If this never happened before you got the Linksys and it happens to both Mac & PC simultaneously, then 99% likely that it's the Linksys router.

Yeah, this definately sounds like a wonky router. Did you try the firmware upgrade thing? That fixes a lot of problems sometimes.

He did update the router, yes.

Firmware is loaded. But I agree, it appears to be a router issue. It's just so bothersome because the netgear router that I replaced with this linkys wouldn't send my email out. "Where does one go from here?"

Sorry guys, I didn't catch that.

Do you still have the Netgear around? Perhaps it might be easier to troubleshoot THAT. :)

I posted the netgear problem a while back. It was worse because with the netgear there was NO resolution to the problem. At least with the linksys, the connectivuty comes back when I power down and back up. The Netgear WOULD NOT send out my email from the mac. Someone suggested it was packet size etc. since the router always tacks on a few more "letters" to the pack and macs are send to 1500. However, changing the mtu size on the mac gets you into the whole admin thing and some of the replies in this forum said it might be a little risky. Is this making any sense?

I don't think there would be any problem in trying a different MTU. You can always change it back if it doesn't work out. My verizon-dsl is set at 1500 and works fine. I've never heard of not being able to send email being a router issue.

Perhaps you were blocking the POP/IMAP/whatever port outbound without knowing it.

precision
 

Ah - but here you are (I guess) telling us you had neglected to tell us before - that you can't 'ping' the router when you have "no connection". Is that true?

Part of the problem here is a lack of precision. There are many things that might cause you to have "no connection". We are trying to determine which things work and which do not.

True. Can't get any ping results when the connection fails. Every time I test the modem (by making a direct connection to the computer) it seems to be fine. But the router works well most of the time, too. It's just this dropping the connection that has me totally frazzled.

Okay - but we still need to see the results of 'ping' next time your connection fails. The exact error message etc might give us a clue. And try the 'ping' from each of your machines - I think you can do 'ping' from a DOS window on a Windows machine.

And let's leave the modem out of the discussion fo rthe moment. Your problem seems to be with the router. If you can't ping the router then the modem is irrelevant.

It sounds to me like either a bad router or misconfigured router. this sounds like a DCHP lease issue. a way to test this would be to power up the router, power up one computer, wait half an hour, power up another, wait again, power up another and then wait and see when they lose connection.

yes??

DHCP issues
 

That does sound like a good way to test for DHCP lease issues. But I would also like to know if the router config page says what the DHCP lease time is.

And I'm not sure, but I think you should still be able to ping the router even if you have a self-assigned IP address. But maybe the router is configured to refuse pings form outside of its 192.168.xxx.xxx network.

Wouldn't the typical default DHCP lease time be a week unless configured otherwise? It may be near the end of that period but the router config should tell that.

It might also be good to just test one internet connection to the gateway machine and leave the other two pc's off the router. If that's solid, then add another computer and test, etc...

it is not that the router is refusing pings from outside the network, it is that of you don't have an ip address on the same subnet as the router, then there is no way to route pings to the router. as far as DHCP lease times go, they very from manufacturer to manufacturer. for example, the airport extreme base station has you set a lease period of minutes, hours, or days. mine is currently set for 4 days. my thoughts on the issue were that when the perope was up, the router was not re-leasing the address, maybe because of misconfiguration, but most likely because something is wrong with the router. i think that DCHP lease issues are at the bottom of the list of things that go wrong with setting up home/office routers.

kfaulhaber, what you say makes good sense to me. I have a hunch you are right that his router is defective. But if he doesn't come back to the thread and continue the test that hayne has started him on, we'll never know.

Going back to his situation with the Netgear router, have you ever heard of such a router not being able to send email over a large carrier like verizon? It seems to me that there is something else going on there with that and that he should probably just get that remedied and then send back the linksys for a refund.

i have never heard of a router blocking the sending of mail without specifically blocking port 25, especially a home/office router. come to think of it, i am not aware of any home/office router that blocks any outgoing connections since any "firewall" effects are just a side effect of NAT. if he could send mail with his computer connected directly to the dsl modem, i don't see how it would stop working with the router added to the mix. the only mac-specific issues that arise with routers is whether they support appletalk. but since i have never used a linksys router or verizon DSL there may very well be a valid reason.

Unfortunately, I don't think he ever established on this thread whether or not he was able to send email while directly connected to his modem and no router.

Also, looking back at his first post, I see that Entourage was a part of the picture which could have been where the problem of not being able to send was coming from. I would suspect that over a router issue.

Hrm. Don't a lot of major ISPs block access to any SMTP servers besides their own? I believe Earthlink, at least, does this. Perhaps Verizon was doing that, too. Anyways, thatch is right, we'll have to wait for more news. :)

Yes, that's true of verizon too. But I think LonHS was just trying to send mail from Entourage through his Netgear router from his Mac and it's verizon account, which should have worked as far as I know.