Weird Router Issue

[skatamatic]

I recently bought a new wireless router (a Linksys 802.11n). The power failed and my brother had unplugged it from the surge protector and into the wall >.< . Well a day later it was acting haywire, it was very difficult to connect to wirelessly and would disconnect after about half an hour. The final straw was when it automatically changed its own settings back to default, and my network suddenly became horribly insecure. I have some dangerous ports open, and have a lot of full access file shares setup (including the C: drive of each computer). I had it set up to be pretty secure before (WPA with a 14 digit passkey, and a MAC filter which only includes my laptop, and a ICMP filter to prevent port scanning). I decided to take it back for a replacement, because it seemed like a corrupted FET or possibly a burnt out resistor.

Now I have a new one (the same router) and recently it's been exhibiting the same behaviour. It hasn't reset its own settings, but it has been randomly dropping. At first I thought it was lack of compatibility with my 802.11g wireless card (although n is supposed to be backwards compatible from the ground up). But the internet has been also dropping from my desktop computers (wired).

I really don't want to think it's the brand of router, since Linksys is owned by Cisco, which makes industry standard networking equipment. Has anyone seem any problems like this before? Any help would be appreciated! (sorry about the long post)

[zeroth]

Make sure the router is set to "mixed" on the wireless side and you won't have to worry about which Wifi card someone has.

Your saying that your getting internet dropouts on both the wired and wireless side doesn't make sense unless the router is bad. It's possible you got into a bad batch of them...but you're right, these things are made by the thousands and are usually stable. I have replaced cheap Linksys routers though, every couple of years.

If it was just the wireless side, I'd ask you how many wireless networks your system sees when it does discovery. If there are several around, try using a different channel than the default 6 for your wireless broadcast. This can be done from the Linksys Router Console thru your browser. 6 is the default, try using one of the non-overlapping channels as far away from 6 as possible. You'll get no interference, as long as your neighbors aren't using the same channel you choose. Since most people don't know about this, it isn't likely.

zeroth

[skatamatic]

Yeah, I've pretty much ruled out my wireless card as the culprit. I found a memory leak in a service called Aedeona - an open source anti-theft mechanism for my laptop. It was causing my computer to go a little haywire - my memory kept jumping from 238mb memory in use to over 1.4Gb for seemingly no reason. I'm thinking that this memory leak could have been related to my router shutting down (hogging all the bandwidth and essentially doing a DoS on my own router). I'm a computer tech and set one of these things up every other day, so I'm pretty sure that the setup itself is fine.

Maybe it is just a junk batch...it seems to be running fine since cancelling the pesky Aedeona (memory leaking) service but I guess I'll have to wait and see if the behaviour returns. Thanks for the help though.