router issues

our router bugged out on me

[rulive]

Hey everyone. I was just wondering if any of you have had problems with a router that all the sudden decides to work at certain times. Is it possible that it was hacked? I did everything and anything to test it out and try to solve the problem and I even went through the whole troubleshooting list with a tech rep from Linksys. At the end, all he could say was that he'd never seen my problem before and said to remember that the router was 2+ years old. I got a new one and installed it and everything works fine now. I can't help but feel like something very odd happened. I guess the board inside the old one could've just melted down finally, but that doesn't seem probable to me.

thanks,
rulive

[DaveAtIFG]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld rulive! :)

As a former Field Service Engineer, a guy who fixed digital electronic equipment for over 20 years, an intermittant failure such as you describe is one of the most difficult problems to identify or resolve. Unfortunately, it's more common than you might expect. My daughter recently had a similar problem to what you describe. Her LAN was acting up for weeks until her LinkSys finally died for good.

[lorax]

I have seen routers and NICs 'go for a walk' on their own. Everything from jabbering to intermitent black outs and they are a troubleshooter's nightmare to track down. There's simply no easy cause and effect to follow unless you or the user can recall some seemingly insignificant incident - but those are usually no better than a guess. As DaveAtIFG notes - it's more common than you might think and sometimes even the pros don't catch on right off.

Oh - and welcome to the Board!

[rogerd]

My Linksys wireless router was acting up and I went through an hour or two of telephone troubleshooting with no success. Finally I dragged home a top-notch wireless guy from work - he determined that the WAN port on the router wasn't working. We convinced Linksys to swap out the router and the new one worked like a champ. No hacking, just hardware failure.

[rulive]

Hey guys. Thanks a bunch for the welcome and the info. ;)

I can rest a little easier now that it is fairly common. I was a bit worried for a while there because the guy that originally installed the Linksys never set a password to access it. All you needed was admin and you got to the control panel. I checked with our cable provider and he said it didn't look like we'd been hacked, but who knows. This kinda IT stuff really isn't in my job description though so I'm expanding my skill-set (albeit starting with a very hard problem to solve).

Thanks again guys, great feedback.
rulive