Two routers inexplicably died - do I need to start buying them in six packs?

First one was a Linksys BEFSR41. After an outage problem with my ISP, we got the net connection working OK but the router could not be made to work. I figured it was because I was doing port forwarding with it before, but no amount of power cycling and reset buttoning would help. Cable connection worked fine when the PC went right into the modem, as soon as I put the router into the loop - nothing.

So I bought a Belkin F5D5231. Worked OK for 3-4 months. This morning

- nada. Again the connection is fine when the cable modem is plugged into the PC, zip when I add the router.

I spent half an hour tonight swapping routers and cables and resetting, all to no avail. All the lights are on where you would expect, just no signal traveling through either router.

Do I have to start buying them by the case??

Reply to
Doghouse Riley
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Did you reboot the cable modem so it could pick up the MAC address of the new router? Did the router respond to pings on any of its LAN ports? Were you able to log into the router and look around? Was it a total brick, or did it only refuse to pass traffic in/out of the WAN port? Did the lights look ok?

Same questions as above, especially the cable modem reboot.

I'm pretty sure your routers are ok. I have way more experience with Linksys (especially the WRT54G, but there are a lot of similarities, I'm told), so I'll start there.

First, can you ping a LAN interface? Can you log into the router? "No signal traveling through" isn't descriptive enough to know where the problem is.

Have you done a full factory reset? You need to hold the reset button in for 30 seconds. The little 10 second reset won't do it. If it still doesn't respond to pings, turn it off, hold the reset button in, and turn it on, continuing to press reset for 30 seconds. Run a "ping -t" (continuous ping) during this whole time to see if it EVER responds, even for a moment. If so, it can be brought back to life, but you may have to use TFTP to do it. Also try connecting to the WAN port and pinging it as if it was a LAN port. Under specific circumstances, they get confused and switch the LAN and WAN ports around, even though it generally isn't very useful to have 4 WAN ports and a single LAN port.

Check out

formatting link
for additional info and tips. Let us know what you find out. Good luck.

Reply to
Bill M.

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