Dear Linksys: Your broken WET54GS5 makes me sad.

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1

Dear Support staff at Linksys:

This weekend I made a futile attempt to enable WPA Pre-Shared Key mode on my home wireless network. The network consists of a Linksys WRT54G router, two WET54GS5 bridges, and a pair of Apple iBooks running MacOS X.

The iBooks had no problem communicating with the WRT54G in WEP PSK mode. As soon as I made the configuration changes on the router and the laptops, the link was up and consistent.

I had no such success with the pair of WET54GS5 bridges. They would report WPA initialization succes, and pass traffic for several minutes. They would then mysteriously drop link and cease passing traffic. The only way to bring the link back up was to "re-authenticate" via the WET55GS5 web interface.

I spent quite a long time making sure the bridges were seeing adequate signal, and double-checking configurations everywhere. In frustration, I googled to see if other folks had seen the problem:

http://www.google.com/search?q=linksys+wet54gs5+wpa+psk

It seems to me that not a single customer of yours who has purchased your WET54GS5 has been able to use WPA PSK mode. I'd like to point out that WPA is advertised as a supported feature on the packaging.

This has been a known defect since the product was first offered for sale. The latest firmware (which does not fix the problem!) for the device was released ONE YEAR AGO, in April of 2004.

I spoke online with a helpful support person, who let me know that Linksys is indeed aware of the problem, but does not intend to do anything about it. This is dissapointing, and reflects very poorly on your new parent company.

Do you plan on remedying the problem before a class-action lawsuit is organized?

thank you,
Matt Ghali
Your former customer

--matt@snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin><
               The only thing necessary for the triumph
               of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

2

The iBooks had no problem communicating with the WRT54G in WEP PSK
  mode.

I typoed, of course. I meant WPA PSK mode. My apologies.

matto

--matt@snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin><
              The only thing necessary for the triumph
              of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

3

Dear Support staff at Linksys:

[blah blah blah]

For those of you who emailed me privately about also running into
this bug, I just got an email from Linksys support saying they
released a new firmware version today(!) that resolves the problem.

http://linksys.com/download/vertxt/WET54GS5-Release-Notes.txt

http://linksys.com/download/firmware.asp?fwid=220

matto

--matt@snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin><
              The only thing necessary for the triumph
              of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

4

How convinient. Somebody must be reading NANOG :slight_smile:
(the case of bad publicity in right place is working wonders for
  some vendors who are otherwise hard to do press to do things quickly)

5

And, as much as everyone on the list would probably hate to think it,
since it encourages more such behaviour in the future, I'd bet this is
*exactly* what happened, though we'll likely never hear confrimation
thereof.

Cheers,
-- jra

6

I hate to break it to you, but it's highly unlikely that someone clueful at
Linksys actually read William's email, fixed the firmware, put it through
quality assurance, and released it to the public, all within the space of
about 24 hours...

Although the IP backbone might not run without a lot of the people on this
list, we're not that important.... :slight_smile:

7

Well, according to the release note URL I posted, this version was
built on 2/24/05, when it presumably went into beta testing.

The version string in the actual code says 3/3/05, which I guess is
when they resolved anything discovered in testing.

The first customer support email I recieved from Linksys yesterday
referred to it as a beta release that they could send me if I wanted
to try it.

An hour or so later, I got an email from the same support person
saying that it was now released as stable on the web site.

My rash assumption is that I was able to provide the boot that
kicked a long-overdue update that was languishing in QA out the
door.

But thanks for the credit in any case.

matto