DDWRT WDS/Connection Watchdog

I love DDWRT. I have been using it for ever. I had a Linksys WRT54G that was running for YEARS! Years, like 5 years. Hell, maybe even more. I got it years ago and it cost me $400. I for some reason the other day had a bit of a meltdown (bad day) and smashed my it because of it’s DHCP still being turned on inside my home/corporate LAN. I was setting up a print server and it wasn’t getting an ip, found out later it was that little guy. I got a little too angry, but things are fine now. I really don’t like it when my stuff doesn’t work. Anyways, I had to replace my WRT54G and I got one of the newer WRT160N's from TigerDirect for $30 bucks. I know. Bad Idea, every time I have gotten a refurbished electrical anything it has been terrible, or full of hassle, or I have to baby the hell out of it. I was a little broke and thought if there were problems I would replace it in the future. Well here I am, still kind of broke but now I’m thinking. The girlfriend told me that the wireless was having problems a few days ago. I have her tell me every time anything happens so I can formulate a plan and fix whatever happens. After a few times the wireless stopped for me. My internet stopped on my old IBM T42 running windows 7 (not so good, but not so bad really). It looks like my wireless is dropping. I have checked the web portal of DDWRT and found no sort of logging. It might be there I just can’t find it. I have also checked the uptime thinking it could be power related. I checked it’s uptime and it was about three days. I checked my administration and found the “keep alive” section. I then found WDS/Connection Watchdog. This will let you ping an ip, if it can’t ping an ip the router will reboot. That’s right. If the router can’t ping an ip it reboots. Normaly, I would never want an option like this. If something fails I want it to stop so I can look at it. Think about it this way, when troubleshooting a wireless router (that I have done millions of times at my old job. Residential fee based support) you unplug it. This is the same thing automatically.

I know pretty sweet. Now think about this, when you are troubleshooting any sort of internet issue what is the one site you ping the most? If you’re like me it’s, start, run, cmd, ipconfig, ping myroutersdnsname, ping google.com. That’s how I troubleshoot. So, if the router will ping Google ever 5 minutes (or 600 seconds) and if it can’t ping Google it will reboot? Awesome! My only concern is that if someone hits the pole outside my house and takes out my cable modem my router will reboot ever five minutes for the length of the outage. This does something bad, but I’m not sure. Here’s a pic of the settings and I put Google’s ip in there too.



So, to recap this router will ping Google every 5 minutes and if it finds a problem it will reboot. Sick, I’m happy with that. Let’s see if it fixes the problem, saves me from buying another router (because I flashed it). If not I’ll get a new one.