My incredibly lame Actiontec DSL router went nuts last night. It started with some slow connections, and I thought it had freaked out and dropped the connection again, so I reset it. It came back, but I was getting around 30% packet loss, and no more than 20kb/sec throughput. Even when I was just pinging the router over my LAN. Within 15 minutes, that rose to 50%, 70%, and it eventually dropped off the network entirely.
A new one is on the way. The Blarg! support guy said that these things have crappy ethernet controllers that just freak out and die randomly. This has definitely been my experience; two of them have died on me, one a year. I begged and pleaded with Qwest to give me any other model, but they coldly refused.
As a workaround, setting the switch port it’s connected to to 10mbit half duplex allows it to sort of work.
Stupid crappy Actiontec.