Router randomly dropping local connections

LloydLynx · August 14, 2020

A few days ago my friend's laptop and phone got their connection dropped and couldn't reconnect, a day later my PC was having issues. Both times I fixed by just restarting the router. Today I was SSHed into a local Linux box and the connection just dropped for seemingly no reason, I walk over to it and it turns out it did the same thing. I'm gonna leave it like that so it can be used for troubleshooting. Anyway, so I login to the router control panel and see that the Linux box isn't in the DHCP client list. The router isn't running hot and I had it check for firmware updates, which it was already on the latest. It's a Belkin F9K1001V4, I've had it since I think 2013 or 2014 and haven't had any issues with it until now.

Falcon1986 · August 16, 2020

On 8/14/2020 at 6:30 PM, TheJooomes said:

A few days ago my friend's laptop and phone got their connection dropped and couldn't reconnect, a day later my PC was having issues. Both times I fixed by just restarting the router. Today I was SSHed into a local Linux box and the connection just dropped for seemingly no reason, I walk over to it and it turns out it did the same thing. I'm gonna leave it like that so it can be used for troubleshooting. Anyway, so I login to the router control panel and see that the Linux box isn't in the DHCP client list. The router isn't running hot and I had it check for firmware updates, which it was already on the latest. It's a Belkin F9K1001V4, I've had it since I think 2013 or 2014 and haven't had any issues with it until now.

Is this on a wired or wireless connection? If on wireless, try using the wired connection instead.

From a few Google searches and reviews, this router, and various iterations of it, frequently loses connectivity due to random restarts. This might be a hardware issue that you're unlikely to fix without completely replacing the router altogether.

LloydLynx · August 16, 2020

7 hours ago, Falcon1986 said:

Is this on a wired or wireless connection? If on wireless, try using the wired connection instead.

From a few Google searches and reviews, this router, and various iterations of it, frequently loses connectivity due to random restarts. This might be a hardware issue that you're unlikely to fix without completely replacing the router altogether.

Happens over both wired and wireless. I found a work around though, that is to assign a static IP to each device. I'd still like to know why it's happening, when a device gets dropped it's unable to connect again until the router is restarted.

Falcon1986 · August 16, 2020

3 hours ago, TheJooomes said:

Happens over both wired and wireless. I found a work around though, that is to assign a static IP to each device.

Make sure that your static IPs are outside of the DHCP-assigned pool to avoid internal IP conflicts.

3 hours ago, TheJooomes said:

I'd still like to know why it's happening, when a device gets dropped it's unable to connect again until the router is restarted.

I was going to suggest you try DD-WRT firmware to see if you get improved performance over stock firmware, but that router doesn't have the hardware to support it.

Your Belkin router only has 8MB of RAM and who knows how much flash storage. That's not a lot to work with, which means that the it can easily become overwhelmed with even a moderate amount of simultaneous client connections.

If you get sufficient performance out of it's wired connections for about 3-5 clients then it should suffice for your needs. Don't expect stable performance with more clients, especially on WiFi. It is a B/G/N-era WiFi router after all. You should look into upgrading if you want better performance.