My Router Broken?

[DDY]

Any guides on getting the plastic enclosure off? My prying attempts have all failed I can't see the clips, and I don't want to force it

Look under the four rubber feet

The screws you'll find under them are torx T9, you can get away with using a 2mm flat screw driver if you don't have the right torx screw driver.

[Ben Rogers]

Just wanted to add that I had a netgear DG834G wireless router as well and my wireless stopped working. Tried firmware upgrade and no luck. I had it for about 2 years. Strange thing is the wired connection worked fine. I ended up binning it and getting a new one. I used to think highly of netgear but this one has tarnished their reputation somewhat for me.

I have experienced exactly the same and have had the router (DG834G) on 24/7 since May 08 so it's close to 2 years now...it has dropped the wireless 3 times in 2 weeks now but the wired has never dropped ever. I don't get any sync problems, it doesn't lose sync often at all, maybe once every 6 months or so and I connect at full 8 mbit. I have not had the wireless fail since my last post in this thread it must have been at least a week ago now.

[Antagram]

Out of all the moderately expensive home routers; I have to confess Netgears are my favorite. However, two of my DG834Gs v4 have suffered severe instability issues, one with intermittent ADSL connectivity and more recently one that drops LAN connections.

I've fixed both 834s by replacing the caps, they have been running fine since.

Maybe you should pop open your 834 to check for bad caps.

Also, give the DGTeam firmware a go.

That's motivational.

My v2 suffered dropped LAN connections that came back to life after a few minutes. But when I looked inside all the capacitors looked fine (not bulging, and didn't see any leakage). Will recheck and consider ordering replacement capacitors.

Out of interest how much did the capacitor order cost (inc. P&P), and where from?

Edit: Some internal pictures:

[Ben Rogers]

When mine gives up the ghost I am going to get a proper router, one that is a lot faster like my old usrobotics is that runs some linux on it, u can ssh into it etc and find out loads of stuff, so much better than this netgear junk that I didn't even look into as I needed a cheap wifi router as we moved house and it was more or less bought without reading about them etc.

[peterb]

Most routers run some form of cut down Linux as their OS - and while not all support SSH, most allow you to telnet into them for a CLI (and while telnet is not secure) usually that is only permitted from the lan side)

If you want to have really fine grain control over your routing, you could use someting like PfSense in a mini-itx set up. many of the mini-itx boards have dual LAN connections, so are odeally suited for firewall or routing applications. Link that so a simple ADSL modem and you have full control over the routing and access to the routing statistics.

Another alternative is to use a modemrouter that supports snmp. I use a Draytek device and then use the Linus Syslog application on my fileserver to interrogate the router using SNMP and log the output with the other log files the system generates. However you do need to use logrotate, as some of the log files grow very quickly!

[Ben Rogers]

My old USRobotics was sooo much faster than this netgear and when I had the USRobotics I synced at 4500kbit and now with the Netgear I sync at 8128kbit due to moving house but the netgear is still way slower at loading web pages.

I did mean telnet sorry, that is how I got into the old router not ssh I got confused.

I have used snmp before on the old router to monitor bandwidth used etc it was very useful.

[DDY]

That's motivational.

My v2 suffered dropped LAN connections that came back to life after a few minutes. But when I looked inside all the capacitors looked fine (not bulging, and didn't see any leakage). Will recheck and consider ordering replacement capacitors.

Out of interest how much did the capacitor order cost (inc. P&P), and where from?

I bought the stuff from Farnell but I can't remember how much they cost I'm afraid, they came in lots of five I think.

If I were you; I wouldn't bother replacing the caps since they don't show any obvious signs of failure, god knows what else could be up with it, it is a Netgear after all.

[watercooled]

Just wanted to say P+P from Farnell is free provided you don't order stock from the US.

[Sputnik]

I had a look at the draytek it gets some good reports but, It is a bit expensive considering I only paid £20 for the DG834GT.

[Glix]

My router is still being a bit naff, at random times it can lock up.
There is a new DGteam firmware but it seems to have an issue with my DS lite.

[Sputnik]

I changed the caps in my DG834GT and now it seems to have a high pitch whistle So I might have to revert to the supplied Thompson unit.

[watercooled]

Oh I get that a lot with electronics, I seem to be able to hear it really easily. Since you've already opened the unit you could try putting some hot glue/silicone sealant on the coils to stop the whining.

[Sputnik]

Oh I get that a lot with electronics, I seem to be able to hear it really easily. Since you've already opened the unit you could try putting some hot glue/silicone sealant on the coils to stop the whining.

I had thought about doing that - I might give it a try.

Edit: I opened it up again and gave it some hot glue on the inductors and now it is dead :S Oh well at least I still have a spare I can use.

Edit: It lives! Seems I didn't leave it long enough to dry out after rinsing off the flux cleaner.