New router time

My WRT54G is dead and I need to go buy a replacement tomorrow.

I want something I can just plug in and it will work I am not going to install any 3rd party firmware or any other hacks. With the current Linksys the only settings I changed were the admin password, and the SSID. Oh and I guess I was using open DNS too.

So any recommendations ? Is Linksys any good now after the Cisco buyout ?

I only need G for wireless I'll take N but I would rather get something cheaper.

Right now I am plugged directly into the cable modem so I am probably getting infected with something as I type this

I'm still a Linksys fan, but that's mostly because I do the whole replacement firmware thing To that end, my favorite router is still the WRT54GL.

I'm hoping that one day the Tomato guys will get into hacking the WRT160NL...

If you have any Apple equipment, I'd recommend an Airport now that Snow Leopard has Wake on Demand. Other routers might implement it in time (as it is an open spec addition to dns-sd), but for now the Apple ones are the only ones.

I'd also recommend making sure it's dual band if you have any N equipped machines and live in a crowded wireless space. I have all my computers on 5ghz now, and it makes a big difference since it can easily run 2 channels for the full speed. In the 2ghz range, too much interferes with getting decent speeds.

One other thing to consider is if you want to attach storage or a printer to the router and have it shared out over the network.

So is it true the WRT54GL would be bad with the stock firmware like the newegg reviews say ? Is the stock firmware different than the WRT54G ?

I wonder what the WIFI range is like on something like the WRT54G2 with no external antennas ?

What is wake on demand ?

I have no apple stuff just XP and I only have one laptop with G everything else is wired. I figured I would just get a cheaper G one but what is dual band N ?

The storage think might be interesting but I doubt I would ever actually do it. My network stuff is in the dirty old basement so I can't see putting a HDD down there. Not printer at home it's cheaper to print at work

Ok I looked up what dual band is so I would want that if I had multiple laptops with different WiFi standard levels I guess ?

Yes, but you don't, so you don't need it.


I'm not sure what they mean by that. As far as I've seen, it's pretty much exactly like all the other Linksys router firmwares. It's possible that they just mean relative to the replacement firmwares or something like that.

How big a place do you have? Do you ever carry your laptop to a part of your home that your current router couldn't reach? If so, you might want to be able to replace the firmware. You wouldn't believe how much you can jack up the signal power with the WRT54GL, and how absolutely easy it is with the Tomato firmware. You just change one number and you're good to go!

My first WRT54G (one of the original Linux ones) died on me and was replaced by a WRT54GL. I would have never replaced it with another Linksys router were it not able to take 3rd party firmware.

If you just want something cheap just buy whatever you find at the lowest price. They should all work reasonably well. But my suggestion would be to get the WRT54GL and put the Tomato firmware on it. You don't need to make any further adjustments beyond the few you would make to the stock firmware. It's just a better performing system with a much easier to use UI.

The house is 2K square feet and with the location of the current setup I can't get more than 50 feet from the router. I never had a problem with signal strength with the old router.

Newegg review

So Tomato won't run on a WRT54G2 right ? It seems like that is the one the local places have. (best buy and walmart)

Pretty much. 802.11 B and G run at 2.4 ghz, and have 11 channels, though only room for 3 without overlap. 802.11 A runs at 5ghz, and has many more channels, but never really caught on.

802.11 N allows operation in either 2.4 or 5ghz range, and a dual band router can run in both at the same time. This allows for someone to keep legacy B/G devices around while also migrating newer devices to N in the 5ghz range. N also allows 2 channels to be tied together for higher speeds, and this is where having the 5ghz frequency helps. With more channels, it's much easier to find 2 without interfering with someone else's router.

As others have pointed out, you really won't see any benefit from an N router currently, and definitely not a dual band one.

As for Wake on Demand, it's a feature Apple systems support with Snow Leopard. Basically it allows a machine to go to sleep, and still have the network services it provides show up on the network. IE, if I have my desktop setup to share files to my laptop, my laptop always sees the desktop on the network even if it's asleep. If I try to connect to the desktop to grab a file, the desktop comes out of sleep mode. The really convenient thing for me with this setup is that it works over the internet as well via Back to my Mac. So I can click on my home desktop from my work machine, and grab files even if it was asleep. There are other ways to achieve the same thing, but this method is completely seamless. With the whole move to green datacenters, I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar there in the coming years. File servers could enter sleep mode when everyone has left the office, but come back online when someone needs a file the next morning, all without manual schedules or additional programs needed on the client side.

I know jack all about Minnesota geography, but going by your location in your profile, it appears that you have a Micro Center near you (that's just a city-to-city mapping, no addresses).

I also can't speak to your store's stock either, but my local Micro Center has the WRT54GL. It doesn't show up in either store's online catalog, but I know for a fact that it's in mine. They had about 20 of them last I looked.

I would say that the NewEgg reviewers say to pick the WRT54G over the WRT54GL if you want to use the stock firmware merely since it's cheaper. The extra RAM/flash (the difference between the G and GL) is more useful for Tomato, DD-WRT and the like. Simple as that... I would guess the stock firmware is largely identical between the two.

My WRT54G seems to be having hardware issues so I'm in a similar position. I'd be looking to get two N devices. An access point and a client bridge since I use it to make my MythTV box accessible. HD can't stream over 802.11g even with good signal strength.

Yeah we have on but I found the same thing you did, they don't have them online. I may be able to check them out it depends on where I end up today.

