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?