Linksys, revived.
Sep 29, 2003
Several months ago my Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router crapped out.nIt had a history of locking up after several days of heavy use (readnabout other people’s experiences with this device at SeattleWireless) and thisnwas coincident with a couple of denial of service attacks beingnannounced for it so I figured someone hosed it. Except it would notnreset. Even upgrading to a then recent firmware and doing a hard-resetnto clear out any remaining settings failed to revive it. Oddly, thatndid cause it to emit UPnP and dhcp requests on the LAN and WAN portsnbut the internal dhcp server and the embedded http server for thenadministration pages remained inaccessible. Maria and I both ran outnof patience after a few days so I put my Lucent RG-1000 in its placenand tossed the dead blue box into a storage tub beside my desk.
nn
Today, for no particular reason, I tried again. I snagged a
recentnnfirmware
image and a
hacked tftp
client that supports the password extension that Linksysnuses. After
fiddling with a static IP, I remembered that these unitsnhave a touchy
IP stack so after editing
/etc/sysctl.confnnet/ipv4/tcp_ecn=0
and doing a
sysctl -p
to turnnoff ECN, I could ping it. I updated the
firmware and did thenreset-power on-hold 30 seconds-power off routine
and the damn thingnworks.
nn
A few minutes later, I had it reconfigured and put it back in placenoutside the firewall. I’ll see how long it runs before somethingnhappens. It’s a shame it isn’t as reliable as the RG-1000 as it hasnmuch better range and signal.