MW modem and Wireless router

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comsaurus

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Hi Everyone

I just bought a ethernet cable and senao wireless router. The problem i am having is that after about 20 min or so the router and modem seem to not communicate anymore, and i need to reboot the router to get a connection again. I have swapped out the router for one that I know works with the mw modem as it was tested by the suppler, however not with my modem. I have tried the new firmware and then downgraded to 4.2.2.8 but the same thing happened. For some reason the PPPoE connection drops. I tried different MTU settings with no luck either.

Has anyone had the same experience and managed to fix it, or does anyone have some new idea's for me ?

J.C.
 
comsaurus- which model router do you have there? ..it gets pretty tricky to try to help when we don't even know what you have there! Also, what you're describing I've seen before- and in my experience comes down to the modem freaking the router out. This happens when the modem doesn't have enough signal and although the router gamely tries to reconnect when it sees its been disconnected it doesn't cope well (enough) and locks up. Disclaimer- I've seen this behaviour on NON-WiFi routers but the WiFi side doesn't really have anything to do with the problem.
 
MMM....thanks bdt

Ok i have a senao wsr-3018. MW modem connect to the wanport and all the other basic settings..... I think i might try a new ethernet cable and or modem to see it it helps.....My signal strength is very good as i am about 2 km from the radiokop tower.......we will have to wait and see
 
I'm with bdt on this one, seen it happen on smoothwall, m0n0wall, and my wireless router!
it generally happens when the device attempts a connection, and in mid-connection, signal dies off!

you say 2Km from radiokop tower, whats your signal strength, a good indicator is the lights
1 light ~ 0-4%
2 light ~ 5-9%
3 light ~ 10-14%
4 light ~ >15%
do they stay consistent, ie always 3 lights, or does it sometimes jitter around?
 
Thanks dorris

My lights are always 3 and above. It only jumps between 3 and 4 lights. As far as im consirned the lights just tell you link signal but not signal quality which is more important (but to test that you would need a spectrum analyser).

But if i use the usb cable on the pc I can stay connected forever without a hitch. So I presume its a PPPoE issue (MW and router). i dunno if there are different PPPoE versions, but that might explain handshaking issues. The guys at nowire yesterday were great in exchanging my modem to to see if the modem had a issue, but unfortunalty it did not solve the issue. Using PPPoE on the nic card in the pc proved to work very well last night and i had no issues. So once again it looks to be the router. However the router supplier has tested on there MW modem and all seems to work well. So I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. VERY WEIRD !!!!!

Johan
 
Will a Linux firewall (Coyote Linux) do the business and be able to link a LAN to the MW modem?
 
Herbs,

I dont know alot about linux, but as long as it has routing capabilities yes you can. Most firewalls or proxies can.
 
herbs, from the Coyotelinux site at http://www.coyotelinux.com/products.php?Product=coyote "Coyote is a single floppy distribution of Linux designed for the sole purpose of sharing an Internet connection" ..so I'd say it looks good. Further RTFM on that page shows that it understands PPPoE which upgrades that to a "yes", provided that you've met the hardware requirements.

Which aren't dire at all: the old box for the firewall, the NNB bit is that you have the ethernet cable for the MyWi modem; that makes it look like an ADSL device to firewall boxen/appliances that want to talk PPPoE. From there it's simply a matter of setting it up...
 
I personally haven't tried coyote linux , but I can vouch for smoothwall/ipc0p, I moved over to it after similiar issues as to what you are encountering.
The reason : Smoothwall has a built in function to reboot itself if connection is not active for 5 Minutes.
(it just goes to show that the problem of resetting router is rather universal to pppoe connections)

The setup is extremely basic, very good for a n00b, stick in cd, boot, configure dhcp/Lan settings, disable ISDN/ADSL modem detection's.

IT will run on almost anything (I run it on a celeron 400 , 96MB ram, and an old AT power supply so it will always turn back on after power fail).
In regards to functionality, it can do pretty much anything, port forwarding/natting/firewalling as well as uPNP for those msn/bitcomet users.
 
I'm rather fond of SW's "watchdog" process- where, if after 5min it doesn't get a connection it bounces the box and then tries to reconnect on startup (the other setting you need to work in tandem with this). This is THE main reason why I prefer a box doing this in software over a router device- they lose the plot and don't *SELF* reboot.
 
Good News

I went and got a linksys router WRT54G, and the thing rocks. Connected it up last night and been up and running since without any issues. It connected to the net before I could boot my machine. Anyway downloads are rather good as well now (around 15KB) and works alot better than any NAT, proxy etc software I have tried.

J.
 
Just an obvious thought, quite a few routers have a default 'disconnect if idle' setting of 20 mins or so. While they are supposed to reconnect on demand, my Linksys gave endless grief until set to never disconnect.

MW, makes proton decay look fast.
 
bdt said:
Also, what you're describing I've seen before- and in my experience comes down to the modem freaking the router out. This happens when the modem doesn't have enough signal and although the router gamely tries to reconnect when it sees its been disconnected it doesn't cope well (enough) and locks up. Disclaimer- I've seen this behaviour on NON-WiFi routers but the WiFi side doesn't really have anything to do with the problem.
Click to expand...

Well I'm glad I'm not alone. My Linux firewall/router used to do this, and I switched to a Linksys router and am having the same problem. When the two are happ, the little green light on the modem is static. About once a week (getting more frequent recently though) I lose connectivity and the little green light it blinking. I end up resetting the modem and router and everything comes back without a problem. It's a bit of a bugger though as I have no way to reset the damn thing from half-way around the world.

Id did read another thread about an alarm-clock and and a paper-clip to do this, but I'm ****-out of paperclips.

From this thread I guess I'm not alone in this problem?
 
comsaurus said:
Good News

I went and got a linksys router WRT54G, and the thing rocks. Connected it up last night and been up and running since without any issues. It connected to the net before I could boot my machine. Anyway downloads are rather good as well now (around 15KB) and works alot better than any NAT, proxy etc software I have tried.

J.
Click to expand...

Nice box, yes. I have the same disconnect problems with mine though. Have you seen the alrernate firmware you can get for the WRT54G? http://www.sveasoft.com have a great firmware load, with quite a number of additional features. Check it out.
 
On the Linux note a could recommend "Mitel Networks SME Server" http://contribs.org If you have 2 NICS, a old P2 with about 128mb RAM and atleast 1gb of HDD space you could set up a very usable gateway. Its easy to configure and more than sufficient for any home user or small business. And I agree with Dorris smoothwall is also brilliant if your looking for something that will merely act as a gateway and not a server.

Also on the Hardware router side I would suggest using a Linux embbeded option such as Linksys. I use the Asus WL-500g with Custom Firmware. The advantage of these over regular routers is the ability to install custom packages and ofcouse they can be configured to greater levels.

Ofcourse none of these will solve the stability issues of the Modem itself, but you could configure them to better handle the problems.

When I was on Sentech I had a similar issue where my router would hang after a few hours of operation. After a bit of investigation I discovered that it was the Log files killing the RAM, being a linux router I could configure the logs to be dropped into a remote database every 30min which solved my problem. Also I configured it to reboot once a week to make sure everything is clean.
 
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