AR5822 wireless crashes Belkin F6D6230-4 router

[adpads]

Hi all!

I've got an Acer Aspire S3-391-53314G52add ultrabook here, booting in 13 seconds to kubuntu from its 20GB onboard SSD. Sweet linux machine for those interested!

Trouble is, the Atheros AR5B22 WLAN (b/g/n) keeps crashing my Belkin F6D6230-4 v1000 router (firmware v. 1.00.15). Admittedly, it's a pretty flaky router, but this problem seems to be unique to this combination of computer and router - and indeed to Ubuntu on this computer, as Windows works fine, and some other distros (e.g. OpenSuSE 12.2) don't support the wireless at all.

The trouble occurs with both radios, in the 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz bands. After a slow connecting process (1-2 minutes) the connection works for 5-30 minutes, and then the router crashes and restarts, taking every connected user's internet with it.

All Belkin offers for this router is an unsupported beta firmware v. 1.00.19 that they tell people not to use. There isn't even a download of the original firmware, so if it is bad I won't have a way back. dd-wrt does not support this router.

Anyone familiar with this problem? Should I fix the wireless drivers or the router firmware?

[ahallubuntu]

I've personally had a few bad experiences with Belkin routers, to the point where I would never buy one. The fact that yours is so poorly supported plus does not support DD-WRT are good reasons to get rid of it and get a router that isn't flaky. Unfortunately, not all routers are created equal. Some are just junk.

If you want another dual band router that can run DD-WRT (and Tomato), try the Linksys E3000. It's an older router but good. (Also has a gigabit ethernet switch if that matters to you.) Cisco (who makes Linksys) has been unloading refurbished versions of this router for about $50 USD via Newegg.com . I have bought a couple of them for various projects - only a 90 day warranty but no problems so far.

[adpads]

Thank you! I couldn't agree with you more about the router. That Linksys E3000 looks like a pretty smooth operator, and if I can track one down in this country I think I'll surely take your advice!

Just one question from the linux side: Switching to Google Public DNS seems to have reduced the frequency of the crashes pretty drastically, to once every couple of hours. Why? What's it actually doing?

Thanks again for your quick help!

[ahallubuntu]

Typically, if you set your router's WAN to "obtain automatically," it will get not only its IP address but also its DNS servers from the internet provider. So when you look up domain names (whenever you visit a web site, the name must be looked up in the DNS servers to obtain its IP address), you are using the internet provider's DNS.

If you use Google's DNS, then you're not using the internet provider's DNS any longer.

Why would that make your router more reliable? Hard to know. Google's DNS could be faster than the internet provider's DNS or something. You're probably changing something that makes the router work less hard or something.

Did you change the DNS in the router or in your wireless configuration in the laptop? You can also try changing the DNS in your router itself instead of just on your laptop and see if that makes any difference.

[adpads]

Thanks again for your help! I quickly found that the improvements I thought I saw with Google public DNS were illusory, so I took a risk and spent a wad of local currency on a new Linksys E3000 router.

I"m astonished at how much faster the entire home network feels - partly because negotiating the wifi link is a lot quicker, but DNS also feels a lot faster for some reason. The next step will be to actually connect a drive to it, and see if that works - the old Belkin used to routinely crash during read/writes and corrupt the entire file system on the connected drive.

Not a fix on the linux end, but I'll mark this thread solved in a couple of days if things stay this smooth. Thanks again!

[adpads]

I'm sorry to report that this problem is NOT solved. I'm having the same issue with the new router. So the culprit is definitely ubuntu.

Any suggestions?