...no, not that kind of flashing. Although it can be pretty dangerous. Especially in a scissor factory.

Aaaaaaanyway. About an half an hour ago or more, we lost connectivity to the wireless router here in the office. It's a Linksys WRT-54GS. When I looked at the front of the router, the power light was flashing and the WLAN light was off. No problem, I thought. I'll just to a factory reset and it should come back to life.

Nope. Not an electronic sausage. Did the long reset (hold for 30 secs, power cycle while holding, then keep holding for another 30 secs). Still no bananas.

Time to google.

Located a couple of pages that basically state that the flashing light means that the firmware has failed to load. I'm finding that a bit odd, as I've never flashed the firmware on it and it's been sitting there for six months working like a champion. The WRT-54G I have at home has been going for a couple of years without any dramas.

I then recall a conversation I half had with one of the other admins here. He was telling me how annoying it was that the factory firmware in the WRT didn't allow him to set anything other than class C or higher netmasks, and even then only pick them from a drop down. I remember him mumbling something about trying to flash the firmware so it could be fixed, or words to that effect.

Anyway, I downloaded the factory firmware from the Linksys website. There was supposed to be a tool for uploading the firmware when you couldn't use the browser interface to do it, but I couldn't locate it on that page. A bit of a search around the Linksys website found a similar tool for a WRK-54G router. The basic principal is it uses TFTP (trivial FTP) to upload the file to a folder that the router can pick the upgrade out of.

A minute after uploading the firmware, the router was back to normal. I reconfigured the default settings back to what we use, and changed the password so it can't be played with again.

The moral of this story? If it's working, leave it alone.