(sorry this isn't finished .. i have much to say and .. well, here ya go)

Problem summary:
After one hour, my router lost it's IP address and had difficulty getting another one.

Recount of events:
Last week my internet connection started flaking out ( or so it seemed ). After quickly power cycling the router and DSL modem, it still wasn't working so I released and renewed my IP address. This seemed to do the trick, but soon the trouble came back. Since the IP release and renew was easy, I did this until I had time to investigate the issue. A few times it took several minutes to get an IP address. My ISP's tech support wasn't much help. They recommended phoning back during business hours or taking in the DSL modem for testing. I was worried it was my LinkSys router, so I opted for the modem test. They promptly handed me a new modem and had me sign a form. This didn't tell me either way if the modem was at fault, but after I hooked up the new one and still had trouble, I suspected the router or ISP.

Another interesting factor to note is that my ISP was recently purchased by another company. The day I began having this trouble is the same day the ISP made significant changes to their DSL network configuration. Many other customers reported trouble with their internet service beginning on that day. Some even lost their static IP configuration temporarily.

It didn't take much research to see how much trouble these firmware updates have caused. It was at this point I remembered that sometime in the last few weeks, I had already updated my firmware without incident (or so i thought) to version 1.45.11 Jun 4, 2004 Many discussion boards are filled with this same trouble. This version is definately flaky and should be avoided. I went ahead and upgraded to version 1.46 June 24, 2004 which stated 1. Fixed DHCP renewal.

As a test, I hooked up a Windows 98 SE system directly to the DSL modem. It successfully pulled an address with a one hour lease. It had no trouble renewing the IP before the lease expired, but did have two very strange things happen. A "release/renew" pulled a different IP each time. After the one hour lease ran out, several minutes passed before a new IP could be acquired. I called and reported this trouble to my ISP. They said to keep a log of how often my IP changed.

From all this, I concluded the trouble to be a result of the latest version of firmware combined with the new configuration from my ISP.

.. i ended up backleveling the router's firmware waaaaaaay back .. now everything works fine .. stupid new firmware that doesn't work right .. it should come with a warning ..

LinkSys firmware revision history
befsr41 firmware at LinkSys
befsr_fw_143.zip