A lot of us have Linksys home routers. They are cheap, effective, and easy to use. I’ve have a BEFSR81 8 port fast ethernet broadband router/firewall for many years… it recently started locking up when anyone in the house shops Amazon.com using Firefox (started in early May we think).
Frequently the router will lock up on pages other than Amazon’s home page; usually while doing DNS queries to get some of the many sub-domains Amazon uses… Occasionally the whole router will crash and I have to reset it to get it working again.
I am running hardware version 3.1 and firmware 2.51.0 (though I swear I applied 2.51.4 update successfully in the past, it’s reporting 2.51.0). While re-applying firmware update this morning the trusty old Linksys died and would not recover.
A mad scramble to get internet again led me to buy a D-Link EBR-2310 from a local Office Depot (how cool that Office Depot carries the entire D-Link line!)… which will give me time to recover the Linksys I hope, and time to research running a linux server with two network ports as a router and firewall.
http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Wired-Routers/BEFSR81-crashes-when-accessing-amazon-com/td-p/333269/page/5 the second to last post on this topic is very informative, and it looks like a DNS specific bug…
I love D-Link’s new line of gear, especially their “EtherGreen” low power high speed gigabit ethernet switches… so I suspect this router from D-Link will be fine, but it only has a four port hub on the LAN side. The Linksys BEFSR81 had an amazing 8 port switch on the LAN side… excellent and still cheap.
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Back in 2001 I was working as QA for a communications software company, and was testing proxy and firewall communications with our product. We kept having this problem though where a couple executives in the company kept having our software crash their Linksys router. After an arduous process of trying to troubleshoot the problem, we found that the DHCP-based proxy script request that we were sending did not have Source Port (I think) proerply defined in the packet, and that would crash the DHCP server on the Linksys, which would then not renew leases (which expired very quickly at the default setting) and it would also cause any DNS forwarding to get locked, so you would have to reboot the router.
We found so many bugs in the Linksys system that to this day I refuse to use any of their products.
Wow! Amazon is a LOT faster through the D-Link than it was through the Linksys… amazing.
Damn! The brand new D-Link EBR-2310 died at 24 hours of use…
Office Depot replaced it, but I am worried about the replacement.
The good news is that I figured out how to reset the old Linksys BEFSR81:
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