Linksys WRT54G Router Setup Adventures

I set up a Linksys wireless router over the weekend. Everything I had read led me to believe the installation would be a breeze and take about 5 minutes. That was not exactly the case.

I had just set up DSL-Lite on a 1999 Dell P3. The PC has 128 M of RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. The DSL modem is a Westell (the little white one.) I ran the installation wizard. I was surprised at how slow it was between steps. It seemed to almost crawl and hang-up between phases (such as verifying the internet connection, etc.) Finally, it got to the point where I had to disconnect the modem and connect the router. It was at that point that it failed.

I stepped through the menus on the wizard. First it asked for the host and domain name. Then it asked for the type of service (802.11b, g, or mixed), the SSID, and some other stuff. Then it asked if I wanted to enable security. Finally it summarized the settings and asked if I wanted to confirm (yes/no) or exit.

The first thing that was wrong was the service type. Even though I selected "Mixed" the confirmation screen was showing that I selected "B-only." I stepped back a couple screens and verified I had the right selection on the pull-down menu (I did.) I went forward to the conf. screen and it still said "B-only." I chose "Yes" to confirm my settings.

The software appeared to go into a hang-state and then told me several minutes later that the router could not be found. It asked if I wanted to power off the modem and try again (I did.) The same thing happened. I tried the wizard several more times with the same results.

I did find a work-around to the services selection. It turns out that if you choose "B-only" the software will set the router to "Mixed" mode. Funny huh?

I gave up on this for a couple of days while busy doing some other work. Finally Sunday morning I was determined not to let a little thing like a router get the better of me. I was getting an RF signal and it was recognizing the ports and internet so I was convinced it was an IP setting conflict.

I searched on the internet for advice and finally found an obscure note on a sub-page of the linksys customer support site. It said to "check the IP address in the router and make sure it is not 198.162.1.1." Now this is frustrating for a couple of reasons. First, the setup wizard sets the IP address to 198.162.1.1. Second, the wizard never mentions that this is not right.

The obscure page said to manually (through the internet settings page) set the IP address of the router to 198.162.2.1. I made the change from 1 to 2 and guess what? The internet sprang to life on my screen.

My frustration is that the setup wizard did not correct this problem. Second that it was so hard to find what is really a pretty simple answer.