WRT54GS + Navini Ripwave

[dakotageek]

I have been experiencing dropouts with my WRT54GS - Ver 1 while connected to a Navini Ripwave wireless modem. So, I updated the firmware to Tomato 1.15 to see if that would resolve the problem, but unfortunately it did not. I have gone through my ISP to see if it is an issue with the modem, but they said that it is working fine.

I have been remotely monitoring access to my Linux box through direct connection to the modem as well as through the router while at work. From the tests I have done over two weeks, the direct connection does not seem to experience any drops, but the router consistently drops on me at random times. Usually it happens in the early part of the morning.

I am sure this is not an issue where the IP changes as I have a cron job running that uses wget to hit a web page that will then grab the external IP used by my machine/router. This cron job runs every hour and half-hour, and so I can find out based on last timestamp of file when my connection fails.

The router is setup to use DHCP to connect to my ISP, and at this point, I am assuming that there may be a problem with router firewall blocking DHCP or DNS communications. I am also looking into issues with ICMP pinging, and with router setup so that it was in "stealth" mode (ie. dropping packets instead of reject).

I have compared the "iptables -L" output for router and Linux box, and things appear to be setup similar, but I noticed the router is using DROP at the top of the INPUT chain.

So, is there any thoughts on what configuration setting in the tomato GUI I should make sure to set a certain way, or what ports I may need to set triggers for or forward to get router to stay connected more consistently? Any thoughts on additional firewall rules that might also help clear this up?

 

[dakotageek]

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can track down what the problem is? I mean it is really odd that it works for the most part during the evenings, but not when I am away at work. However, at the same time my Linux box has no problem staying connected when directly attached to wireless modem.

Is there some firewall rules that I should take and review to see if there is a problem, and how can I test to make sure DHCP is releasing when the lease expires. Can I create some cron job to force a lease renewal every couple of hours?

Also, I ran ps on my router via ssh and can anyone tell me what exactly the following command and arguments does?

udhcpc -i vlan1 -l br0 -s dhcpc-event -H hostname -m

I understand in general what most of the command is for, but when I kill the process and run the command manually I get the following:

udhcpc (v1.2.2) started
Sending discover...
Sending select for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...
Lease of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx obtained, lease time 14400
vlan1: No such process

Why would the vlan be considered a process?

 

[dakotageek]

So, I found out a little more about my wireless modem, and found that the diagnostic tool uses raw Ethernet protocol to send data from "169.254.254.1:3859" to the attached device on port "3859".

My current thoughts is that the wireless modem is for some reason going to sleep, and so I was wondering if it is possible to send a wakeup signal out the wan port?