest of them off.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I replaced the PSU for both my router and modem with a dual voltage (5v and 12v) switched mode with a battery backup on the 12v side. Both my modem and router are 12v and the LAN lines I care about running in an outage are connected directly to the router.
It's much more efficient to back up the supply on the DC side rather than on the AC side. Also, you get to run multiple devices on the one PSU thus reducing the overall power consumption of lots of small wall warts. I'm currently looking to replace my network switch with a DC powered version for the same reason.
The telcos have been running their kit on 48 volts for years for this very reason, I'm surprised there aren't more geeks taking this approach!
I had the same exact problems when I upgraded my XP machine to SP3.
This was actually covered here already. There's some network stuff SP3/Vista does that's new to Windows and cheap routers fail to handle it correctly.
I just replaced my garbage Trendnet router last week for this reason. Got a Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT and couldn't be more happy!
http://m0n0.ch/wall/
http://www.pfsense.com/
haven't had to reboot my m0n0wall ever, except for firmware updates.
by offshore inexperienced programmers who are constantly hassled by managers trying to lower development costs by cutting back on validation testing and bugfixing
I has a WAP54G die on me. Complete failure, didn't even get power onto the board because the regulator popped. I knew it meant that something else on the board was bad too so I tossed it.
Got a Belkin, I wish I had paid heed to a friends warning. I had to reboot the thing every few hours.
Next up a Netgear 614. Coverage awful which is odd because I used one on a clients network and it's got perfect coverage. But then I'm in an area where there are LOTS of wireless networks.
Another client gave me a WRT54G that wasn't working for him. I flashed the latest software onto it and it now works fine. Now if Windows didn't have such a fucked wireless zero config app maybe I'd be happier with wireless.
But by and large, I like wired better. I bought two 50' Cat-5 patch cables for $30 and ran one to my office and another to my bedroom.
I've been using cheap Linksys linux-based routers, which I've never had to reboot. The last time I rebooted one was when I upgraded to a wireless router over six months ago. The time before that was when I moved, over three years ago. I didn't even realize that rebooting routers was something people often need to do till today.
I seriously doubt the problems people are seeing come from BitTorrent, because, although I limit myself to legal torrents (which means fewer peers, I suspect), I tend to leave the torrents running for days, and often have multiple running at once (using btlaunchmany).
I'm also somewhat dubious about the claims that it's dhcp-related, because, even though most of the systems here have static IP, we do have two or three using dhcp services.
On the other hand, we have a static external IP, so my router's dhcp client has never, ever, been used. Maybe that's where the problem is?
"Twice since December" is "quite reliable"? I've never rebooted a router. I've had my current one (WRH54G) since Feb, and the previous one (a similar model replaced because it didn't have wireless) ran for over three years without a reboot.
My DSL modem needs to be rebooted every three to six months, but my router(s), so far, never.
A few years ago, they were caught with this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_router/
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've got an Airlink 101 el cheapo (bought it for around $30 at Fry's) wireless router feeding my Linux workstation via wire and a Windoze box via wireless. It's continuous uptime is measured in months... and some of those reboots may have been unnecessary. (I now tell it to grab a new IP from my broadband provider if it stalls before trying a reboot)
My assumption is that its internal OS is something other than embedded Windoze.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'm on my second router with all three. :p
(Only replaced the first one because I finally wanted wireless.)
(My Linux-based computers are also a strong counter-example to your apothegm.)
I am the un-offical IT support for my family and many friends. All the various routers I have had to put up with over the years that weren't Netgear have had this problem. Most annoying is that some of the routers seem to loose their EPROM on restart. So you then need to set them up again.
I don't know if the newer Netgear equipment is still good as the one I bought 4 years ago has been in continuous operation, so I have had no need for replacement.
And it all comes down to the margin. As routers become a commodity the quality of the hardware goes down and so does the quality of the software to squeeze the margin as high as possible. New features are introduced to compete but less money/time is spent on QA to keep the cost down and time to market short.
Also functionality that used to be in hardware is being moved into software, wifi radios especially, introducing a huge number of bugs to the software, but it keeps the cost lower.
I have seen a lot of people reboot/buy new/complain about a lot of the wireless routers. Most of the time changing the router channel to something other then channel 6, a shared channel between other router, to a dedicated channel, 1 or 11, will fix the problem. The problem is that a lot of people do not change the channel and the entire neighborhood ends up with a router using channel 6 which ends up causing some issues. Another possibility is poor router software so go out and get the latest firmware.
My router is on the same circuit as the blower on my furnace. The router would occasionally when the AC kicked on. Half my house apperas to be on that circuit. Anyway I plugged my router into the UPS and works fine now.
I have an 8 port Netgear FVG318 router. It supports VPN, NAT, SPI, and I can create a dozen pinholes without issue. There's all sorts of extra features about it that I love...the metal casing, antenna configuration, and the excellent wifi.
I bought this to replace an old network solution of having a 4 port netgear plugged into another 4 port netgear since there's 7 in-use wired rooms in this house. I haven't had any problems that the old solution offered....latency, uneven thoughtput, and crashing.
I could go on about how this $160 router has superior hardware compared to a $10 router despite both of them using the same Linux and IPtables and coming from the same manufacturer but you can see where I'm going.
root@wrt54g:~# uptime
18:13:09 up 212 days, 6:07, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Been working fine both wirelessly and wired for that long.
(It's powered by an uninterruptable power supply and a backup generator, in case anyone is wondering.)
My GS and GL routers were very stable for months. After I witnessed a bownout (lights went dimm for 2 sec) I started haviving connection issues like frequent disconnectect and reboots. After I reloaded ddwrt it became stable again.
