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I am using about 10 wrt54gl's in a small school. I am using a combination of stock firmware and Tomato 1.25, slowly moving towards all Tomato. We have had these devices installed for several years without problems.

Recently, more and more of the units have started to spontaneously reboot, usually during high-traffic times (but not always).

For the most part, the rebooting is not critical for us, but the wrt54gl's temporarily revert to 192.168.1.1 on the LAN ethernet ports and conflict with a critical server that's already installed with that IP. (Yes -- we plan to move the server off that address, but it is an involved process.)

Both Tomato and the stock firmware (several versions from recent to several years old) exhibit the same problem: random reboots and reverting to 192.168.1.1 and conflicting temporarily with our server until the firmware boot process finishes.

Here are my questions:

  1. Any way to prevent the wrt54gl's from reverting to 192.168.1.1 during the boot process? I was thinking of doing a custom firmware mod, although I hate to go that direction.

  2. Any steps to take in troubleshooting the reboots? Only some of the wrt54gl's reboot, which is odd. Others stay online for weeks and months without issues.

Thanks.

3 Answers 3

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Thanks for your reply.

Finally figured out that this behavior is as spec'd by the firmware. As part of a boot-up failsafe mode, the firmware always assumes 192.168.1.1 for about 5 seconds before assuming the programmed IP address. During this brief window, you can tftp a new firmware in case you accidentally bricked the router. It would take a very low level rewrite of the firmware to change the 192.168.1.1 default.

I never completely figured out why the routers rebooted spontaneously, but I believe it's either a) too many clients or too much traffic b) clients with a very marginal signal level.

In any event, we are starting to replace with enterprise wireless equipment now.

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Since both firmwares exhibit this behavior, and the boxes are older, I suspect a hardware problem. Difficult to say what it is without digging around in there, but the likely candidate would be marginal/failed electrolytic capacitors.

Given the price of the hardware, your best bet is probably to simply replace the failing boxes.

Sorry, I don't know how to force a different default IP.

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I would recommend you start troubleshooting from replacing power supply units between [still] working devices and affected. I bet on well known 'capacitors problem' (thanks, Chinese brothers) and your affected devices will function properly with replaced power supply units some more years...

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