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Linksys, revived.

2003-09-29 , ,

Several months ago my Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router crapped out.
It had a history of locking up after several days of heavy use (read
about other people’s experiences with this device at SeattleWireless) and this
was coincident with a couple of denial of service attacks being
announced for it so I figured someone hosed it. Except it would not
reset. Even upgrading to a then recent firmware and doing a hard-reset
to clear out any remaining settings failed to revive it. Oddly, that
did cause it to emit UPnP and dhcp requests on the LAN and WAN ports
but the internal dhcp server and the embedded http server for the
administration pages remained inaccessible. Maria and I both ran out
of patience after a few days so I put my Lucent RG-1000 in its place
and tossed the dead blue box into a storage tub beside my desk.

Today, for no particular reason, I tried again. I snagged a recent

firmware image
and a hacked tftp client that supports the password extension that Linksys
uses. After fiddling with a static IP, I remembered that these units
have a touchy IP stack so after editing /etc/sysctl.conf net/ipv4/tcp_ecn=0 and doing a sysctl -p to turn
off ECN, I could ping it. I updated the firmware and did the
reset-power on-hold 30 seconds-power off routine and the damn thing
works.

A few minutes later, I had it reconfigured and put it back in place
outside the firewall. I’ll see how long it runs before something
happens. It’s a shame it isn’t as reliable as the RG-1000 as it has
much better range and signal.

Comment


Comments [2]

2003-10-15 13:01 , paul

I forgot to ask you when you were over to have a look at my Linksys. I can use it as a hub, but not wireless. Remind me next time.

2003-10-15 14:13 , Ross

Sure. Can you be more specific about how it doesn\'t work? A quirk of the Linksys BEFW11S4, at least my revision 1 release and 1.4x firmware, is that it treats the wireless and the switch ports as the same network. My guess is that internally it is a five port switch with four ports exposed and the fifth wired to the access point.

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