Crashing routers

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26 Mar 2004
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At home I'm currently on O2 and before that i was on Be.

The Be router they gave me used to crash about twice a month (more often if i enable wireless). I couldn't access or ping it, but a quick on off would fix it, but it got annoying. Be refused to blame the router.

So borrowed a netgear, and exactly the same thing. it would crash about twice a month, and a off on will fix it.

Now I'm using the O2 router, and again exactly the same thing, crashes regularly. And with wireless on it crashes more often, and I can't access the router until i turn it off and on again.

Well the problems have been happening for a whole now, and in the mean time all the computers have changed and i've upgraded the switches.

Any ideas what it could be?
 
can noise cause a whole router to crash? its not just losing connection, i just lose total access to it.

3 different Power bricks. connected to a power surge.
 
power surge wouldn't help if the power was dropping below 230.
I know I've had a couple of clients in the sticks with that kinda issue.
noise from speakers etc (or a TV?) could be causing it if close by
 
If it was just the o2/be routers I'd say it's probably because they're rubbish. I've had problems with netgears too in the past (though to a lesser extent).

What model of netgear router is it? Have you tried running an up to date DGTeam firmware?

Also, is your line prone to drop-outs/noise? Or have you tweaked it a lot? Marginal lines sometimes overload routers over time.
 
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i never get drop outs. Never really assessed the noise, and haven't tweaked any settings.

I used the netgear DG834G v4.
 
Oddness. What firmware did you use on it? An updated firwmare (or the DGTeam firmware) might be more stable.

The not-so-great alternative would be to just manually power cycle the router 'now and then'. Not great but if you do it bi-weekly or monthly you may avoid the hard locks.
 
I think you'd be hard-pressed to get them to take it back as faulty. If the 'fault' can only be reproduced once every two weeks of constant use. I guess if you're insistant enough you might be successful...
 
Indeed - kind of suggests that it's not the router at fault.

However, it's something that commonly happens with the Speedtouches (Be and o2) and I remember happening quite a bit with ADSL2+ and a netgear DG834GT when it (ADSL2+) was new to the UK (and hence running older firmwares).
 
Got a DG834GT bunged in DGteams firmware.
And it lasted 3 days, but still ended up crashing.

I suppose its an improvement, but its still something i want to fix.
 
buy these.

am200 (adsl modem with 1x ethernet port)
wrt54GL (wireless broadband router) install Tomato firmware on it


if it crashes, i'll give you a tenner
 
Where do you keep the ADSL router? Is there enough ventilation? Is it somewhere very warm? Can you try putting a fan on it for a few days?

The speedtouches have 2 fatal flaws, the first is that they overheat...a lot. Secondly, their routing table is pathetically small and many popular P2P apps can easily cause it to overflow resulting in a crash.

I ended up putting my BeBox in modem mode (Multi IP 4 Data Ports) and then bunging a decent SOHO router (Draytek 2900VG) behind it to do all I needed (even if the BeBox didn't overheat I'd have done this for the native VPN tunnel support) and I haven't had a crash since (over 4 months uptime).
 
No P2P was even being used at the time of the most recent crash. and hadn't been for a week or so.
Its not just one PC its all the ones connected through wired, one of which is directly connected and not through a switch. so I don't think its a NIC card problem but worth a try i suppose.

Well I've put the Netgear router on the table top, so it should be catching plenty of air. and its not running very hot.
 
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