Quote Originally Posted by dbmaven View Post
I want to post a closing comment to my ridiculous saga.

I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon with Brandon - trying all sorts of interesting router and pap2/server configurations.

I even set up my 'old' WRT54GS as the internet router, and hung the PAP2 off it, taking the WRT610N out of the picture.

The behavior was identical.

I ended up flashing the 54GS to DD-WRT.
And.....

IT JUST FREAKIN' WORKS

No port forwarding
No port triggering
No DMZ

No nothing
As basic a router config as you can get.

It just works.

Somebody needs to take whoever is responsible for the NAT section of the LINKSYS firmware, and put him in a room with a couple dozen recalcitrant Linksys routers and PAP2s. Tell him/her they can come out when they just work properly all the time.

Many thanks to Brandon, and Tim - for their dedication and patience.

Now to compose a nastygram for the President of Cisco......
Linksys firmware is crap on purpose. Lets see you have a company making money and doing really well selling $50.00 routers that people in turn take and install other firmware on and they make it work like a 300.00 (or more) router. This in turn spreads by word of mouth and a company (Cisco) starts losing business on its "high end" products.

So if you can not beat them buy them out, cut out some of the extra space, memory, install crappy firmware , and while your at it lets stop using open source firmware and instead we will use something we can (try unsuccessfully ) to keep a secret.
EDIT -- I forgot to mention the really crappy tech support.

My WRT54G V2 was great. It died and I went to Walmart and purchased another (V6). It would not work out of the box so I returned it and got another (surely it must of been a bad apple right). The replacement (WRT54GS) did not work either.

I had to connect directly to the internet, download the newest firmware, install it just to get dns to work. Then ssh connections would die after about 10 minutes of use. I repaid Linksys for my wasted time by taking my dead V2 and sticking it in the box the new one came in and returning it to Walmart. I mean I can not be expected to pay for something that does not work right (lol).

Eventually they came out with DD-WRT micro and instructions on how to install it on the V6. Installed it and never looked back. Lots of control, ssh never disconnects (been connected for days at a time), and so many new features.

If you follow the directions flashing your Linksys with DD-WRT is safe. I know some folks here love tomato but its not compatible with any of the newer Linksys models except (maybe) the WRT54GL which still has the Linux based open source firmware.