Graphite base station problems

[babertocci]

Since about two weeks ago, my graphite base station has gone all whacky on me. I've had it for two years now, and it has always been solid as a rock. However, now it can rarely go more than a day or two without dying on me.

What happens each time is I will come on my Cube and notice that I can't load get a connection to the outside world. I look in the Network panel and I have a 169.x.x.x IP address. Sometimes my status icon in the menu bar will show me getting half a signal (during normal use I get full bars), but sometimes there is no signal whatsoever. I my family's other Macs and none can get a connection. If I go and power cycle the base station, it resets just fine and works like a charm again.

I've reloaded the firmware (3.84 I believe), but that didn't help. At first I thought it might have been something to do with the Airport 3.1 update, but my parent's computer doesn't have that yet and it has the same problems connecting. I fear that the hardware may be going bad, although it seemed odd to me that it would go from 24/7 uptime to near daily crashes so quickly. Any help or input would be appreciated.