Ah, we're in the same boat. I'm considering getting a cheap 802.11G router and have a makeshift dual-band. At the moment I have two Airport Extremes, one being a wireless bridge, essentially, which I plug my Tivo and my bluray player into. Right now they're both on N and G, but I'd love to get them on N exclusively to try to boost the performance of video transfers to my Tivo.

Random observation from when I replaced my D-Link DGL-4300 "gaming router" plus cheapo Motorola DSL box, with a Netgear DGN-2000 (all-in-one DSL + router + wifi).

The D-Link had gigabit, but not jumbo packets. This was still a significant performance feature when I was running my ReadyNAS file server, since replaced by just adding more disks to my Mac. The new router is "only" 100Mbit, but that hasn't been a problem.

The D-link had 802.11g with one external antenna. I had replaced that with a larger, longer-range antenna, but it still didn't reach from one corner of the house, where I had it, to the other corner. (No biggie. I got a D-Link DAP-1522, which has a four-port GigE switch and is a not-simultaneous dual-band 802.11n access point and connected that via wire.)

In my new world, the Netgear, with two antennas and 802.11n (2.4GHz only) covers the whole house, rendering the DAP-1522 access point not terribly necessary any more, although I suppose it means that devices can lower their transmit power when they're near it.

I will point out that ditching the Motorola DSL modem for the modem built into the Netgear was a world of difference. Much more stable connections.

With regard to dual-band, consider it to be a non-feature unless it's advertised as "simultaneous dual band." My DAP-1522 has a software switch for 2.4GHz vs. 5GHz. I tried it both ways, talking to my MacBook Air. At 5GHz, with less than ten feet of air between the laptop and the base station, even surfing the web didn't work well. Things like YouTube were hopeless. Switching to 2.4GHz, it worked like a champ. I later met a resesarcher who does antennas and asked about why this could be. Simply, they're most likely taking an antenna designed for 2.4GHz and shoving 5GHz through it. That gives them a checkbox, but doesn't yield a workable feature.

One caveat about the Netgear: when less than six months old, the wired ports all fried themselves, high packet drop rates, etc. Netgear shipped me a new one, which is now running just fine, but the router is quite hot to the touch. I fear it's not going to last very long.

I'm not 100% what you're saying here. Are you talking about the router that just died and one before it?

Regardless, if you get the WRT54GL and put Tomato on there, you'll be able to boost the signal strength so people two doors down will see it (or not, it's up to you ).


Ah, it took me a couple readings of that to see what they mean. The L version is generally about $10-30 more expensive than the non-L version, depending on where you get it. That reviewer isn't saying the stock firmware on one is better than the other, he's just saying (rightly so, IMO), that if you're not going to flash it, just get the cheaper one.

And I'd say that if you're not going to flash it, just get the cheapest 802.11g router you can find (as long as it has WPA/WPA2). They'll all do the job these days.

Speaking of which, does anyone have a recommendation for an 802.11n access point (or router — I can just not use the router parts; I'm happy with my Tomato) that functions at 5GHz? It can be 5GHz-only as far as I'm concerned.

I live in a townhouse near a shopping center and I can regularly see a dozen WiFi networks, and I'm tired of them clobbering mine. It would be nice to have the extra speed, but I'm really more interested in the non-conflicting frequency range. But if it doesn't work well, I might as well stick with g. (And I'm not interested in dropping back to 11Mbps with a, not that I have any adapters for that anyway.)

Netgear can't make a decent AP or router in my opinion. Every single one I've used has died a mysterious death. Thats not including the terrible firmware in them which is highly unstable.

The only Netgear item I'd willingly buy are the metal cased unmanaged switches.

I've got a couple Cisco 1252s but they're probably a little over the top for your purposes.


Whats the composition of your house? 5GHz even with 802.11n doesn't have a massive range and can be shielded pretty easily if your house has a lot of metal parts in the walls.


802.11a does 54Mbps.

Maybe a D-Link DAP-2553? $130 or thereabouts.

EDIT: this is another one of those "selectable" dual-band things, which you don't really want. You're really getting a 2.4GHz box that will at best fake it as a 5GHz box.

The Netgear WNHDE111 (802.11a/n, 5GHz only), for $55 at Amazon, may be the way to go for a cheap 5GHz access point.

Yeah, I was hoping to pay a little less than $700.


As with most houses in the US, stick-built. The only things in the walls are pine, gypsum, paper, wires, nails, and screws.


Brainfart. Still, no adapters.

I was talking about the newly dead WRT54G. I paid too much and got the WRT54GL at Microcenter (their website sucks !). It was 20 dollars cheaper on newegg but I didn't want to wait.

I don't think I will install anything on it the stock firmware seems to be working fine now.

Yeah, Micro Center is weird. Most stuff is as overpriced as you'll find at any brick and mortar computer store, but then they'll have tons of loss leaders. I got all my components at Newegg except for the CPU its self, which was $30 cheaper at MC than anywhere online.

In case you decide to put Tomato on your new router (which really is the reason to get the L version), just know that it's really easy to do. You can find it here.

I use dd-wrt on te same box and have been really pleased with the reliabiltity of it since upgrading. We used to have to power cycle the unit every day but now the only downtime we've had had been power supply related.

dd-wrt is good too. I was just suggesting Tomato because of the simplicity. Both of obtaining it (I hate dd-wrt's download area - I never know which one to get), and the (IMO) much better UI.

By the way, increasing the power output of the WRT54G(L) units beyond about 70mW is asking for trouble. The extra heat generated can/will damage the RF frontend. So don't just crank it to maximum...

