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I am using a Linksys BEFSR41 as a home network router. And yes, I know the device is old – this is a temporary setup and the router will eventually get replaced with a device I currently need elsewhere. Until then, I don’t want to invest too much into this, and I still happened to have a spare BEFSR41.

Every now and then the router will lose its Internet connection. Devices on the internal network can still communicate with each other, but no Internet resources can be reached and ping 8.8.8.8 will not yield a response. Power cycling the router will restore normal operation for a while, until the next time the connection drops and the cycle starts over again. Time between failures seems to vary and can be as short as about one hour.

Uplink is a standard Ethernet connection. The IP config is obtained via DHCP; no PPPoE or similar.

The last few times this happened, I checked the web admin GUI and discovered the router had lost its external IP config (IP address was 0.0.0.0, and DNS set to its own internal IP address). Attempting to renew the DHCP lease, with or without releasing it first, had no effect.

I remember having similar issues with this router before, on a different network – which indicates the issue is with the router, not the ISP. A web search tells me that in the heyday of this device, a lot of people were having this issue, but most of them didn’t seem to have the tech background to figure out the issue.

Firmware version is 2.00.1, Sep 11 2006, which seems to be the last one for this device. Also, since this seems to be somewhat exotic Linksys hardware, with no support for DD-WRT, the firmware is likely very different from the bulk of other Linksys models.

Until I can replace the router, is there any way to fix this?

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  • I'm having a similar issue with an equally old LinkSys WRT; I suspect that it's just age-related failures. The only thing I can suggest is mitigation by powercycling on your schedule rather than waiting for it to drop out. And replace the device as soon as possible, if not sooner.
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 13:36
  • the router will lose its Internet connection. <-- this was never a strong router. Internet has changed and there is no way for it to keep up.
    – anon
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 15:11
  • @John the BEFSR41 was a piece of junk right from day one (not just for the lost connection issue). I had the same issue already in 2008–2011 (followed by 9 years of not using the router), and other reports go back as far as 2003. I don’t think it has anything to do with outside changes. Ethernet and DHCP should not have changed, at least not in a way that would break older devices.
    – user149408
    Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 16:29
  • Since the external interface is on an RFC1918 network (there’s another router separating it from the Internet), I tried giving it a static IP config. There’s a small risk of an address collision if the DHCP server gives out that address to someone else, otherwise we’ll see how that works.
    – user149408
    Commented Jun 25, 2021 at 13:38

1 Answer 1

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The issue seems to be with the router’s DHCP client, which seems to choke at some point. If you can somehow use a different uplink configuration, consider that; otherwise there isn‘t much to do, apart from getting a router that actually does what it promises to do.

In my case, the external interface is on an RFC1918 network with very few other devices (basically the internal network of a home router). After the next restart, I checked the IP address and configured that as a static one. There is a small risk of the uplink router giving out that IP address to another device – since in my case there aren’t usually any other devices on the network, that risk is negligible, but your mileage may vary. That was three weeks ago, and I‘ve had no more issues sice.

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