Netgear ADSL modem/router keeps going down....

Lo peeps....

I have a Netgear DG814 DSL modem/router. Its attached to 4 PCs, one of which via a wireless access point (WAP). One machine is hooked up with eDonkey, whilst the other 3 is just simple web-surfing or updating BIONC stats.

My problem is that the modem drops the connection from time to time. On a good day, the connection will be 'live' for anything like a whole week. On a 'bad' day, the connection will be dropped after 5 minutes. The only way of getting the connection back is to switch the modem off and then back on.

I've updated to the latest firmware, and I've set the modem not to drop the connection after so many minutes idle.

Does anyone have any ideas or have experienced this?

Another thing that happens is that when I disconnect eDonkey from the net, web-surfing seems to hang for a few minutes (or a reset is required). The browser (both IE or Firefox) seems not to be able to connect to the DNS server and I've noticed no traffic activity on the modem. All of sudden, the modem will work again, and the data just fly in.

How are your computers obtaining the DNS server data... are they using the router's DHCP server? Also, do you have a lot of port forwarding going on?

Port forwarding and bad DHCP can cause problems, both of which I've had to deal with before.

Only port forwarding I got is for eDonkey.

As for the DNS bit, AFAIK, its using the router's DHCP server.

I binned my DG814 for being a huge pile of crap. Run a smoothwall server now :D