I haven’t had a reliable net connection while staying in Swindon. (Yes, that’s my excuse.) My landlord has a cable modem and a Netgear MR814v2 wireless router installed in one of the neighbouring houses, and I’ve been trying to use it. The signal strength has always been good enough, but the connection has always been really bad: on average, packet loss was over 40%; the connection would also frequently disappear for days at a time. This was happening on the LAN, before reaching the cable modem, so it had to be wireless router.
When the connection was lost I used kismet to try to try to find it. The router was still there, but transmitting on zero channel with a zero rate! (Using kismet I also found another one of my landlord’s routers, across the street.) I used tcpdump to watch the LAN while connected. The router was continuously arping for all the possible machines in its subnet. The router across the street wasn’t. A further comparison revealed that the dodgy router had a lower firmware version, so I figured that a firmware upgrade might solve the problem.
I downloaded the new firmware from Netgear, followed their instructions, and nothing happened. So I tried again, 6 times. That was yesterday.
Today I decided to try once more. The upgrade is performed by using a web browser to upload the firmware via the router’s web interface. I had tried this using the Mozilla Firebird browser, and it had failed. So this time I decided to try it with curl: curl -F mtenFWUpload=@mr814v2_5021.img -F Upgrade=” Upload ” http://192.168.0.1/upgrade.cgi
It worked first time! And it seems to have solved all the problems. But the whole experience has made me dislike Netgear products, despite their shiny appearance.