biting kneecaps

My Belkin and Linksys routers decided to become retarded: they reached a point where they would get "confused" and just get... well... stupid.

The Belkin would die in bizarre ways: I would still be online, but in a strange state -- anything that directly used the router would fail. Since it insisted on providing DNS itself, name resolution would fail. It could not be pinged... but everything local worked, and I could even SSH in from across the 'net, run VNC through the tunnel, but no way could I get firefox to reliably open the web pages on the router to reboot it. And even though I could ssh in and run VNC, I couldn' t run SlimProto and listen to music at work...

So I replaced it with my old Linksys wired router... and made the Belkin into just a plain old access point. Which worked slightly better for a couple days, then the Linksys got stupid and would just randomly block all incoming connections to some ports. If there was "too much" activity to a port, it would just block it. Eventually it would become a brick, but I usually had to reboot it long before then.

The final clincher was when it started doing this every few minutes, making it impossible to do anything online. ssh into work to read mail, start mutt, and get one sentence into a reply before it died...

So in desperation I returned to a plain old Linux box. I salvaged a NIC from OldGimli for NewGimli, installed ipmasq and dnsmasq and instant router.... and it works so much better. A little less green (well not really since Gimli is on anyway, and now I can unplug the Linksys, so it uses slightly less power), but more reliable and so far not a single problem.

(And that, of course, is why this page kept vanishing for a week, while the dumb routers would get stupid.)

Now I have to rewire yet again... for some reason I have stacks of 3' Ethernet cables, and a couple insanelty long cables (25' and 50'), so I picked up some 14' cables which should be just about perfect.