Testing router for problems

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

The other night, I thought my ISP connection went the way of funk. Next morning, I called them again and they said the my area was still out of connection. *thought, this is kinda going on long* So next time I called I waited for a rep. We went through all the hoops, turns out my router took a crap. Reinstalling the firmware fixed it. This was only a few days ago. Is there a way to keep an eye on it to make sure it's running smoothly? The only thing I know would be to go to speedtest.net but that solution seems too full of variables to decided if the router needs to re-install the firmware again....

Thanks

 

[Ghiedo27]

I wouldn't let this issue make you paranoid. It was a pretty clear connection / no connection problem so if you don't notice an issue I wouldn't let it take up a lot of mind-share by giving it dirty looks as you wait for gremlins to show up.

If it does start to seem slow you can run some traceroutes to different web sites. You can do this by going to the command prompt and typing tracert google.com (or 4.2.2.2 or some other stable website in place of google.com). Your router should respond in about 1 ms. If it's hanging there or on the second hop then you'll have a quantitative measure of any slow down.

The thing is, if your soho router dumps flash again or has some other kind of issue you're most likely going to have to replace it, so there isn't much point in trying to watch it for things to fix (though I would probably try flashing it one more time before giving up on it).