I notice that Tomato defaults to 42mW. That's enough for me.

Also cranking power ouptut doesn't increase receiver sensitivity so if the other end of the link (laptop etc) doesn't have enough power you're wasting your time.

Tomatoe was on my list of firmwares to try, but since I had to get the thing up and running quickly I didn't have chance to try anything other than dd-wrt.

We actually turned the output power to about half the normal level which made the connections more reliable. Probably cutting down on excessive reflections.

I read a forum posting someplace saying this as well. They were saying the signal gets distorted when you increase it and makes the connection less reliable.

I don't doubt that you're correct about this, but I've never experienced it personally, and I've installed a couple dozen of these. The church I do tech support for has two of them installed, and one of them has been running at maximum for a couple years now. If it dies, it's a mere $50-70 to replace it. That's worth it when you get reliable internet access throughout the entire building. And it is reliable. I haven't seen any issues on that end either...

Maximum being 70mW or the 250mW I think the WRT54G radios go to? Somebody did a plot of the output of a WRT54G at the maximum possible power and it was pretty distorted with significant interference with adjacent frequencies.

Yeah, but dd-wrt's got some nifty capabilities. I use mine as a repeater bridge to extend weak network signals. Tomato couldn't do that when I set it up (although that was over a year ago).

It all depends on how he wants to use it. I agree though, Tomato would seem to be a great fit for him as the QoS stuff is likely the only non-standard feature he'd use.

Almost as if my WAP had been reading this thread it decided this week its had enough and packed in!

What are the feelings about Apples Time Capsule or AirPort Extreme Base Station ??? I like the sound of the new wake features, but from what I can tell I may get better value getting the AirPort Extreme Base Station and an external hard drive for Time Machine ???

I'd also be interested to know of the wireless performance is actually any good, at the moment I have my AirPort Express plugging the gap and it's terribly unreliable with very poor range.

Cheers

Cris.

My Airport Extreme has worked well for me. Unfortunately I can't speak to its performance on N because I don't have any N devices.

Has anyone here had bad experiences with Time Machine? In recent months I've heard nothing but bad things. Horror stories about people trying to recover from catastrophic data loss and not being able to do it. I've heard Carbon Copy Cloner is much better.

But I'm not a Mac person, so I can't speak from experience...

Carbon Copy Cloner is just a UI for rsync. It's usable for a manual backup, and I suppose it can be automated with a cron job or other scheduler. It's not a replacement at all for Time Machine however which keeps incremental date-based backups.

I didn't say it did the same thing, just that it was supposed to be more reliable. I was just wondering if anyone had found that Time Machine did not live up to its promise. I've not heard great things.

Has anyone here had to restore from a Time Machine backup?

I have pulled test files from Time machine without a problem. It's reliable so long as it doesn't experience a failure - that's pretty much like anything.

Lately people on the Apple forums have been collecting stories of Time CAPSULE hardware failures - so I'm not sure if you've heard about those. I know Tom has used Time Machine with other shared volumes - maybe he'll chime in with some notes.

I have however had bad experiences with backups from a number of other methods, including the inability to boot from backups made with both SuperDuper as well as Carbon Copy Cloner.

Anyway, I just mentioned they're not at all the same thing because you had said that you'd heard "CCC was much better" - it's not better nor is it worse. It's just different. One might actually use both, as I do. Time Machine does my incremental backups to a Time Capsule and is on all the time. Then manually every now and then I will use CCC to copy everything to what should be a 1:1 bootable backup. I also use CCC to make backups of other external volumes, such as my music and movie drives.

I've got both an Express and an Extreme at home. I use the express to stream music into the kitchen/dining room and have the Extreme in the living room along with my Thomson modem. I used to have the extreme upstairs in the study but moved everything about to make the most of the available gigabit ports I needed in the study. According to the Network Utility my MBP connects at 130Mbit/s and without getting too carried away with benchmarks, I feel I get excellent throughput. My MBP is the only 5GHz N device I have, so everything else (phones, iTouch, Squeezebox, other Airport) connects at 2.4GHz.

I've not used the USB hard drive feature of the Extreme as I already use my ReadyNAS for stuff like that, although I've read it's not particularly speedy. For what I was doing I didn't think I needed a Time Capsule and also the fact it's only a single disc seems a little risky to me.

I quite like the idea of having everything in one box, but then there is the risk off all your eggs in one basket. I do however have a Drobo for critical client files backup and was thinking the Time Capsule would be more for the system drive only.

I also have Mozy backing up my Documents folder and MobileMe saving emails and favourites etc...

It seems quite a lot of money for what it is though, do you get goos range on the wireless ??? I have a few dead spots here, and they are even worse using the Express.

Cheers

Cris.

Time machine for me is the big feature of Leopard. I've had very few problems with it, using it in a variety of places. At home I have the Mac Pro and MacBook Air backing up to the ReadyNAS. No hacks, just checked the "Time Machine" option on the ReadyNAS and pointed the two Macs to it. I've done both small file restores and a full system restore on the Mac Pro without a problem.

At work I use the undocumented settings to allow it to back up to SMB. You can restore individual files this way, but you can't do a full recovery. However, a workaround is to move the backup to a USB drive for restore, and I've done this twice now with work machines to migrate to newer hardware, including from a PowerPC Mac to an Intel Mac.

