Thank you to everyone who provided suggestions on this.  "Knock on wood,"
resetting the router to factory defaults and manually re-entering all
settings and key seems to have worked.  And, for anyone who was curious,
my client is my dad who is retired after working 30+ years at UVM, and my
support to him is completely free.  (Well, except I did get paid in tacos
which my step-mom made for me to eat. :)

If the settings go wonky again I have prepared him for the fact that it
could be a hardware problem.



On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Stefanie Ploof wrote:

> Hi all, I'm hoping that someone has experienced this problem and has
> advice for why the problem is happening...  Since UVM doesn't support home
> networking routers specifically and since the person I am helping is a
> retired UVM staff person, I'm posting this during my lunch time and hope
> you'll use free time to respond. :)
>
> I'm obligatorily helping someone who has Verizon DSL and a Linksys WRT54G
> v5 router capable of 802.11B/G.  The router is configured for PPPoE with
> WEP 128-bit encryption, and keys have been generated on his wireless
> machines to match the key generated by the router.  The Linksys router has
> been configured to be in a separate subnet from the DSL modem.
>
> For a reason that escapes me, any wired or wireless computer that use the
> router will periodically be dropped from network accessibility and be
> given a 169 address.  The only way to re-establish a network connection to
> the devices is to access the Linksys router web interface (the machines
> can still browse to the 192.168 router address, but no other addresses)
> and click on Save Settings.  No settings are misconfigured, just the
> action of resaving the settings regrants access to the network for all
> wired and wireless computers connected to the router.  If the router is
> removed from the equation and a computer is plugged in directly to the DSL
> modem the computer never drops network connectivity.
>
> Since resetting the router would mean regenerating the keys for encryption
> he has not tried this yet, but if it's the only solution then he'll try
> it.  Does anyone have ideas why this is happening?  Defective router, or
> is this a settings issue?  If settings, what should he look at?  Verizon
> is unable to help with this problem because the router was purchased
> through a third party.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions.
>
> Stef
>