At lunchtime today Jo mentioned she was having trouble connecting wirelessly to our network. This has happened a few of times in the last couple of weeks, but retrying or in one case restarting the router resolved the issue.

Not today! Wired connection was working fine, but there was no wireless. After resetting the router and re-entering the configurations, I had intermittant wireless, but now no routing of wireless connections to the internet. Also, it was no longer logging any connection details.

I have had the router since February 2005, so it has been on for most of that time continuously. I updated the firmware from the default Linksys to Hyperwrt when I got it which gave me the ability to log the incoming and outgoing firewall connections and messages. This has had its uses; a few weeks ago I was able to identify a test signal from my VOIP service that was trying to connect every few seconds.

So, unexpectedly, I had to go out and buy a replacement router this afternoon. Linksys routers used to run Linux. There is a great support for 3rd party firmware upgrades to the Linux based routers, one good site for this is Linksysinfo. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Linksys changed their routers from using Linux, which means the 3rd party options are now limited.

I now have full connectivity restored, but have had to sacrifice the logging ability as this isn’t part of the standard firmware.