For my family members, I get them Time Capsules. My mom has one used also as a wireless extender from her neighbor. This has backups for both my moms laptop, and the neighbor's Mac Mini. Neither have ever needed to use the restore feature, and they haven't told me about any problems backing up. It's a very set and forget method that works. My grandparents also have a laptop and mini pointed at theirs, and it's their main internet router. I use theirs as an offsite backup too. This works over MobileMe, by typing in my account to their router. This allows me to see it in the Finder on any of my Macs as if it were local. My long term plan here is to have my Pro sync some critical files to it weekly, though I haven't scripted that yet.

The only issues Time Machine has ever given me were under Leopard. I'd get the occasional error on my Pro that it couldn't find the backup drive. In the 2 weeks I've run Snow Leopard, I haven't seen the same error. Having both the hourly and long term backups has come in quite handy. If I am experimenting with something like addons for Warcraft, I can use Time Machine to bring things back to a baseline easily, without having to do manual separate backups. If an hour isn't small enough for my testing, I can initiate a new backup from the menu bar, and it takes only a few moments. I do have a few exclusions to prevent the backups from being large. At work, I excluded the Entourage database, as it's one monolithic file that Time Machine would back up every time. That's no longer an issue though as I've dumped Entourage. I do also exclude my local iDisk (~/Library/FileSync), since I feel having the files on every machine and Apple's servers is enough protection there, and I tend to not need the accidental deletion protection for it.

In the end, sure, some minor issues exist in Time Machine. But it's the first backup solution I use properly on every machine I work with. Carbon Copy Cloner works, but I really never used it much. Between the manual nature of setting it up, managing backup files, and so on, all it did was litter my NAS with things I'd have to clean up later. I think I still have a DMG on there somewhere of my PowerBook from 4 years ago.

I too am hearing stories of the power supplies dying around 17-18 months with the Time Capsules. While the units come with a 12 month warranty, a Mac with AppleCare will extend to cover the Time Capsule for the 3 years. So far the two I've deployed work fine, with the oldest approaching a year old now. If it's anything like the very first Apple Airport I bought in 99, it will probably turn into a cheep fix most resellers can handle in under a day. The sealed nature of the box does bother me though. The Extreme comes with an external power supply and no disk sealed inside, so I'm less concerned there.

As for wireless range, I use an Airport Extreme Dual Band as the main home router, then I have an Airport Express in my room. Both are hooked into the LAN, and this provides excellent 5GHz N coverage for the laptops anywhere in the house. With just the Extreme unit for 2.4 GHz, I still get good enough G coverage for my iPhone across a 1000sf area with 2 walls between them. It would have been fine for 5GHZ as well for normal web and video use, but I wanted the quickest network speeds possible for the Air when it's next to my Mac Pro. Comparing just the Extreme to my two previous routers, it has the best range on both 2.4 and 5GHz bands. The other routers I owned were a Linksys 610N (junk) and a Buffalo dual band router that due to the lawsuit and their laziness has become stuck at an older N spec version that isn't very compatible with modern systems.

At my grandparents house, the Time Capsule sits in the basement near the middle of the house, and provides coverage across both floors and even outside into their yard a decent ways. I can't speak for network speeds there much, but it's enough to carry on stable video chat sessions.

And the one at my moms house sits on the side of the house closest to their neighbor to extend the network. They live in an uncrowded area, so interference isn't an issue, and the extension is enough to cover her older house with strong signal, and provide coverage in her yard as well.

I've not looked into it far enough, but does Aiport Extreme + USB Drive == Time Capsule?

The UK Apple store has the Extreme at £139 and a 1TB Time Capsule at £229. This gives you £90 to spend on an enclosure and disc. Jump to a 2TB Time Capsule and the difference is £240! Now that's quite a chunk of money to spend on a single 2TB disc. In fact, for me, that was halfway towards a bare ReadyNAS that also has a ton of additional features as well.

I'm sure it's just the paranoid pseudo-sysadmin in me but, but if I value 'any' data then sticking it on a single disc doesn't seem safe.

I can see your point Tom about giving them to relatives as an install and forget solution, but if you're a seasoned fiddler then it seems like there are possibly cheaper but probably better ways getting the same functionality.

Yes. Apple says you had to have a Time Capsule, but this seems to have changed with 10.6. I plugged in a disk to my Airport, and Snow Leopard on my Air saw it as a valid backup destination, without any under the hood config tweaks. I'm letting it do a backup now, and will make sure it sees it as a valid restore option when booted off the Snow Leopard DVD.


If you only use a Time Capsule for backups, then the data is in two places, on the machine and on the Time Capsule. The risk comes in if you also use it as a normal NAS for file storage. You could plug in disks to the USB port on the Time Capsule, and backup the internal drive files to an external drive, though it's not an automated function of the Time Capsule, like it is on the ReadyNAS.

Ah, but you're not. You're sticking it on the original disk plus one more. And since you're frequently copying the data to the other disk, it's unlikely to go bad and you not notice.

Looks like it works fine, I was able to use the Time Machine restore option off the DVD, and have it see the backup I made. So under 10.6, an Airport Extreme Dual Band and 7.4.2 firmware, it works. YMMV.

*edit* oops. I see Tom posting that it works. I'm certain that it didn't at first, though, and I'm pretty sure it didn't work for a long time.

Re. the USB port on the Extreme:

Personally, I don't recommend the USB port if you're using Windows. It requires Bonjour to be installed, which works fairly for printers but I hate how it handles hard disks. Definitely not a good substitute for a NAS. I've also switched my family's "networked" printer from the Extreme USB to just a shared printer on my computer. It's just easier that way, and my computer is almost always on anyway.

