[Cboldt]

My ISP (Adelphia) pings the cable modem regularly, to maintain the lease on the IP addy. They don't care how many machines use the bandwidth. I don't know how they'd learn the IP address of the router on my local network, and the router has been instructed to discard PING (ICMP) packets.

I used to have to reboot the hardware router about once a week, but lately it's been solid (after a program update). I'm running a Netgear MR314, router plus wireless.

[Kenny Bunk]

Adelphia has evolved to a higher plane of user friendliness thann Time Warner, apparently. The TW folks do, to give them their due, run a fairly heads-up virus patrol. It's just that they have not yet committed to support routers they don't sell. Their marketing plan calls for selling hi-ticket commercial + private service and they want to make money off routers.

[Dimensio]

I converted an old PII450 to a router that runs Linux and an ipchians firewall (I'll update to iptables Real Soon Now). The last time that it required a reboot was...

I can't remember when. I think that it was when the power went out and I shut it down manually in case the UPS didn't hold out.