I never reboot my router just because something is unstable and I have not seen it reboot on its own since I got it. I have a Linksys WRT-54GL with Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato) running on it. Currently I have an uptime of 36 days and that is because I tweaked some settings requiring a reboot. The router is hooked to an APC UPS but we have pretty good power here.
Heat is the most common cause - -routers are cheap and typically sitting on top of the computer or in some other corner that is hot - and they overheat or they are on the boundry of acceptable power from the also very cheap power supply (typical 9V power supplies deliver anywhere beteen 7V and 11V ) ....
My cheap D-Link router and equally cheap DSE router work perfectly in the winter and typically have some sort of fit on the few HOT days in summer -- I can almost predict when they will fail. Temperature 30C 50% chance of failure.
My very old Netgear DG834G (rev. 2) hasn't been rebooted in almost 3 months.. guess I'm just lucky :)
Go ahead and enable remote management on port 8080, give me your router credentials, and your current public IP, and I'll reboot it for you once a week.
if you were me, you'd think the same way
I've noticed this with newer routers. My RT311 is still kicking however. Haven't had to reboot for about 2 years, and that was because i moved into a new apartment.
I've got a WRT54G v1.1 running DD-WRT v23 SP2 which stays up for months at a time, if we do have a power fluctuation, the router will happily restart and come back up. I have had problems in the past, but my router has been very happy for the last six months!
I Have a range of cheep routers, some better than others. i find that if you buy a cheep router it's good to buy a cheep timer. I power-cycle my routers every morning during the off peak (about 4am here) i find it's more the Adsl modem/routers that are the problem. use them as just a modem and there great.
("What Never?" "Hardly ever....")
I've had an old Linksys running long enough I don't remember the model number; I think it's the BEXS41, but maybe it's the BEFSR41 or something. Behind it I've got a 3Com wireless router that runs in bridge mode rather than routing. Every couple of years something goes wrong, so I unplug/replug/reboot the DSL model, Linksys, and (if the desktop doesn't work either, also the 3Com) in order, and the problem has never obviously been the Linksys. A couple of times it's been the DSL service, once it was the DSL modem, and maybe once or twice it was a power hit that rebooting the router was actually useful, or a loose cable under the desk.
On the other hand, I haven't tried running two VPNs over it, or uPNP, or other things people complain about.
Before I got the 3Com, I had a Netgear 802.11b router - I'll probably never buy another Layer 3 product from them, since it was a totally ill-designed piece of junk (as opposed to their dumb Ethernet hubs and switches, which I've always been happy with.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I use a Buffalo 54g router with Tomato firmware and haven't rebooted since I upgraded to v1.15 early this year. The linksys and d-link boxes are some of the worst garbage I've had the misfortune of buying, specially with their stock firmware, none of them laster beyond a year.
Now that you mention it, I don't remember the last time I had to power cycle my routers or switches, and I've got 3 of them if you count the wifi. Get equipment that doesn't suck.
>>Switched to a Netgear VPN824V3 and the problem has pretty much disappeared.
Every single Netgear wireless router I've ever owned was shit, and needed to be rebooted on a (very) regular basis. This includes everything from their bargain-bin routers to the super-duper-hyperprototype-N-plus routers.
And yet, mine has worked like a charm. It would be interesting to understand why the difference. I've had two and both have worked fine (well, the first one worked fine until Vista that is).
.. or if you can't do that, you can find some decent ones on the used market still...
One thing I noticed with my previous WTRG is that if I fired up to many port translations (read: torrenting), it'd just be to much for it (maybe exceeded it's PAT table? i dunno).. now I got me a 'rhymes with Crisco' (and I don't mean one made by Linksys), can't say it's ever needed a reload..
For the amount of money you probably ponied up for all those routers over the years, you're half-way to a real one already.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
You know you can just replace the power brick, right?
Anything that outputs the same voltage and tip polarity should do the trick...
Unless you are insinuating that the new VxWorks wrt's take a different supply voltage, and that the supply voltage for the older wrt models will inherently lead to inefficiency...which I doubt.
If you have any Router or other electronic gadget that uses AC power and freezes or malfunctions.. Toss it on a Power conditioning UPS.. Get it off AC.. Brownouts are what causes Electronics to go haywire.. if that doesn't fix the issue then I would look at the hardware itself..
If you paid 11.95 for a Gigabit Wifi Router that was being sold off the back of a truck just off the interstate with a name that you can't pronouce... I might skip the UPS if you have stable power and go buy a new one that has a name that you recognize.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
On the exact same laptop I get much faster speeds wirelessly in Win XP Pro than in Ubuntu 8.04. Is this because the driver isn't opensource on Ubuntu and in the restricted section? The computer is a Dell Latitude D600 and the wireless card is a Linksys Wireless-G notebook adapter.
In order to drive down costs, home router manufacturers use as little ram as possible. Which limits the number of active NAT connections that can happen at one time. If you are actively torrenting something, those home routers are for sure out of the question.
I had a P90 box a while back, never had to reboot it for over 3 years. Then my wireless bridge died and I decided that maybe it is time to get a linksys router with built in WIFI, as I think it would save me power. Had to reboot that pos about every day and a half. I trie a dlink router, same story. I finally couldn't take it anymore, went to ebay, spent $40 to get a 1U p3 (another 40 for shipping ;) ), that box has been running been my router and asterisk machine, been over a year so far no reboots.
Get the DD-WRT Firmware from http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php
I have it installed in my Linksys Wrt54g v3 and it hasnt caused me any problems for months. i didnt need to reboot. Plus it shows alot of administrative functions and stuff.
good luck
My Linksys WRT54g has gone months without a reboot. As has my cable modem.
I never had to reboot mine until it started to go bad and I was loosing my connections so you may have a bad device.