flaky residential router

[Thufir Hawat]

I have a strange, intermittent, connection problem.  Oddly enough, the 
wireless part of the router seems to work fine.  However, the computer 
will periodically experience connectivity problems only solved by a 
reboot.

I try:

ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth1 down; ifconfig eth0 up; ifconfig eth1 
up; ifconfig; ping 192.168.1.1 


and the router's available, however I cannot ping google.com, I get 
"network unavailable" which, given that the wireless connection is 
working, this is kinda odd.  (Yes, the wireless is connected to my 
router, not to my neighbors -- I double checked.)

I've tried powercycling the router, but get the same result as above.  
However, restarting the computer allows a reconnection.

Obviously, I need to replace the router.  However, that doesn't explain 
what's going on.  Why would restarting the computer have any effect?  If 
I was on Windows, I'd suspect corrupted system files or something along 
those lines.


thanks,

Thufir