I decided to follow a variation of Daniel’s excellent suggestion.
I ran ping -t for 24 continuous hours and the router behaved itself perfectly.
I started to suspect that running ping -t was forcing the router to keep the connection ‘live’, so yesterday evening I terminated ping -t and went to bed.
This evening I came home, booted up my laptop as usual and pootled about on the internet…
For two hours.
Two hours is the amount of time it took for the Netgear N150 WNR1000v3 Wireless Router to lock up and freeze all internet access.
Again.
This time, with internet access locked out, I tried to ping my default gateway. Unsurprisingly I got a big fat Request Timed Out.
So, leaving the router running (but locked out), I connected my laptop to the Netgear N150 WNR1000v3 Wireless Router with a cable.
Guess what!
I got instant internet.
Yay!
So despite my laptop ‘seeing’ an ‘Excellent’ WiFi signal strength, and despite my laptop saying the status of that WiFi is ‘Connected’, the only way I will be able to connect to the internet is by rebooting the router.
Or using a cable.
Which is, obviously, actionable under the trade description act – for a WiFi router.
In fact, the only reason I can publish this blog post is because I’m still using the cable, directly connecting me to the Netgear N150 WNR1000v3 Wireless Router.
As a final check, I disconnected the cable and attempted to attach – via WiFi – to the router’s admin control panel.
Yep, that worked. I was able to go in, change WiFi channels and update all other router features, via WiFi.
But couldn’t get to the internet, via WiFi.
So this experiment also established that my laptop’s WiFi wasn’t to blame. The problem appears to be the WiFi function of the Netgear N150 WNR1000v3 Wireless Router, that locks out.
On both of the routers.
Hmm…
How come no-one else has experienced/found this problem?
Dodgy wifi strikes again – homeplugs FTW!
Give it some time on the wired port, just to prove it’s not some ARP or DHCP thing.
Told yer: Netgear is crap.
Do what everyone else does: keep it as a modem and use that cable to connect it to a different (better) wireless router.
Probably because if our internet goes off I have two simple steps to fix it:
1) Throw a tantrum.
2) Yell at Mr V, my tame IT guru, that the bastard internet is bastard well broken and wait for him to fix it.
The system works.