Out of curiosity, I booted off my Leopard DVD that came with the Air (10.5.6), and it also saw the disk attached to the Airport Express for Time Machine restore. So from what I can tell, it's worked pre Snow Leopard without config changes, but may not be fully supported by Apple. Confusing to say the least. Some reports say it started working at 7.3.1.

I don't have Bonjour installed in Windows 7, and see the disk fine in Explorer just like any other share on the network.

Interesting.

Now, if only I could easily configure my Extreme in Windows 7. I had to find a "pirated" version of the airport software somewhere, and every time I launch it I have to do it in compatibility mode, which is obnoxious. All because I can't install off the disc in Windows 7, and I don't see Apple finally offering a downloadable, updated version of the utility. I guess I'll have to take a crack at XP virualization sometime. I don't care about the reasons they don't let you download the utility (we've discussed that in a previous thread), they just need to, for cases like this.

You mean like this?

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL840

Installed and worked fine for me on Windows 7 without compatibility mode or anything, and didn't require a disc. It did install Bonjour in the background, so it looks like it's required for configuration, but not any of the other features of the Airport.

Older versions also exist going back to 2003:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL537
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120273

Very interesting, but you're not exactly correct on one thing: that download was only available starting in June. Before that, if you owned an airport extreme (which has been out for at least two years now), you were out of luck, as the others you link are only for the express.

In the past, if you lost your disc you had to find someone else with an airport extreme and borrow theirs.

Anyway, I'm glad to see they finally got around to putting it up online. I still don't think it should have taken this long.

Version 5.4.2 was posted in June yes, but 5.4.1 was up in March, and 5.3.1 was up there in March of 2008, both stating support for your N based Extreme. The other links were for the older G based Express and Extreme, and the last link was for the really old B stations.

This does confirm needing the disc up till 5.1 though. No idea about 5.2 as I can't find a download for it anymore.

Whatever you do, don't buy a Linksys WRT160N. I was reluctant in buying this router for a friend of mine who has asked me to buy and install one for him because I had had many problems with the WRT54G in the past. But that was now a couple of years ago and I figured Linksys would've cleaned up their act by now.

They hadn't.

After a couple of days, my friend contacted me and said he had been having DNS problems with the router. The browser would give a DNS error on his PC which has a wired connection to the router. His daughter, who used a wireless connection with her laptop, didn't have this problem.

After two minutes of Googling, I had located the problem.

It seems there are two versions of this router: the first one (V1) used a Broadcom chipset and was pretty decent it seemed. Unfortunately, in all their wisdom, Linksys changed the chipset to the pretty unknown RT2880F chip, V2 of the router. That's where the trouble started.

This problem has existed now for almost a year, but still Linksys has not done anything about it. A first they blatantly denied the existence of the problem, now they are ignoring it. It seems the first firmware was pretty decent, but left you vulnerable for a DNS exploit. For this they released an update which patched the exploit, but broke the router entirely. They only thing currently to do is re-flash the router with the old firmware (found here) and use the DNS servers of OpenDNS to avoid becoming a victim of the DNS exploit to which your're vulnerable again then of course. Harly an ideal situation, but if the shop won't take the thing back, it's about all you can do.

In any case this will absolutely be the very last Linksys product I've ever bought! I'm truly disgusted by how Linksys treats their customers so they won't be seeing any more money from me. IMO, Cisco made a big mistake putting their well respected name on POS hardware like this.

As far as I can tell, most consumer level routers are horribly broken in some way. Some of them are broken at a basic level, other don't break until you start doing something interesting with them.

Linksys does this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I tend to also skip considering them for much of anything. I still remember helping a friend load Windows 2000 on his machine with a Linksys network card. There were 6 versions of the card, sharing the same model number. Each one had different drivers, and in most cases loading the wrong one would bluescreen the machine.

This taught me way back then that their push to drive down cost was going to drive up my time having to deal with supporting the products.

I had figured they might have improved after being acquired by Cisco, and so I bought a 610N when Circuit City imploded. 3 weeks later I replaced it with an Airport Extreme.

Yeah, it's to bad, really, because when they first came out with their blue metal-enclosure hubs and switches, they worked really well. They were a nice step between consumer crap and too-expensive commercial products. Now they're just consumer crap like everything else.

I don't know guys, I think this might be a case of "I hate company x. I've bought 37 things from them and they all failed miserably. I'll never buy from them again, and only buy from company y." We had a hard drive discussion like that a while back.

I've had very few bad experiences with Linksys products. Sure, I've had some, but no more than other products in this space. If anything, I've had better luck with them.

Whatever experience you've had, I have had nothing but good experiences running a WRT54GL with Tomato installed. Yes, I've had a router go bad (just happened two days ago, actually), but it ran for 2 years, and only cost $50.

My issues with Linksys are mostly over their model and version confusion. Trying to use or support their devices are a nightmare. I don't want to go to a website, pick Model 42399 and then be presented with pictures to try and help me decide what version the device actually is, especially when it's an internal NIC. They have made no effort towards streamlining this mess in 9 years, and I'm not sure exactly how much more time I have to give them to not come off as a person who dislikes their products for irrational reasons.

If your going to radically change the internals of a device enough to require new firmware or drivers, make universal driver packages, or make a new model. Most companies do this, Linksys doesn't.

You're saying that a Linksys product is good but only after you've replaced a core component of it.

I never said that. I said I indeed had problems with them in the past, but, exactly because I didn't want to be biased, I decided to give them another try. Stupid me I guess.

I also didn't say I'll only buy products from brand Y. I only know I'll never buy Linksys products again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice,... well you know. By now I've been burned five times or so by Linksys. I think that's enough, don't you?

