On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 01:47:03PM -0500, Jack Chastain wrote: > Today (and probably for at least a year or so now), the unit indicates it > has a WiFi section active (on front panel) but I do not have a signal > present. I used WiFi Analyzer on my phone to check. My main office signal > is present at -90+ db but other than a few other neighborhood signals, > nothing is there. > > I apparently cannot access the router either. I removed all other network > cables leaving only the Linux system it is normally supporting via wired > conenction. I rebooted everything - I cannot access the router. I used both > 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.100. Without the supporting FiOS router though, > the Linux system does not see any network at all and obtains no address > itself. (I pretty much expected this as the Netgear was set up to be > an extension, so it can only get an address from the FiOS system). > > So - I thought I would pop it out to the folks who know the most about > these things. Anyone ever played with one of these? I am about to do a full > factory reset on it and try to start over, at least trying to get into the > router itself, but I recall having a pretty tough time initially, so I > figured I would ask first.
As an extension, do you mean it's a second AP with the same SSID? Or is it set up as some sort of wacky repeater? You want the former - namely, same ssid, same crypto, non-router 'bridge' mode, different channel. As far as the rest - this happens a lot with crappy wi-fi consumer gear. It's a real pain. A lot of them simply don't have the ram to manage connection and such, this usually shows up as a bigger problem when it's in router mode instead of AP bridge mode, but... Factory resetting is probably a good plan, it can't hurt. You should be able to reset it into a router mode, then connect to it via wired, and reconfigure it. You may have better luck in the long run getting a new AP entirely - things are getting a lot better. I've had good luck with the WNDR3800, it's relatively cheap on amazon, runs openwrt like a champ, and can support USB drives and such as well - even running it as a bridge you may find it useful in other capacities (like throwing a few USB disks on it for backups, etc). Sorry it's hard to be more exact with diagnostics - a lot of the older (and current cheapest) gear tends to poo itself fairly regularly and there's not much by way of debugging you can do. It's not too unusual to get it wedged in some funky state - most of the smaller stuff has dropped from linux to vxworks, halved the ram in the unit, dropped CPU quality, etc. It's not unusual to ship them with 2 meg of ram and 4 meg of storage. Way too underpowered for modern loads. -m --
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