Re: [PLUG] Home wifi access point & router recommendation

The small consumer stuff lacks good grounding. Rarely do they have dedicated grounding. When you get transients often a common connection between devices will act as a ground path. In this case potentially the Ethernet connection. Sometimes it's not enough to completely destroy the electronics. Better grounding can help relieve the problem. Make sure your cable line shield is grounded to your electrical ground and make sure all your stuff has a good common ground. Also with inductance, the shorter your runs the better.

-John

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 1:50 PM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:

On 06/25/2015 11:08 AM, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
...
> What's peculiar is the failure - refuses to connect with the WAN (cable
> modem) and get an IP address. The light on the cable modem flashes when
> I connect the cable to the router, so evidently there is physical
> connectivity, and the cable is good because it is working now with my
> old backup router. So, it must be a hardware failure on the NIC of the
> Buffalo N300 - most peculiar…

I lost a bunch of NICs to similar symptoms in a near lightning strike a
few years ago. My wild guess was induction on my Cat5 cable plant. One
unit had a multi-port NIC and I was able to just swap ports, so that one
was interesting. Others were more of a pain.

Come to think of it, I lost the WAN port on a WRT54GL some months ago
for no reason I'm aware of, with exactly that symptom. I just bridged
the whole Ethernet bus and used a different port; the way I have it set
up "WAN" doesn't matter.

Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

John Kreno

"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin