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Anthony Hiscox
Asked: 2011-02-16 13:16:33 +0800 CST

Number of routers in small community lock up and require reboot

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I live in a small town which has one primary ISP. Lately I have noticed that a number of wireless routers have been locking up and requiring a reboot before allowing any connections. This has affected two of my routers, my work router, and a few others. In all cases wired continued to function as usual. Often wireless clients can see the SSID but simply won't connect. I can only think of a few possibilities and was hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction:

  1. Our ISP is well known to be flaky, something they are doing is causing this, what that might be I have no clue it as seems to affect the wireless only.

  2. There's a power issue in town, given our remote location and reputation for crap electrical, this seems reasonable. Only one router was plugged in to a UPS, and I'm not sure of the quality.

  3. There is some bug in all the different firmware for every one of these routers (all different). That doesn't seem reasonable, unless;

  4. it's an unknown (or known) exploit or DoS of some sort being launched by a massive team of ninjas hell bent on forcing us all to be tethered to our walls by ethernet cables or;

  5. it's just been a coincidence and I'm just paranoid (this has some weight, I mean read 4 again).

Anyone else experience similar issues and have some tips?

router isp wifi modem

3 Answers

  1. In locations where I've had bad power I've used some inexpensive garden timers to do scheduled power cycles. Pick which ever time is the least busy and schedule a reboot.

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  2. Best Answer

    It is very unlikely that ISP settings would mess about the wireless side of your routers. It is very likely that power trouble takes down the most power-intensive part of your routers (the wifi emitters).

    Schedule/automate regular reboots or use UPSs that can 'upscale' the input voltage. Also protect all your expensive (server) power supplies with a UPS, it will save on downtime & emergency call-outs.

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  3. Maybe unrelated, but depending on your router setup I've had the same problem. When our internet goes out the router adds bad values to it's routing tables, the router then requires a reboot to clear it's 'bad' data. In your case it maybe that the wifi device cannot sense an internet connection and drops service...

    Either way we both need to do more research with some net tools / power equip. to figure out a root cause. I am just trying to throw ideas out there for thought :)

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