[kwlug disc.] need some opinions on a misbehaving wireless network

[Robert P. J. Day]

  many months ago, i installed a basic 4-port linksys WAP in a
friend's home in TO, and it worked just fine until a few weeks ago,
when it started being unable to access completely arbitrary web pages.

  imagine three computers in the mix -- her desktop, her son's laptop
and (when i visit) my laptop, all running wireless.  the first ugly
symptom a few weeks back was when i couldn't do "fetchmail" to get my
mail from mindspring -- every attempt produced a DNS error trying to
resolve pop.mindspring.com.  and it got worse.

  suddenly, i could surf to *some* web pages, but not others, and the
set of reachable pages changed totally at random, but it seemed that
the other two (windows) systems always behaved somewhat better than
mine (though still not perfectly).

  when i finally got hold of rogers tech support and explained the
symptoms, the chap asked me to first test the windows laptop, said it
sounded like a corrupt DNS cache, and got me to flush the DNS cache on
that system.  it *briefly* started to work better, but shortly went to
hell again.  and, of course, doing that on *one* laptop did nothing
about the other systems.

  i have, of course, done all the standard stuff -- resetting the
modem and router, trying to troubleshoot whatever i could think of,
but to no avail, and the maddening thing about this is that the
problem is unpredictable -- a web page that was unreachable will, five
minutes later, be reachable, while some other page is now gone.

  at this point, i'm seriously starting to consider hardware, and i'm
taking in a couple new routers when i visit tomorrow, since i can't
imagine what else it could be by now.

  does any of this sound familiar?  any other bits of advice?  thanks.

rday