DSL support

[Danny MacMillan]

On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 02:49:34AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> primary one we have always recommended has been the Linksys BEFSR41.
> 
> ...
> 
>   HOWEVER - we are no longer recommending the Linksys devices.  Why -
> because over the last 3 months we have had an increasing number of
> them which have been installed for several years, just fail.  And the
> failures aren't pretty.  Usually the packet flows through the router
> start getting slower and slower, and the user gets an increasing number
> of disconnections from websites and such that they go to.  It is
> insidious, and very very difficult to tell the difference from either
> a congested ISP or virus activity, so most often the user just gets
> more and more dissatisfied with their DSL line, never realizing it's
> the cheap router that's the problem.  When things get bad enough they
> start power-cycling the router and that 'fixes' things for a few
> hours, and the customer gets the impression that this is 'normal' for
> these devices.
> 
> ...
>

Speak of the devil and he appears.  My 3 month old BEFSR41 puked a few
hours after I read your post.  In my case it seems to be related to very
high bandwidth utilization -- ~470KiB/s down and ~50KiB/s up while
grabbing 5.3-Release with bittorrent.  The upstream interface seems to
have totally cratered, passing no traffic.  It did this three times in a
row, and it didn't take hours to recur -- just about 10 minutes,
seemingly until the traffic built up to a substantial rate again.  The
first time, a reset did the trick, the next two I actually had to unplug
the router and plug it back in.

I'm a little choked because the router is virtually brand new.  It
replaced a 3 year old Hawking Technology PN9245F that worked like a
champ, aside from a couple of bad ports.

-- 
Danny