WAN activity lamp on roomate's router constantly flashing

[NeoPTLD]

My roomate has a 2.4GHz router connected to the university's residential internet system. I noticed that even with his computer disconnected, the WAN activity lamp is constantly flashing and frankly, it interferes with my 2.4GHz cordless phone.(tick tick tick tick sound)

Is it safe to assume that someone is gaining access to his connection w/o his knowledge? What could one do to a Linksys router to prevent unauthorized access?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

it's more likely you just need to change the channel on your wap/router (to fix the phone problem). the lan activity will constantly flash if it broadcasts the ssid, and will flash constantly anytime it picks up a signal in it's frequency range, there is a lot more overhead than in ethernet, and so there is constant communication to for it to see when it's connected to anything.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Actually, depending on the broadband service, it's normal. My cable modem has continuous activity, and the WAN traffic light of my router pulses away all the time. When I connect directly and monitor the traffic, it's Comcast's local gateway sending ARP packets to everyone on the planet for some reason. This only started happening to me recently, but a friend a couple miles away has seen it for several years. It doesn't appear to affect my throughput, so I've stopped worrying about it.

 

[Rainsford]

My wan light on my router is always active as well in my university apartment. My guess is it is some probing crap on their end of things since my roomies all have the same issue, and I've had it with multiple routers.

 

[MontysNotebook]

I wouldn't worry about it.

If you still are not convinced that it's not something serious, you can limit who can connect to your router by MAC address. Also, most routers have logs in them. I'd check those to see if there's another MAC address in there that's not your roomate's.

Good luck.

 

[JW310]

Just so you know, the WAN Activity LED != Wireless Activity LED... WAN is the "Wide Area Network" that the router shares with your LAN. The reason the WAN LED is going nuts is because of all the broadcast and arp traffic that is likely to be going through your university's network.

Chances are, the interference is from the router broadcasting its SSID. Try changing the channel that the router uses for wireless and see if that doesn't fix the problem with your cordless phone. It sounds like it's on a channel too close to the one your phone's using.


JW