[Stiletto]

Got a report from my father that when he got home today (after a thunderstorm had passed through the area) that he had no Internet. He already called his ISP, who verified that their equipment was working as designed.

So I popped in to check. Turned out the WNDR3700 v1 I got him a while ago had stopped speaking to the cable modem! Claimed to be searching for settings for DHCP, but the WAN light was off.

I tried all sorts of things: a full 30-30-30 reset, a 5min-5min-5min reset (ouch), different reset and power button combos, factory reset through the web interface... In every instance: it'd come back on, LAN was working, Wireless working, WAN... not working. Swapped out ethernet cable (god forbid), also fine.

I swapped in my spare DLink DIR-655 (A4), network started right up and sharing wireless and wired with everything.

I even took the WNDR3700 v1 from stock Netgear firmware to latest DD-WRT, thinking that would clear and reset enough things to test. Nope, WAN still down. WAN light went from off to flashing amber (I think) but still no luck.

Furthermore, everything else seemed to be working fine. Cisco 2100 cable modem, fine. Actiontec ECB2500C MoCa adapter looped into that (for some reason I don't understand), also fine. Plugging the cable modem directly into the Dell desktop, worked fine.

Took it home later, and plugged his old WNDR3700 v1 in where my new hand-me-down WNDR3700v3 (replacing my old DLink DIR-655 A4) stood. Different cable modem, ethernet cable, coax run, AC adapter... WAN still did not come up, but LAN and wireless appeared to start up fine.

Now, if it had been a power surge, all the electric was protected by surge protectors and UPS. So I don't have any more ideas what to could have happened, and what to do next.

Is it safe to say that WAN somehow got fried, or died of old age at an inopportune time?

My solution thus far: Ran to the store and picked up something in his budget, a Netgear R6400v2-100NAS. Got it installed, everything seems okay so far (wifi to the Samsung Galaxy Tab E seems crap, or at least the Facebook app is slow to load content, haven't troubleshooted that yet).

I have the Netgear WNDR3700 here at my house now, if WAN can't be fixed, I might use DD-WRT to turn it into a Client Bridge or similar to replace my old WRT54G2 1.0 configured with DD-WRT as a Client Bridge. Assuming the rest of it continues to work...