WRT54G retirement time?

[kornphlake]

I have a Linksys WRT54G Ver. 6 I bought used about 2 years ago, it was an access point/switch for quite a while but it's been my gateway/router for about 6 months. Recently it decided to go kaput, the LAN side both wired and wireless seem to be fine but for whatever reason it started blocking traffic to the WAN port, all devices on the network lost access to the internet, it would work fine for a short amount of time after a reboot then go down after less than 5 minutes. If I hook up my PC directly to the cable modem the connection is rock solid.

Since it's Christmas time and money is tight I decided to stop by the Goodwill since they almost always have a couple WRT routers on the shelf, I found a WRT45G Ver. 5 for $14 and brought it home, did a hard reset and configured it as I had the old router. It seemed to work fine until I tried watching a video on Youtube, it would buffer for a long time then finally play, longer videos would play for a minute or so then buffer until I ran out of patience and gave up. Speedtests returned 14 Mbps+ consistently but for some reason Youtube didn't like the router, Netflix and Hulu choked as well on other PCs and my blue-ray player, plugging into the modem directly the problem went away so the problem was definitely the router.

I figured I'd return the router to Goodwill and try something else, since the router was pretty much junk anyway I thought I'd try DD-WRT firmware before writing it off. After a minor frustration caused by not reading the installation instructions correctly I got DD-WRT loaded and plugged in the router, it worked fine, the connection was stable and I was able to stream HD video, even with several devices streaming at the same time with a few speed tests on top just to really stress the router.

So my question is, did DD-WRT fix the router? I figured a hard reset and running the Linksys firmware at default settings would be 99% as good as DD-WRT, I really didn't expect a firmware update to correct whatever issue the router was having. What are the odds this router is going to develop problems in the next couple days that DD-WRT won't be able to compensate for? Did the series of resets during the installation of DD-WRT do as much good as the updated firmware?

 

[VirtualLarry]

LOL at returning electronics at Goodwill. All of the thrift stores around here don't accept returns, that I know of.

As for your question, yes, DD-WRT often "fixes" routers that have buggy stock firmware.

I've read accounts of routers that needed a nightly reboot, that after installing DD-WRT, they run for months. At least mine have. I never need to reboot them.

 

[kornphlake]

LOL at returning electronics at Goodwill. All of the thrift stores around here don't accept returns, that I know of.

As for your question, yes, DD-WRT often "fixes" routers that have buggy stock firmware.

I've read accounts of routers that needed a nightly reboot, that after installing DD-WRT, they run for months. At least mine have. I never need to reboot them.

The only reason I mention returning electronics to Goodwill is because they actually have a 14 day return policy, it doesn't make sense to buy electronics there otherwise, there's really no way to test them out in the store. The only reason I know about the policy is because I asked once for some reason, after this purchase I noticed it's actually printed on the receipt, the policy is exchange or store credit only, no cash refunds, which seems fair. I don't believe the other thrift stores in the area offer any kind of return policy, there's a computer only thrift store downtown that does some basic testing before selling anything and they do proudly advertise a return policy, but their prices can be a tad high.

It's comforting to read that you've had luck fixing problematic routers, I'll give it a few more days and see how it works out.

 

[skyking]

I've used about 25 of these routers in the past. Here is what I have observed:
Better firmware is better, but the hardware can get flakey on you. The smoke does not come out of the chips, but they get old and tired.
I've had to retire a few that just could not keep the DHCP server going for more than a week or two. Firmware did not matter on those ones. I could flash it to tomato or any version of DD-wrt, it would do the same. Just tired.

 

[pitz]

My dd-wrt-flashed wrt54gl's wireless stopped working about a week ago. I had the radio cranked up to 251mW, so I thought I fried the radio.

After consulting with a few message forums, I did a complete hard reset, re-entered my settings, and wham, everything worked again!

I'm convinced that, for some reason, the wrt54gl hardware, or dd-wrt, for whatever reason, enters a state where there is NVRAM corruption after extended periods. It also lost the entirety of its configuration settings about 3 years ago -- again, the solution was to wipe the NVRAM and re-load everything.