Anyone ever hear of a router doing this?
We had an elderly linksys wireless router, secured with a WEP key, and a dottering old netopia DSL modem. The router was probably 5 years old, and the modem was at least 3.
Trouble was not unexpected. However, the form the trouble took was - interesting.
One day before Christmas, I was unable to access several of the news sites I normally go to. The next day, I could again. A few days later, they were down again. So I’m thinking perhaps these smaller newspapers are hosted by the same datacenter and it’s having rolling server crashes. Unlikely but possible.
Then one day we woke up and couldn’t get to Google and gmail, either. The computer couldn’t find the server! And all the news sites and a few others were down again. We could, however, zip around the rest of the web like usual.
Our DSL provider suggested initially that it was something in the router, because on their end they could see on/off, on/off — user request to terminate. With a DSL connection supposed to be always on, that’s awfully odd.
So out comes the tech. Interesting fellow, reminded me of my friend Donnie. Same voice and mustaches and everything.
At first, he didn’t think it was the router. So he tried 101 different things, all failing. Finally he said he’d try it on his computer - thinking that, perhaps in my insanity, I’d done something to block ours from access. (I guess)
So in comes his laptop, which cannot be configured to accept a WEP key. I’m fairly sure that given a few minutes, I could configure the 3rd party software to tap dance in addition to accepting the key, but for simplicity’s sake I just logged into my router and took the WEP out.
Lo and behold, he went straight to google. So I tried it on mine, to show him that he could and I couldn’t. Lo and behold I went straight there too! So did my palm pilot.
Lightbulbs flashed brightly. I put the WEP back in. It’s all dead again. Took it out and we can go to Google and the news sites.
So he set me up a nice new modem/router combo and we’re zipping around again - incidentally a much faster connection than we had before.
Has anyone ever heard of a (previously functional for a number of years) WEP key suddenly causing chaos of this nature?