I also agree with Tom. If you start changing internal components, up to the point where you'll need to use different drivers, you either need to give the product a new name, or develop universal driver packages. The way they do it now just won't do.
Trevor also puts his finger exactly on the sore spot. Much of the WRT54G model's success has to be accredited to Tomato or DD-WRT. The model by itself is pretty basic otherwise.

I hear where you're coming from and I know what you mean, but that isn't what I meant, at least.

I don't think they're any worse than D-Link or Belkin or Netgear or anyone else of that class. I just think that they used to make quality products in the mid-range arena, and now they make the same low-end crap everyone else does.

Also, it just occurred to me that I'm thinking about Netgear and not Linksys. Linksys has always been crap. Netgear, on the other hand, was created by a big player in the network space (Bay Networks, since purchased by Nortel and run into the ground) to fill that niche. I could buy a product with a reduced feature set from commercial equipment, but with its quality for a 200% instead of 800% markup. Add onto that that there's no one left in that mid-range market that they created, and it pisses me off.

Even this isn't enough. I remember arguing with a network card ages ago under Linux, for which they provided no drivers, Linux's autodetect didn't work because it saw it as a card that it knew had a different chipset, and it was virtually impossible to figure out how to fix it.

If you've reengineered a product, give it a different name, at least in firmware.

Draytek?
I've had good experiences with their hardware. Good stuff, incredible amount of user settings. A decent Draytek router costs about 2 to 3 times the amount of what an 'high end' Linksys or D-Link costs. (so that's what I would call 'mid-range') Well worth it IMO. Never failed me yet.

Perhaps I'm unfamiliar with this type of equipment, but how the heck do you buy their products?

I've always bought their stuff online. Almost every online shop carries their products in Europe.

Edit: what I also like about DrayTek: you can browse almost every firmware of their products when you select a product and then click the 'live web demo' link in to the left of the product. Eg. This is the live web demo for their newest router, the Vigor 2110 series : click.

Interesting. It appears that they have almost zero presence in US online stores. Their products aren't on Newegg, which is almost my sole source for computer equipment these days, and a quick search on Pricegrabber turns up nothing for them.

It does appear that there are some products on Amazon, but it doesn't look like they have the latest stuff.

And on a side note: why does almost all networking equipment look like complete crap? I understand that you're not really going to put this stuff on display or anything, but nearly all of it (that Draytek stuff included) looks awful. There are some exceptions (this Netgear is pretty nice), but those are rare...

Yeah, their US web site is kind of bleak. No "where to buy" link, and a desperate plea for resellers:


This is concerning, though:


Sounds like they want to sell through the dreaded "value-added reseller".

Hmmm

After giving out on my old Netgear WAP that couldn't cope with more than half a dozen wifi clients I tried that Thomson that turned out to be a pile of crap.

After the Thomson I spent a lot more and got a Draytek 2820n. I have to say I am underwhelmed.

For example I had to give up using the DHCP server on it. I tried all sort of things, but I could not get it to give out addresses to wifi clients reliably. It also crashed a lot until I upgraded the firmware.

When I did upgrade the firmware the web UI became unreliable when accessed over https, you have to hit refresh a few times to get it to work if not used in a while and if you leave the browser open on the routers page it can cause the router to slow down and crash.

It wasn't quite the premium experience I was hoping for. A read of their UK support forum suggests I'm not the only one with these specific problems either.

So let me ask you folks this:

Which router would you suggest for supporting 100 people, with no price barrier? How about for under $1000? Under $500?

Well, no one's ever been fired for buying Cisco. If you want to put a price limit on it, I've been pretty happy with ~$500 Sonicwalls, I've got two deployed, and have never heard a single complaint. They want support money for continued firmware upgrades however, which does bother me, but the product is pretty solid.

By router, do you mean wireless? Because most of the "high"-end stuff is not going to be all-in-one. That is, you'll have a separate access point and router.

I haven't by any means tried everything, but the only access point I've never had any trouble with in an office environment is a Cisco, an 1131.

As far as routers themselves go, I've never had any significant problems (quibbles, yes) with any of the major players: Cisco, HP, Juniper, Foundry (now part of Brocade), Extreme, … I'm sure that there are more I'm missing.

For firewalls, all I can suggest is to stay away from Cisco. Their firewalls are just complete junk.

Yes, I just meant routers, but thanks for the access point recommendations. I may have to outfit a building with access points at some point in the future. That might be a post for later, though.

So, forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but are most higher-end routers not also firewalls?

Most, if not all, firewalls are routers, but not all routers are firewalls, no.

These days, you usually see a few classes of devices in the commercial networking arena:

• Low-end routers, often with "odd" network interfaces, like a T1 interface, used as edge routers.
• Low-end switches that still generally have more features than you'd see in consumer switches, like 802.1Q VLANs and STP. You tend to find these in remote network closets attached back to a main switch with a fast trunk of some nature.
• Mid-range switch/router combination units. Sometimes you see these referred to as "Layer 3 Switches", which I think is a misnomer at best. These tend to have far more ports than a regular switch and also do routing. These are the real workhorses of a big network and are usually used as core routers.
• NAT devices/firewalls, which usually only have a handful of ports and often sit directly behind the edge routers. If the edge connection is ethernet, these can sometimes be used in place of an edge router.
• Access points. Many can actually support multiple SSIDs at the same time.

I'm sure I've left some stuff off.

