Unreliable wireless connections for business network

[rbelden]

Good Morning. My current network setup at my business is frustrating me to no end and I need some solid advice. I have an older Linksys BEFSX41 as my primary WAN router connected to the Motorola cable modem. This serves my office PC and our credit card approval system (both hard wired). I have a linksys WRT54GS used as an access point for our counter sales pc and my laptop as well. My internet connection always seems to get hung up whenever I use the wireless connections. A quick reboot of the routers fixes the problem but this is not acceptable as it severley affects my business and I'm not there 24/7. My first solution was to replace them with another brand such as dlink but after extensive research on those it seems that their firmware is horrid an their customer support is as worthless as that of Linksys. Now I'm considering going to a more professional setup such as a switch and wireless access point. Am I wasting my efforts! It seems that buying one of these "consumer" grade routers is like playing roulette since you might get one that works and you might not. As you can tell I don't have many requirements as far as technical but just bulletproof reliability. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[DaveMcLain]

Do you have the WRT54G set up as an AP or a router? If it's working as a router you might end up being double NAT'ed and this can cause problems sometimes. Getting the WRT54G set up as an AP only is easy to do and there's an article here on Small Net Builder that shows how it's done. Basically you end up turning off DHCP, firewalling etc because you already have a router that's performing that task and you're wanting to use the WRT strictly as a wireless AP.

Another thing to try might be to take your WRT54G or other hardware to another location and see how it performs in different surroundings.

 

[claykin]

Check for firmware update from Linksys. Also check for wireless driver update for client in remote PC. FYI, older Intel drivers were notorious for locking up wifi routers/ap.

What security do you have setup? WEP, WPA, WPA2/AES.

 

[minghi]

Don't spend any money yet. did you try installing dd-wrt on it. Its supposed to add more stability to unstable routers and offers more functions.

check out http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G/GL/GS/GX
to see if your router supports it

If your router doesn't support it, you can try buying a Linksys WRT54G-TM router with DD-wrt installed on ebay.

 

[rbelden]

Thanks for the responses. I do have the WRT54GS setup as AP. I also have the wireless firmware upgraded to DD-WRT. It does offer much in terms of customizable(sp?) options but I'm not an expert so I don't mess with many of them. I have it set as a DHCP forwarder using the hard wired router as the DHCP server. All of my PC's have static IP aaddress except for the credit card approval switch. It should not be an IP issue and I really don't have access to that unit as it is part of our retail system or I would make it static and turn off the DHCP totally. I do know that it just grabs the first ip address allocated. The firmware on the hardwired unit is not up to date but it has been my experience that upgrading Linksys's firmware with their updates to fix problems can have the opposite effect. Anyway, the security I use is WPA personal but I don't think that has any effect. Are there any firms out there that I can pay to remote into the routers and check the settings?

 

[thiggins]

I have it set as a DHCP forwarder using the hard wired router as the DHCP server.

If the router is really set up as an AP, you should not have to do anything special for DHCP.

Compare the IP settings for your wireless clients with those of wired clients, especially the gateway and DNS settings. The only thing different should be the IP addresses, all of which should be unique.