🚀 go-pugleaf

sheldon@sheldon.notadomain wrote:

> Over the past few weeks, I've had a lot of unexplained outages for my
> home internet connection.  It's not been my ISP (at least Time Warner
> always claims there's no outage in my area when I call).  And the
> outages either last a couple minutes, max, or if prolonged, they
> immediately vanish when I unplug my router, wait a couple minutes,
> then plug it back in.
> 
> The router is a Netgear MR814, more than five years old.  I have a
> pretty decent and recent XP machine hardwired into it from the modem,
> and it supports, through a wireless connection, three other computers
> in our house.  The firmware for the router is the most current
> version, although that is several years old.
> 
> I know nothing lasts forever, but it really looks like my internet
> outages are traceable to the router (I've had Time Warner out to check
> the modem and it's fine).  What confuses me is that I'd think that if
> the router were to go bad, it would just die and not work, ever,
> period.  What I have is 98%+ uptime, always fixable by recycling the
> router.  Can routers die like this?
> 
> If I need to replace the router, what's a good recommendation?  I
> don't need anything fancy.  I have my eyes on a Netgear WGR614,
> although that too is a pretty old model.

What you never mentioned is if any other hosts are also connected to the
suspect router.  If not or the other hosts are yours (so you won't
impact anyone else with a loss of Internet connectivity), just connect
your host direct to the cable modem and track any outages after that
over several days.  If you are using the router's wireless feature
(which is assumed since you cross-posted to a wireless newsgroup),
you'll have to buy a long CAT5 cable to run to from your host to your
cable modem during the testing.  Then see if the sporadic outages still
occur.  If the outages still occur, the router isn't the problem.