I have a WRT54G, the ancient 2.2 version of the hardware, back before there was an L edition. I’ve been running the Sveasoft Alchemy firmware on it for years and years. I don’t even remember when I installed it.

Yeah, I know, there are some folks with ideological reasons why I shouldn’t run Sveasoft. Whatever. That’s not the point.

Anyways, for the last few months, we’ve had to reset the device on a nearly daily basis, otherwise the DHCP server just stops handing out addresses.

This weekend, we got fed up, and I downloaded the latest firmware from Linksys/Cisco. It seems to have all the same features as the Sveasoft firmware I was running. Or, at least, if it’s missing any, it’s ones I wasn’t using. Presumably I could run a ssh server on it, so that I could ssh in and … um … do something … I’m not sure why I would want to do that, actually.

Anyways, we haven’t had that problem since we did that, and it makes me wonder, not for the first time, how it is that software can suddenly take it into its mind, after years and years of functioning correctly, to just suddenly quit.

So strange.