wireless router issues...

[Glenstr]

At least thats what I think it is.. In the last 24 hours I've had some weirdness happening. I have a buffalo whr-hp-54 with dd-wrt 2.3 on it, and a few times I have noticed that my connection has been dropping off. When this happens I can't ping the router or log in to it from either from a wireless connection or a wired one, last night it happened again, and when I logged into the gui on it only part of the web gui showed up.

At this point I was wondering if it was a problem with the ISP or router, so I tried to tried to log into the router from the net via the aircard on my laptop (I have web access enabled) and still could not log in to it or ping it. Powering off the router seems to clear things up, and in some cases it seems to clear up itself.

I am thinking this is a router problem, before when I had ISP issues I could still get into the router GUI, in these cases I can't.

[M/Q]

Hey Glen,

I am not 100% sure, but is sure seems like the router is dead. Especially if I understand you correctly and the wired connections are not working either. I have had enough experience with Buffalo to not recommend them as you know. Other members do and I respect them so I usually do not comment.

I in all honesty do not like to recommend any consumer grade equipment as I consider all of them to be less than satisfactory. IMO the Linksys WRT54GL is a slight exception, but it is still a consumer grade piece of hardware. So, I only advertise that devise to those who mention financial constraints. But, the truism of "pay me now or pay me later" is a better bet than any Vegas odds.

[Glenstr]

Well it's still under warranty I suppose, but flashing it with the dd-wrt probably voided that I'd imagine. In any case I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens. It has been running flawlessly since I replaced my WRT54GL with it, which I still have so I do have a backup router.

If a guy was to go with commercial grade, how much would that cost?

[M/Q]

Ouch, you just trashed my previous post.

I have absolutely no problem mentioning Cisco as being my choice.

[Glenstr]

How'd I trash it??

I may just put the linksys back in place, I recall having a fair bit of trouble with it, but with what I know now I think it was more the ISP than the router itself. I've done a fair bit of reading on the consumer grade models and there is a wide variety of opinions out there alright. Some say the later linksys models are lacking in quality control, others swear by them, some say they are running a lot of consumer grade buffalos in commercial type situations with no problems and so on.. I actually decided to try a buffalo after reading through the dd-wrt wiki, IIRC it said that router was about the best bang for the buck to run dd-wrt on.

[M/Q]

That wide range of opinion is one reason why I shy away from consumer grade equipment. I doubt seriously if you would get any argument that Cisco owns about 85-90% of the enterprise networking market.

In my daily travels amongst the Fortune 500 companies, I rarely see anything else. Not trying to be overbearing, but today I had a call to a 3M data center. It covered about a city block and the only networking device in the whole place was "you guessed it"

[Glenstr]

I've been reading the wiki for this router, and it says if the built in amp is enabled (dd-wrt sets this as default) then the xmit power should be no higher than 10. I checked with nvram show | grep boardflags and the amp was enabled, and I had the xmit power set at 48 for some reason.

Could this have been causing the router to hiccup or hang? Or worse yet, could I have damaged it somehow?

[M/Q]

I am not sure what the power band is for that device, but if you were within that range there should not be any problems. Consumer grade devices are just not made to the same standards as business class devices. That is why you are seeing the gamut of opinions.

As for a reference, the lowest business class device I use is the Netgear business equipment. The devices are much better than their consumer grade. I also design differently as well. I very seldom use a wireless router. I use a wired router with APs. It frees up the processors to almost a single operation and IMO creates a better design. Costs more but works better.