Most people take their wireless routers for granted. They never think about the possibility that their router will ever crash. However, I can tell you that they do fail and of course thanks to Murphy’s law 😉 they crash at the most inopportune time. In my case the router crashed right when I needed to print from my wireless laptop to a remote printer.
Over the past couple of days my router had been acting more and more unreliable. The performance was slowing down and the connection was being lost. The quick, but temporary, solution was to cycle power on the router. However, eventually the router talking to all the wireless devices. When I investigated the problem I discovered that the router decided to do a factory reset on me. All of my previous configuration information was gone in seconds. In order to get it functional again, I had to modify the router’s MAC address so the cable modem would be talk to the router, then I had to reset the communication parameters & passwords.
Because I was the one that configured the router, it didn’t take me too long to restore it to its previously functional state again. However, if I had the job of reconfiguring this router from scratch it would not have gone so quickly.
I mentioned this story just to remind everyone that most network devices that have a considerable amount of configuration usually have a backup feature built into the administration portion of the firmware. If the router had been backed up, it would have restored and functioning again within minutes of the hardware failure.
My old wireless router served me well over the past decade, but reliability is a must in my line of work. So, out of necessity, I’ll be switching out this one in favor of one that has a little more horsepower.
