So here’s the situation, I wanted to upgrade my router and wireless access point last year so I bought an Asante FriendlyNET kit. Having used an Asante router for the last five years I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Well, I did. The new router, in all frankness, sucked. The web interface was kludgey and the wireless coverage was spotty. So in steps my buddy with a Netgear WGU624 router and the web interface is much better and the wireless works well, however, there is always a “but”. The but in this case is stability.

After running for three hours like a champ, BOOM!, the router stops doing what it is named for: it stops routing information. None of the machines on the network can see it though the lights on the unit itself indicate all is well. Cycling it only brings 45 seconds of connectivity then all goes out again. My theory, at the moment, is load balancing.

I’m running two servers (one inward and one outward facing), three laptops, and one Xbox. At the time of the crashing only the servers and one laptop were running and my guess is that the router cannot handle the traffic on the servers. This is not to say that traffic is heavy and though I cannot say precisely the level of traffic but it is minimal at best. That said a quick perusal of the Netgear forums points to bandwidth allocation as being a source of lockups on both the WGU624 and WGT624.

The first thing I checked into was the firmware and unfortunately I’m on the latest revision, the ones that are supposed to address the exact issue I’m currently struggling with. Where to from here? Well, at the moment I’m back to the hardware that works as I cannot really afford more downtime that in necessary to swap routers in and out. So I’m supposing that what I need to do is build a network in tandem and hammer the ever loving crap out of it to see what locks it up.

For now, I’m going to put away the toys and read a book because the thought of working on it any more just makes me tired.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.