USB Wifi card as the internet connection on a router

[krc4267]

So here's my strange situation: I've got internet which comes through an AT&T "Homebase" device which is basically a cell modem + router. The problem with this device is that there is no way to even *look* at how much data has been used *at all* let alone by client. To fix this, I've been running a TP-LINK wdr3600 with gargoyle, connecting the "internet" port on the gargoyle router to the ethernet port on the homebase. This has worked fine for about a year and a half now, until yesterday when the gargoyle system started rebooting constantly. Like, it'd stay on for ~30 secs, then restart. As you can imagine, this isn't workable at all.

Due to it being really hot here and my house not having air conditioning, I figured it must be overheating. After messing around for a while, I found a system to keep it cool, and lo and behold it stayed on. However, we had no internet! It took me about 5 seconds, then, to realize that I hadn't plugged the ethernet cable back in to the internet port when I put the router back. As soon as I plugged in the cable going upstream, the router started rebooting again.

TL;DR: My router reboots constantly whenever it's connected to the internet.

My idea is (since this router has a USB port) to plug in one of my alfa awus036h cards and connect to the homebase' wifi instead of using the ethernet cable. However, I've got absolutely no idea how I might go about this.

More suggestions are welcome as far as other ways to work around this. I've got a ton of random networking hardware around, so I can mess with things as needed. I'm also proficient in the linux/unix command line, so anything that might help, don't be afraid to post it even if it's not simple.

More debugging info:

Running gargoyle 1.7.2
I've tried a different power supply- same problem
I've looked inside the router, no blown-looking components (including caps)
I've blown a fan at the top of the circuit board while running it- same thing
I've set a heatsink from an old AMD cpu on the atheros chip- I don't know if it did any good
I've felt the atheros chip- it is indeed hot, but since the router does this even when it's only just been turned on and has a fan on it, I don't think it's overheating anymore.
Finally, I've *tried* to get a look at dmesg when the thing reboots- Logged in to SSH and wrote a bash script to repeatedly read dmesg, then plugged in the ethernet- no dice. It kicked me off before I got to any errors other than something about a timezone.

[Lantis]

Unplug Ethernet to stop the reboot loop.

Log in over ssh and remove everything from the directory
/usr/data/bwmon
This will remove your bandwidth graph data.
You can then reboot and plug in the Ethernet and it won't go into a loop anymore.

To prevent it happening again, upgrade to 1.9.1.

The basics of the issue is some of the time data became corrupt, and when connected to the Internet the router syncs its internal clock and then attempts to load the bandwidth graph data. It finds data from the future, panics, and reboots.
This resets the time, it connects to the Internet, it resyncs it's time... Etc etc infinite reboots.

[krc4267]

Thanks! It works now. I'll be updating gargoyle when I get a chance- right now everyone is just happy to have internet again