What the hell is wrong with my router?

I’ve mentioned earlier the problems I’ve had buying this WRT54G Linksys router. I bought it for three reasons – because my existing router was sometimes flakey, giving in-coming http connections the router’s administration web page login instead of passing through to my Linux server like it’s supposed to, because the performance on Team Fortress Classic would start out ok and then after about 5 minutes drop you down to a “ping” of over a thousand (which gets you banned from every server in the world because that low a ping ruins the game for everybody, not just you), and because this new one runs Linux and is hackable. But twice in the last hour or so it’s flaked out on my – Vicki and I would both still be showing decent wireless strength, but neither of us could ping or reach anything. The wired connections (the Linux server and the G4) were working just fine, and the Linksys administration page was still reachable from those computers.

Oh, as a bit of an aside, I should mention that the Linksys administration page sucks donkey dicks. I could not find a way to list all the wireless clients on it, neither could I find a way to soft-reset the router. Does anybody know if the Swensoft (or whatever it is) firmware has better administration pages?

I power cycled the router and things came back up. I’m not sure what we’re doing this evening that’s so different from normal. I’m writing in my blog, which doesn’t even use the network, keeping three ssh sessions open (like always), bit-torrenting the new Doctor Who episode and playing some songs on a disk NFS mounted from the Linux server. Both of those last two are fairly network intensive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never done both at the same time together. Anyway, I’m going to refrain from playing iTunes until I’ve got this Torrent done. Which will probably be tomorrow morning. I also made sure the router is clear of the switching hub and the cable modem so it doesn’t overheat.