First let me explain how my home network is setup. In my living room I have a cable modem connected to my Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT (build 14929) firmware to cover the front of the apartment with wireless. That router is then wired to a Linksys E2500 with stock 1.0.05 firmware to cover the back of the apartment with wireless. The E2500 is then wired to a Rosewill RNX-GX4 also with DD-WRT (build 14929) to cover the top floor with wireless.
The other day I noticed that my internet was slowing down to a crawl. My computer is connected to the E2500 via a wired connection and I wasn’t using that much bandwidth so it was odd. After shutting down each open program one at a time I noticed that closing my uTorrent client stopped the slowdown. I wasn’t downloading or uploading much so it was confusing to me why it would slow down my internet just having the uTorrent client open. Even if I stopped all my current torrents it would slow down the internet. After some trial and error and downloading a new BitTorrent client that I didn’t use I found out that by changing the port used by uTorrent fixed the internet. I had been using the old port for a couple of years and don’t know why it suddenly causes problems. During that time I did a reboot of my WRT54G router and thought nothing of it. Everything seemed to be working fine since all my desktops are connected by Ethernet cable.
A couple of days later I went to the living room to download some PSN+ games on my Playstation 3. It was originally connected to the internet wirelessly with the WRT54G. This time, though, it wouldn’t connect. I didn’t think much of it since I assumed it was some update to the PS3 that caused it since I rarely use my PS3. I just dragged an Ethernet cable from my WRT54G to my PS3. The next day I tried to connect wirelessly to the WRT54G with my laptop and it just couldn’t find the SSID. Manually connecting to the WRT54G failed to work too. The other 2 routers were just too far to give it a stable connection. That’s when I started Googling around to see what could be wrong. I couldn’t really find anything concrete and also couldn’t really mess with the WRT54G since other people were using the internet.
One thing I noticed about the WRT54G is that on the DD-WRT router status page the Memory and Network sections were blank. You couldn’t see any of the memory usage or the number of active IP connections. Also, none of the clients were showing up on the lists.
Later that night when no one else was using the internet I decided to backup the settings and do a 30/30/30 hard reset on the WRT54G. That worked wonderfully and my WRT54G wireless capability was back. Instead of restoring my old settings I just started fresh. I do not think I ever actually did a 30/30/30 hard reset when I originally flashed the firmware so better late than never.
Since I was already messing around with my routers I decided to make my E2500 the same SSID as my other 2 routers so that I wouldn’t need to keep switching wireless connections when I walked from 1 side of the apartment to the other on my phone. That actually worked great.