router death: twice!

My second router is reaching the end of its life! Looking to hear what
routers people with heavily loaded ADSL connections use...??

A bit of history:

My first ADSL router which I got a couple of years ago, a 3com OCR612, had
problems regaining ADSL synchronisation when the connection dropped. Also
it crashes reasonably often - maybe every 2-3 days.

The next router, which I got about a year and a half ago, is a Solwise
SAR-110. Worked fine at first (although I've never had any luck with the
web interface - it always stalls: luckily it's got a (cryptic) command
line interface where I can do administration).

Unfortunately for the last couple of months it's been dying slowly - it
locks up, with the time-to-lockup decreasing by the week. We're now down
to something like roughly 6 hours between lockups, which is very annoying
- have to go running through to the server cupboard and
disconnect/reconnect the router power every time.

We actually just use the router as a ethernet-connected modem: we've got a
small public IP block, so one public IP is assigned to a server which does
NAT, firewalling etc for the rest of the network, so all I need the
router to to do is connect to my DSL provider and route traffic between
its phoneline and ethernet interfaces! Keep It Simple!

The connection is shared between some computing students, so it's fairly
heavily used (both upstream and downstream). So if anyone out there has a
router which you've just plugged in, thrashed around a bit, and haven't
had any hiccups from the router, I'd be very interested to hear what the
router is!


Steve

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:30:05 UTC, Steve <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> The connection is shared between some computing students, so it's fairly
> heavily used (both upstream and downstream). So if anyone out there has a
> router which you've just plugged in, thrashed around a bit, and haven't
> had any hiccups from the router, I'd be very interested to hear what the
> router is!

I think they're a bit more expensive, but my router has been faultless
for the last two and a half years. It's not been switched off in that
time, bar two occasions when I've been working on the main power intake.

Zyxel 645R. Single port router.

--
Bob Eager
begin a new life...dump Windows!

DDDDDDD..Draytek 2600+

Not the cheapest..but very reliable.

Plus you can do individual port throttling so no-one can hog the bandwidth!

L3K

> My first ADSL router which I got a couple of years ago, a 3com OCR612, had
> problems regaining ADSL synchronisation when the connection dropped. Also
> it crashes reasonably often - maybe every 2-3 days.

This was a known bug that 3com never bothered to patch...

> The next router, which I got about a year and a half ago, is a Solwise
> SAR-110. Worked fine at first (although I've never had any luck with the
> web interface - it always stalls: luckily it's got a (cryptic) command
> line interface where I can do administration).
>
> Unfortunately for the last couple of months it's been dying slowly - it
> locks up, with the time-to-lockup decreasing by the week. We're now down
> to something like roughly 6 hours between lockups, which is very annoying
> - have to go running through to the server cupboard and
> disconnect/reconnect the router power every time.

That's interesting. I've got an SAR-110 and it's been fine but my mum also
has an SAR-110 and it was doing exactly what you describe. We updated her
firmware to a later version and it's been solid ever since. The weird thing
is that my router with the 'old' firmware is still fine. Must be something
to do with different ADSL line conditions or something. Anyway, if you
haven't already tried the latest firmware it could be worth a shot. (We got
it from http://www.solwise.co.uk/downloads/adsl.htm )

HTH,

Dan.

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 08:31:47 +0000, Dan Wood wrote:

>
>> My first ADSL router which I got a couple of years ago, a 3com OCR612, had
>> problems regaining ADSL synchronisation when the connection dropped. Also
>> it crashes reasonably often - maybe every 2-3 days.
>
> This was a known bug that 3com never bothered to patch...

I see you're also a plus.net customer: I'm guessing you were in the same
situation as me!

Yes, the ADSL sync problem was a firmware bug, but it locks up every
few days as well as having problems regaining sync with the exchange
(which isn't something that happens too often, as the connection is
relatively rarely down).

> That's interesting. I've got an SAR-110 and it's been fine but my mum also
> has an SAR-110 and it was doing exactly what you describe. We updated her
> firmware to a later version and it's been solid ever since. The weird thing
> is that my router with the 'old' firmware is still fine. Must be something
> to do with different ADSL line conditions or something. Anyway, if you
> haven't already tried the latest firmware it could be worth a shot. (We got
> it from http://www.solwise.co.uk/downloads/adsl.htm )

I'll give it a go, thanks! I did try upgrading the firmware once upon a
time (the 190303 release), but it killed my router! Had to send it back to
solwise, they reflashed with the original firmware for free. Hope I have
better luck this time!

Steve

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 11:31:48 +0000, Steve wrote:

> I'll give it a go, thanks! I did try upgrading the firmware once upon a
> time (the 190303 release), but it killed my router! Had to send it back to
> solwise, they reflashed with the original firmware for free. Hope I have
> better luck this time!

Just an update on that: firmware update worked, but had another crash
earlier today - looks like it didn't help, unfortunately.