Wednesday, February 10

Linksys WRT310N is a FAIL

I bought this router a couple months ago and, for the most part it seems to do it's job.  It's nothing fancy, but I have had a very strange issue for a while now where I simply end up going to the wrong page.  Facebook ends up on Myspace.  Endless SSL issues where the site I am trying to hit is not the SSL certificate I get.


My first thought was that someone was messing with my router.  It's happened before even though it's locked down to mac addresses, the radio is off, and the router is secured.  After searching through the logs, confident that no one was in there maliciously, I headed to the next likely culprit, my ISP.  Where I live in the country, broadband internet choices are limited.  I chose DSLExtreme... funny name, but their service is good and their support staff not only speaks *good* English, they are actually knowledgeable and they don't just mindlessly follow a flowchart.  However, the fact that they are not a Verizon or AT&T sometimes makes me wonder if there may be wonkiness that the big guys have already worked out.  Still, after talking to the techs there for about a half hour, we found nothing.  They suggested I clear the DNS cache on my router and my computer.  I did that and it seemed to work for a while, but the problem came back not long after.

In retrospect, now that I know what the issue is, it's pretty obvious why it worked immediately after clearing the cache, but the problem cropped up again so quickly that I actually thought it was not fixed.  So I dealt with the issue for a while until this morning, when I actually got so fed up with it that I went searching.  Turns out there's a whole community of people with the same problems as me.  The user forum for the 310n has a thread started sometime last September which points to the issue that also occurs on the 160N

The worst part about it is, Linksys is not fixing the issue.  Multiple people have gotten the "Sorry, we've never heard of this issue before." ... FAIL!  In an interconnected society like we have now with user forums, social networking and so on, you can't tell more than one person that or we all know about how bad you fail.

The workaround works.  I might even venture into the DD-WRT world, which has an experimental version of their firmware that is supposed to work.  Still, this seems like a pretty obvious issue that needs to be fixed and not with a workaround like editing network settings on the computers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello there..
I am very glad to read your post. And very thankful to you.
Thanks again for sharing such a nice information with us.

Michael Nishizawa said...

Stuart,
Glad to know my troubles have been helpful at best and entertaining at worst. :) Keep reading and thanks for the comment!