In May of last year, when lightning struck close enough to fry electronics across my house, one of the victims turned out to be my Linksys WRT54G. The local side of it worked perfectly, but the WAN port was dead. Plugging my computer directly into the (ancient) Alcatel DSL interface box worked perfectly.

Fine. I replaced it with a shiny D-Link DGL-4300 (with GigE, speeding things up noticably between my fileserver and computer). Now, today, it happened again. I don't have any other evidence of fried electronics (yet), but there was some rain today, so there could well have been another lightning strike somewhere nearby. At any rate, the LAN is working fine but the WAN port is flakey. My router claims it's receiving packets on the WAN but with a very high error rate. DNS and everything else is hosed. And, as before, if I plug my computer directly into the Alcatel box, everything works perfectly.

(Annoyingly, the one year warranty on the D-Link expired a mere three months ago, otherwise I'd try to do a warranty claim with them.)

Questions:

- Should I get a new router or is there any hope of repairing the current one?

- Should I bother AT&T (nee SBC nee Southwestern Bell) to send me a newer DSL modem, or is my ancient Alcatel 1000 worth keeping around? (I'm moving in a few months, so I don't want to do anything that would require me to sign a longer-term contract.)

- What's the right way to deal with surge supression to keep this from happening again? Do I want to get something that operates on the Ethernet, or the DSL, or what? My UPS has a telephone supressor, which I believe I tried routing the DSL line through when I first got it, but the DSL wasn't happy with that. I could always try again.

*sigh*

Well, since the "modem" is working fine, I don't see any need to protect it (suppress the DSL line coming in to it). I'd see if there was a surge suppressor I could get for the ethernet linking the router to the "modem". Something like this APC in-line ethernet surge suppressor. It's available for $27 from Amazon.

Well, first off, I still miss my Alcatel 1000. I got it when I got my first broadband connection in '98 or so. That thing was rock solid and never lost sync once until it lost sync permanently in 2004 and went to silicon heaven.

I'd start by buying a gigabit switch, and a dd-wrt compatible router. I just ordered 5 Buffalo WHR-G54S, but I havn't gotten to play when them yet, so I can't reccomend them. The most interesting router I came accross was the dd/open-wrt supported Asus model with the built in USB ports, allowing for either USB drive sharing, or USB audio streaming (audio is very beta from what I could tell, but still neat.

Matthew

That APC gizmo seems like the right idea for protecting my router from the modem. My next concern is what the right box would be to replace my D-Link. To keep the box count down, I'd like to get another all-in-one. The D-Link comes pretty close to being everything I need except that (a) traceroute doesn't go through it and (b) it doesn't support jumbo frames. Any suggestions?

I ended up replacing my D-Link with an identical copy for $122 from NewEgg (versus the $150 I paid 15 months ago). The only way I could have done better would have been a two-box solution (say, a Linksys WRT-54GL plus a GigE switch), but I didn't want to deal with multiple boxes. Amusingly, it came with an ancient firmware version, rather than the firmware release from January '06. With my luck, a newer/better version will be announced tomorrow.