Hi,

I have a similar issue to those posted by several others of late - intermittent loss of connection from some of my devices conneced to my netgear WGR614 wireless router. However I do have a solution which I thought I would post here as it may help others avoid some of the pain I have suffered this week!

I've been using the netgear WGR614 with the telstra cable service in Kapiti since last year. I had major problems getting it going to start with and have 2 little gems that might save you some pain that I learned via talking to telstra, the netgear helpdesk and much digging with packet sniffers and the like...

so here's my first tip for netgear users. Log on to the router and change its address range from the default (192.168.something) to another 192.168 or 10.x.x.x range. You will have endless connection / routing problems otherwise.

2nd tip - Netgear / Telstra ARP issue
As noted in other posts (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=44&TopicId=16787, http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=49&topicid=17666 ) & others there is MEGA arp traffic bouncing round the telstra network.

Here's my setup:
telstra cable modem
netgear WGR614
Various ethernet / wireless devices in internal subnet 192.168.x.x something.

Problem symptoms:
apparently random loss of connectivity even to the internal router interface from some internal devices but not others. rebooting router / hosts, "repair" connection, or event just "arp -d routeraddress" in a cmd window restores connectivity for short periods. Smart packet sniffers such as etherpeek will report duplicate address errors for mac addresses that seem to come out of nowhere. 

The why:
Fact 1: The WGR614 only has one arp cache for both internal and external interfaces (probably a common factor with many cheap combo devices)
fact 2: the router updates its arp cache from both internal and external interfaces based on arp traffic it sees
fact 3: much of the arp traffic in telstra is for invalid addresses (probably due to stupid configuration by users)

The WGR614 only has one arp cache for both internal and external interfaces, and combined with the fact it sees all the arp traffic on the telstra network, this can cause you big apparently random pain. The router will create an arp cache using the arp traffic from both you valid internal hosts and all the external hosts floating about telstra land.

If you are using an ip address that some idiot has misconfigured their machine to broadcast arp for into telstra's subnet the netgear router will wipe your valid internal arp entry with the bogus internet one on a regular basis as long as the other machine is turned on. This will happen each time the other box sends an arp broadcast advertising its ip to mac details.

Solution:
Change your internal addressing scheme to something really really obscure and private that is unlikely to be hit by other stupid (or malicious) telstra users arp broadcast traffic....


I'd be keen to hear any other suggestions (don't tell me to buy a more expensive router with better security as this is what the netgear helpdesk told me already as a solution). I've complained to Telstra but am not confident of a positive resonse from them...