Vonage just recommended that I use Ping Plotter to figure out why I am having so many lost packets on my VOIP line. I use Cox Cable, btw.

Anyway, I just downloaded the latest version and whenever I start Ping Plotter it causes my Linksys BEFSX41 firewall/router to reboot.

Anybody else have this problem? Suggestions?

What ports do I need to open and protocols?

That's an interesting problem that we've not really heard of before - rebooting? Wow.

In any case, PingPlotter, in its default configuration, doesn't actually use ports. ICMP is a protocol that is a peer to UDP and TCP (which both use ports), but ICMP does *not* use ports.

ICMP does support a number of packet types, a few of which are required by PingPlotter. PingPlotter uses ICMP echo requests for all outgoing packets, and ICMP TTL expired and ICMP Echo reply for returning packets.

In addition, you can set PingPlotter to UDP mode, which uses UDP for outbound packets on ports 33434-33475 for outgoing packets, and ICMP TTL expired and ICMP destination port unreachable for all returning packets. You must enable UDP mode for PingPlotter to use these types, though.

You might try setting PingPlotter to single threaded mode to see if that solves your problem with the rebooting router. See http://www.nessoft.com/kb/22 for details on how to configure PingPlotter for single threaded mode.

Your first check should probably be to see if you can find a newer version of the bios for the BEFSX41, though - this sounds very much like a bios problem.

- Pete

Hi Pete,

Thanks taking the time to help out. I checked and my Linksys BEFSX41 firewall/router is running the latest 4/30/2004 ver.1.50.18 firmware.

Oddly enough, even if I feed the computer running Ping Plotter through the firewall's DMZ port (no filtering), it still causes the box to reboot.

The Vonage VOIP Tech support advised me to make these config changes to Ping Plotter's default settings:



Any more suggestions?

Vonage says that they need at 5 hours worth of Ping Plotter monitoring to debug my lost packet problems.

Your best bet is probably to follow the instructions here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/22

Usually, problems like this are related to bugs in the router's ability to handle multiple outstanding requests.

Another possiblility is to move to an older bios version. I've not yet had a chance to google / google groups on the BEFSX41 to see if others have had problems, but you might do that to see what bios version first introduced this problem (if it was introduced in a bios release), and what version to run for a fix. Changing the settings in the kb above will probably make things work, though.

got exactly the same router and exactly the same problem.
Pingplotter crashing router with any packet type except UDP (Unix) one. Other setting looks insignificant

That seems to be addressed in a later Linksys bios release (which isn't yet publicly available as of September 13, 2004).

You should certainly check the LInksys site first, but if they've still not updated their bios page, have a look here for some other "ideas":

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,10339478

- Pete