BEFW11S4v4 Hangs
Tuesday, March 30th, 2004My BEFW11S4 would hang every 76 to 91 minutes. The management interface would just stop responding and the wireless side would not get through to the switch. DHCP is on the other side of the switch and I’ve got a really short lease set up for my LAN. This made for a rather baffling problem. Add to that a new intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 which would drop the secure connection every nine minutes and the fun begins.
The solution was to hard reset the BEFW11S4 followed by an immediate firmware flash of 1.5.10. After reconfiguring the router properly I’ve gone 24 hours at the time of this writing without a hang.
For the intel card, Dell had a new version of the driver which solved a key renegotiation problem. That sounds like my nine miniute drop and indeed the problem had not reoccured.
So, how did I get to the solution? Darwin Retuya on the Linksys live chat suggested this course of action. First he suggested hard reset then RTS and fragmentation then removing firewalls then firmware upgrade. In each case I told him that the preceding step had failed. Finally he said, hard reset the BEFW11S4 followed by a firmware reinstall. I tried it using the tftp client instead of the web client and it worked.
Others at Linksys had been working with me for a week without providing the solution, so my hat’s off to Darwin Retuya.