The Time Capsule arrived today. First impressions are good, and I am testing the old dead spots by writing this message from one of them, if you can read this then it means they are all gone

The thing runs quite hot, but it is backing up about 600Gb as I type so I guess the drive has been spun up a while. It's very quiet, and surprisingly heavy. I would have preferred in a sleek aluminium look, but hey ho.

Cheers

Cris.

My Airport Extreme gets hot with no drive in it

Same here. Which Time Capsule did you get Cris?

The new 1TB version, I looked at all the options and it seemed a good one. I got a bit of a discount too

The wireless range seems much improved over my Express and the previous 2Wire router I was using. Even though my house is made of basically cardboard, it has 3 floors and find that in my bedroom at the top of the house I got various little deadspots, now even with the fire doors closed I get good signal quality. I think it has something to do with the amount of other WiFi traffic going on here, I have maybe 10 others listed when I look. The Time Capsule seems to be doing a good job of finding some space.

The back up was pretty slow, but now it's done I don't even notice it doing it. I have no idea why I haven't used this feature before.

One thing I can't get to work is Back To My Mac, but this has nothing to do with the Time Capsule. I need to install uPnP on my Clarkconnect box and am too much of a dumbass to do it. I think it time for a review of my internet solution anyway, that may mean a replacement of the Clarkconnect after 3 years of faithful service. One of the HD died the other week too, so there is a little motivation to do something with it anyway.

Cheers

Cris.

Count me in now as another happy camper in the Tomato patch.

After our recent DSL woes, I decided that a second DSL line might be a good investment while sorting out the primary line, so we had a second pair installed.

Meanwhile, the first pair is also working reliably again now, after multiple visits by various grades of Bell workmen.

So.. bonding the two lines using ML-PPP seemed the obvious thing to do, especially as we have TekSavvy as the ISP on the new/second line.

And for that, I decided to finally entrust firewall/router duties to a WRT54GS that we've had on the shelf here for a couple of years.

The WRT is now running Tomato/MLPPP firmware, bonding the two DSL lines together into a much faster connection than we were used to having here in the boonies.

The original line runs with a 2496/640 interleaved profile, and the new line has a 3008/800 interleaved profile. The two DSL lines combine seamlessly into a single connection now, giving 500KB+/sec downloads and better than 130KB/sec uploads. Woohoo!

I know that sounds rather pedestrian to anyone closer to a DSLAM than we are, but to us it's nearly heaven. Especially since a side-effect of ML-PPP is that the local Bell telco's packet-inspection based throttling no longer works!

Tomato itself took some getting used to, as I found the plain paper page menu layout confusing at first (no visible cues as to the existance of sub-menus), but it does make more sense now that we've figured it all out.

Cheers

I just upgraded our freenas at work to the latest release and straight out of the box it works as a time machine target (no "plist" hacks required or manual sparse image building, time machine sees it as a proper supported target and automatically sets it up), it quite happily syncs both of our macs to it, good stuff.

This makes a lot of sense. I've been running 2 bonded DSL lines for some time now, giving me faster downloads/uploads along with an automatic fail safe. It has saved me a few times over the past year alone, and I don't think people who rely on the internet as a place of business can afford to skimp in this area.

During my time as a DSL engineer I daily met people who were really desperate to get the internet back on, I very often didn't have sympathy for them if they are daft enough to base their whole business around a £20 product with no SLA in place and with no backup. I decided I wasn't going to be one of those muppets.

The cost of internet access is stupidly cheap in my opinion. I pay one of my SPs, O2, £7.50 a month for ADSL 2+ line giving me 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. My other SP is even cheaper, I think Sky are charging me about £5 a month!!!

Cheers

Cris.

With two DSL lines, each maxed near the limits for our 5.2+Km loop, it seemed handy to have the line status (noise margins when "up") available at a glance. Thus..

1st line: SpeedTouch ST516v6 modem, 3008/800 Fast,
2nd line: TP-Link TD-8841 modem, 3008/800 Interleaved.

Hmmmmm, I want that

Cheers

Cris.

Yeah, handy that. Simple too.

Meanwhile, today it turned -18C for the first time this winter, and the TP-link modem went on the fritz.

I thought perhaps the cold was causing some of the bridge tap splices to open up on our F2 line. But when I got home from work (client's site), I noticed the TP-link modem was hot. So I powered it off, cooled it down, and now the line is fine again.

'Guess I ought to heed my own advice.. I had that modem mounted horizontally under a shelf, rather than vertical in freer space as I do with most other stuff here.

So.. hopefully it was the heat on the modem, and not the chill on the line.. should find out tomorrow, as the deep freeze (-24C tonight) is due to continue for a few days.

Cheers

We don't get temperatures like that here in the UK very often, but I would expect it does effect line characteristics over a long distance.

Here it was once a common thing that SnR values would fluctuate even in heavy rain, but there has been significant investment in sealing up the network to try and prevent that, and certainly towards the end of my time at BT had gone a long way to reducing HR Disconnection and poor SnR faults. You only need one bad crimp on a run to have a massive effect, weakest link in the chain and all that.

It would be interesting to see a graph of line performance against outside temperature

Cheers

Cris.

Over a long period this past spring and early summer, we had an exact 1:1 correlation between SNR and rain density.

I eventually scaled the pole out back, found the breach, and taped it up. Rain no longer buggers things up nearly so much here now.

But then there's still the 20 or so poles (from the cross-connect box at the underground feeder cable) before the bundle gets to the pole out back here.. each with their own splice / bridge taps for a pole-mounted leaky F2 junction box..

