dead dlink
Yesterday (Wednesday April 10th, 2013), we had some strange happenings with a couple of computers that host the weather station, SID2 and ALLSKY2. They were popping on and off the network for a few hours in the morning and then went right off the net in the afternoon.
Of course this started just after leaving home and it was a later night than normal so the problem with data being available lasted longer than you would think.
In the end, the troubleshooting led to a DLINK DIR615 wifi router/switch ($50 from staples in 2008 December).. rebooting? itself a few times each minute. oh well.. it paid for itself. Resets did not change anything, nor did many power cycles. It is truly dead.
Luckily we had another wifi router/switch and were able to reprogram it so portable devices could reconnect and all was well again.
Hardware does fail. Even hardware that just sits there, protected with a UPS, well ventilated, and not disturbed.