Rt-n66u needs reboot every few minutes

[bdee1]

I have an Asia rt-n66u which has been working for a while without too much trouble. Buesterday I was working when suddenly I got a notice on my MacBook pro which said another device on the network was using my IP address. It would try to grab a new IP address and then the alert would come up again.

Shortly after that I realized that all the computers on my network had lost connectivity. Not just my MacBook. I was not even able to hit the router in a web browser. Eventually I got it to come up but each page load took a few minutes.

At that position my intebooted the router by pulling the power plug. It came back up and all was well for about 3-5 minutes and then it started again.

And this kept happening. I would power cycle and it would work for a few minutes and then just hang up.
I even tried restoring to factory defaults and setting up my network manually again and it didn't seem to help.

So I have no idea what happened. Is my router dead? Is there anything I can do to troubleshoot this?

 

[Trip]

How old is the router? Long story short, a physical burn-out is very possible with this stuff... If it all of the sudden started to exhibit this behavior on its own, then it could indeed be burning out.

Before assuming so, though, I would backup all settings if you can, then factory reset the unit and import the settings. Better still, if you can manually re-input all your settings, that will eliminate any corruption from a possibly faulty setup being run as it is now. Last ditch resort would be to try third-party firmware, such as Merlin or DD-WRT. If it is hardware-related, you'll see roughly the same behavior regardless of reset status or firmware variant. But I would take those steps to rule it out for sure. If you do monkey with custom firmwares, just make sure you can and do reload the original Asus firmware before trying to proceed with an RMA -- OEMs will often snuff out your eligibility the moment they see something like that running on one of their products.

Moving onward, unfortunately you'll find that these and other consumer units often suffer from cheap internals and hasty go-to-market, which when combined often lead to short life spans... If you do end up plunking down more cash for a replacement, I would highly recommend buying a solid *wired* router to handle your network topology, and only adding in a consumer all-in-one to handle AC/N wifi as an access point. All-around, they're just too flaky to handle the other stuff reliably over the long haul. At least that's been my experience. Good luck!