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Fixing the WAG54G

November 1st, 2006 by Phil

I’ve had my Linkssys WAG54G (a wifi router and four-port switch) for about eighteen months, but over the past month or so, it’s been consistently dropping and then reconnecting my wired network connections every few seconds with Windows reporting that “A network cable was unplugged”. Replacing the network card would solve the problem for a few hours, after which it would start again.

It turns out that changing the connection type to 10Mbps (full duplex) solves this problem. I’m not really sure why, possibly too sensitive to noise on the line at higher transfer rates?

| 5 Comments »

5 Responses

  1. Being a techie I guess you’ve already tired the lastest firmware? Mind you it looks like the last firmware release was 2004, so might not be an issue. I guess the other thing to try is a factory reset and try setting things up again, in case there is a corruption somewhere. The final option is that the unit is old and duff and you’ll need to trawl the web for a new one!! ;o)

    Posted by Richard on November 1st, 2006 at 4:14 pm

  2. Yeah, I did trawl for newer firmware, but apparently I’m already running the most stable version.

    I did also do a factory reset, but that didn’t do anything except give me another 30 minutes of re-configuring everything :)

    I can live with the slower rate for the time being, but it does rather look like I’ll have to get a new one at some point.

    The most annoying thing about it all was that all through, my wife was sitting on the sofa, using her laptop connected to the wifi, and it was fine! :)

    Posted by Pip on November 1st, 2006 at 4:54 pm

  3. maybe try hyperwrt?

    Posted by Anonymous on November 3rd, 2006 at 2:19 pm

  4. As far as I can tell, HyperWRT is only for the WRT series (as the name suggests) – I have a WAG.

    Posted by Pip on November 4th, 2006 at 3:33 pm

  5. amazing! I had this problem all of a sudden as well (my wag54g performed quite well for a year) after a year I got the same problems as described, constantly flickering of the message “a network cable is unplugged” restored the old firmware, back to the new, tried everything until it drove me almost mad. I tried your settings (slowing the speed down to 10mb fd) and it seems to be working fine now. Thanks!

    Posted by Anonymous on December 28th, 2006 at 8:07 am

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