Monday, April 10, 2006

My Linksys wireless router is on vacation

Last night with no warning whatsoever, my Linksys WRT54G router decided to go into brick mode. Unplugging and replugging, even playing with the reset button, does nothing. Power and Diag lights on solid, no wireless signal seen, no way to browse to it to try to fix anything.

Something like this is crippling because my main source for information on how to fix it is the very same Internet I can't get to because of the failure. (Hooray for self-referentiality. Meh.) I was able to kluge up a direct connection, but since the wife needed the connection more than me I didn't get to use it to do diagnostics.

I noticed while unplugging it that the power supply felt very hot, though cooling it off was no help. This morning, while the wife showers, I did some more online research and found a tale of someone else who had the same symptoms because of a bad power supply... though dozens and dozens of other cases where it was something else. Unfortunately I have no equivalent power supplies to test with.

Today on the way home from work I'll buy a new router of the same type from Staples. Then I'll try using its power supply on the old one. If it works, the old one goes back up and the new one gets set up at my leisure to be a spare. If it doesn't, I get to do the agonizing process of setting up the new one to match the old one, without being able to look at the old one's settings. (Yes, I have a backup of the settings, but unless the firmware versions happen to be identical, which is very unlikely, it's of no use.)

In the meanwhile, there are cables running from my WildBlue satellite modem to each computer, and I switch between them depending on who needs the connection at that moment. Yes, that's right. I am now a router. Someone update my firmware!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*sniffle* Merewyn and Reb were having so much fun fishing too :(