-ml

I am not sure how accurate this is, but a figure that was talked about alot while I worked at BT was an average of 35 connections between the exchange and the end user. That is a hell of a lot of connections to go wrong!

Most of these in the UK network will be non-IDC twisted or crimped connections. I always found it amazing how a DSL fault can be cured by simple replacing what looks to be a perfect connection by eye. There are 2 tests we used to do when looking for bad lines, the first indicator is one anyone can do, can you hear the DSL hiss or tones over the phone even with the filter on? If yes line = buggered.

The other test involved looking of what we called "The Mole" I have no idea what the technical name was. Once you had done it enough times you could see the fault on the scope as the shape was often similar, then it was all running about trying different connection points. Now you'd be amazed how many guys at BT call that advanced diagnosis!

Cheers

Cris.

Mmm.. that line went bonkers again today. It's hard to say if it was due to the outside temperature fluctuations or not -- went from -24C to -11C this morning, and is now going back into deep freeze mode again.

Today I had the old Speedtouch 546 modem on the line, rather than the TD-8841 which had overheated previously. Very similar behaviour, though.

So, after work, I took the ST546 apart.. and ahha! Blown electrolytic caps inside on the PSU circuitry. So I've replaced those now, and we'll see what happens with it again over the next day.

I also checked the caps on the TD-8841. Visually, they look fine. But I might just replace them too, on principle.

It could also be a combination of the outdoor line conditions (temperature) and the bad caps.. hmmm..

Cheers

Your Mole wouldn't have been one of these gadgets, would it?

Yep, TDR, I knew there was a proper name for it. Although when I first started as a apprentice they didn't look like that! It was an analogue bit of kit with a retro scope on it, worked like a dream though.

There were various different units in use, but they all came under the same title for us. I found with all these testers that it was just repeated use that got me results rather that reading the manual and understanding how they worked. It was always useful to have a basic idea in your head what was going on, but I can remember boffins from the labs coming out with us one day and them not being able to understand what we were doing and why.

My most used tool was my old analogue meter. After using the thing for almost 10 years everyday I could pretty much connect it to a disconnected line and give you an approximate distance to the disconnection point just by reading the cap discharge when flipping the meter from AB to BA back and forth on the meter. I always preferred taking that £80 meter up a pole with me rather than the £1,000+ moles.

Ahhhh them were the days! If I could have just stayed your bog standard line engineer as we were pre-broadband I think I would be quite happy doing that again now. Shame BT are now screwing all the engineers into the ground, I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China now!!!

Cheers

Cris.

I think that must be a BT only nickname as engineers I've dealt with from other Telcos either called it a TDR or a 'tester', not very imaginative! I wonder how the name came about? Maybe because the process is like sending something the length of the cable to check it and given cables are often subterranian a mole is the most likely creature. Although ferrets tunnel as well, if I ever get a TDR machine I'm going to call it 'the Ferret'.

EDIT: It appears the device the other guys were using was in fact an OTDR. But I suppose it does the same sort of job, just with a different medium.

Openreach, the current engineering arm of BT is steeped in many years of history. There are still people who have worked there for 30+ years and this is considered the norm.

The strange terms for tools, testers and many other items often refer back the stores cataloguing system and it's strange way of calling things. The Analogue meter I talked about is called a 9083, as that is it's model number in the catalogue.

I've always assumed it was called a mole because it goes underground so you don't have to, it's a universal term used in every part of the country so it must date back to when the technology was first introduced.

The one I have no idea about is the Butt Phone. It's what we called the Yellow (now Blue, although they were originally Blue before they were Yellow) test phone that is used to test basic dial tone on the line. not sure why they call it a Butt Phone? Maybe because a complete arsehole uses it most of the time ???

I always found working on the cables fun, members of the public would often come up to me in the street when I had a box or joint open and ask "How do you know what to do with all those wires?" It's a very simple system using a very simple colour code which is most remembered by a simple rhyme (W)e (R)xxe (B)usty (Y)oung (V)irgins, not very nice but it sticks in your mind.

Cheers

Cris.

Because it hangs from the service dude's butt when not in use?

Because the dial pad is usually on the bottom (butt end) of the device.
But I like the first explanation better.

The modem now works as good as new -- equal to the st516v6 I had replaced it with. On our primary line, it (as well as the other two modems) is solid.

So today I put the known-excellent st516v6 modem onto the suspect line. And the same wanky line condition struck at about the same time again this morning (10:42am).

So, I think the three modems are all just fine (now).
And one of our two lines has an issue of some sort.

I'll ignore it for now, and deal with it in the New Year.

Cheers

About 20yrs ago all of our cad terminals used fiber to carry the analog RGB signals from the mainframe to the workstation CRT's. One fiber for each color and one for the kbd/tablet and terminal text.

Over several years a number of the fibers were broken eventually using up all the spares. Every one assumed it was the pigtails coming out of the drops that had been broken from mishandling.

It was a surprise when the OTDR showed that all the breaks were due to failed splices inside a closed junction box.

It was the first I had heard of or seen what a TDR could do. Seemed magical. The unit in use had a crt and a paper tape output. Even used on a good fiber the tech could spot where every splice was all the way back to the other end. He even showed how bending a fiber a little to sharply could be seen.

Those workstations were insanely priced $25k for a desk an rgb monitor, digitizing table, keyboard and a circuit card that mapped the terminal text on top of the graphic display. Today it's almost impossible to spend more than half that much on a high end PC workstation including all the compute power, which the old cadds workstation totally lacked.