Netgear wireless routers quit working

[jepeters]

We have a hodgepodge of wireless routers in our school--NetGear, LinkSys, and Belkin. All worked fine previous to this year. Apparently at the start of this school year (Sept 07) the three NetGear routers quit working (they were all in an area of the school were wireless was hardly ever used, so I didn't realize all 3 were not working until now).

The other routers work fine, but all 3 NetGears show an amber light. Not only does wireless not work, you can't use the ports to connect a computer with a Cat5 cable anymore, either.

The model is WGR614, they're at least 3 years old.

The odd thing is--these routers work fine if I plug them in to a network drop in either of our two computer labs. Plug them in to any other network drop around the school and they don't work. The two labs are using different switches than all the other drops, but those switches have been in place for 3 years.

Any ideas as to how to get these working? (we will probably re-do the entire wireless system this summer, but would like to patch this system up for now)

[flanzig1]

Here's a possible scenerio: The the computer labs and the rest of the school and are on different subnets. The routers may use a static IP which matches the lab subnet.

[jepeters]

no--not the case in this situation. subnet is the same for the whole school

[glc]

Are you using them as routers or just as wireless access points?

[jepeters]

routers

[mojo]

Originally Posted by jepeters routers

Well, dont. You'll have far less problems if you just use them as access points. Disable the DHCP server on each one and connect it to the main network with one of the LAN ports, not the WAN port.

[glc]

That will also require you to assign each one a unique IP in the subnet.

[jepeters]

It seems that all they needed was a firmware update. I did that on one of them and now it works--we can connect wirelessly.

I had mistakenly thought that the amber lights meant something wasn't working correctly. Instead it means that it was connecting at 10 MBPS--which is how we are set up except for the two labs which were giving me green lights.

Unfortunately, on the first one that I updated I followed the instructions too closely. It said that I HAD to reset to the factory defaults after installing the update, and now I'm having trouble putting in the settings that were in there before. On the second one, I did NOT reset it, and it works just fine.