Posts have been a bit slow over the past few days. In fact, there have been no posts. Why? A little Netgear WGT624 (v2) router melt down.

The original problem with the router was very mysterious. It seemed to work fine, but I was having intermittent problems connecting to this site (Zoinger.com). Eventually, I couldn’t connect at all. My browser would just time out.

Of course, I thought this was my host’s (1and1) fault. A call to them indicated that this was not the case. Next up, Charter Communications, my cable modem supplier. Nope, they could get to Zoinger.com no problemo, but they did suggest that it might be the router.

WTF? The router. No waaay. However, by this time, about 5-6 hours worth of debugging time, I was getting desperate. I removed the router from my set up and… low and behold, I could get to Zoinger.com.

Indeed, it was the router causing the problem. I searched on Netgear’s “support” site (what a joke), and could find no reference to this issue. I then tried downgrading the firmware to an old version to no avail. Then I found this post on the Netgear forum site. 19 pages of people having a similar problem with no official response from Netgear.

I’ve owned routers from Sonicwall, SMC and Cisco and have never had a problem with any of them. My Netgear router has had problems from day one (it really doesn’t like renewing the dynamic IP address and would hang all the time requiring a reboot).

So how is Netgear router relief spelled? Linksys WRT54G… the damn router I should have purchased in the first place.

P.S. I wish I would have used Skype when I called Netgear’s technical support line. The router has a pretty cool feature to automatically upgrade the firmware. However, during an upgrade in my debugging process the router hung which ended up frying it. Anyway, the tech support person asked me why I would use the feature… implying that you really shouldn’t. OMG, it’s only the first thing you see when you boot into the admin screen, and it is all the time asking you if you want to upgrade when a new firmware version comes out. Classic!