rant about routers

ok, let me preface by stating this post is written by the hand of rage and anger


How come companys can get away with making shitty products.
My linksys wrt54G has been a NIGHTMARE

my dlink POS wasnt much better

my belkin never worked right from day 1 out of the box

my linksys.. every month i had to reset the bastard because it did not retain an IP from comcast, ive tried 2 wrt54g's and i ran into the same problem.. thought it was comcast.. they claim no responsibility... eventually my linksys just stopped asigning IPs all together...

bought a dlink... range BLOWS.. i can piss farther than it throws a wireless signal....took 3 tries for it to take the wireless security settings... and now it will drop my connection every 3 min.. so far it has done it twice writing this post.. i see "cable unplugged" in the bottom cornor then it comes back after i disable and re-enable my network adapter.. i stood out in my garage where the router is.. when it drops the entire thing locks up.. all lights come on and stay there... then it blacks out.. and boots back up

the belkin never really worked from the get go... shitty range... DMZ settings did absolutely nothing. port fowarding did nothing... if i needed to open up a port i had to make a virtual server, even that didnt work half the time... every now and then it would randomly lock up.. have to go out and cycle the router and modem for it to get an IP again


what the hell is wrong with routers.. are they seriously that cheep that they do not function for more than a year? the longest ive had a router is about 7 months then i have to buy a new one

anyone else have problems like this with home networking?!

Darn, hexadecimal, this sure isn't funny, but you had me smiling here, kind of like listening to the voices inside my own head about wireless .....
But, anyway, to let you know you have company, i have 4 boxes on wireless, strung all over the house, most have some flavor of MS but a couple have Linux flavors changing boxes somewhat regularly for the same problems you discuss.
Seems that if the box is hooked to the router with an RJ45 it works pretty good and holds the values. But on wireless, all mine are Linksys (Comcast) 802.11g USB except one that is Linksys PCI 802.11b. Thats the one I can't get Fedora *or* SUSE to detect. So anyway, last week i phoned in to the SUSE store and ordered the 10.2 boxed set (w/manual) for sixty bucks, it comes with a year of tele support after you get it running.
So anyway, today i get this return (from an enquiry a week ago, the techies have been on vacation) phone call from Novell and they want to help me get 10.1 onto the wireless but i was trying to put a new 64bit box and couldn't even sit down at the present SUSE box today, so thanked him for the return call and said i'd just wait until 10.2 got here. He said that 10.2 "fixed a lot" of issues they had with 10.1, and would be glad to work with me to get 10.2 online even though they really didn't work a lot with wireless. (probably because Linux is usually wanted for servers and they are hard-wired not usually wireless). He said if i'd hook up a hard link to the router first off, the OS might set itself but if it didn't they'd be happy to work with me on the wireless. Oh, and he said if i'd pop up to the HCL list at ...linux-something/HCL (hardware compatibility list) there were some brands that people had tried and worked, but it was not a list approved by SUSE.
So anyway, thanks for the smile. Kind of sounded like an echo somewhere back in the deeper parts of my grey matter..... :-)

(edit, forgot to mention) Last week i took a hardware 'update' from MS that came from LinkSys. Shouldn't a done that. It dropped my transfer rate (system internal) from 54mb/s down to something like 3mb/s. That warmed me right up too. Funny part though, checking the online speed it was about where cable should be. Still wish i'd have not 'updated' my Linksys on that box. At least it didn't affect the other boxes. Am waiting on this new box to get the full version (not the trial/beta/etc version) of 802.11n. Until then i'll just use one of the old 802.11g probably the USB version as it seems that works better than the PCI card.

You get what you pay for. I've been working with a Cisco 806 and Cisco 831 for years. I always had HORRIBLE experience with the other cheap "routers". I quickly overloaded them and they hang. (use up all the memory by doing too much, p2p, torrent, surfing, etc all at once)

I have a WRT54GP2 (with the voip ports) wireless router just for my Pocket PC and my girl's laptop. Those two devices never overload it. All my other traffic goes through my Cisco 831. The 831 has more than enough resources to handle all my activity.

I actually don't mind the wrt54g routers. They just don't have a lot of resources. Put dd-wrt on them and they make a nice little gateway. Up until a couple weeks ago, I had two of them chained with wds and the coverage was great. I found that I didn't really need that in my apt and put them in a box for when I need more coverage. The little voip one works fine.

I had ok experience with netgear. Hated dlink and belkin.

If you're spending $50-100 on each router and you've gone through that many... seriously look into getting a Cisco 871. They're a bit more up front... but after you set it up... it's good to go. I maxed out my 831 with memory and flash and would LOVE to get 871... however, I have other things I need to buy. The SDM makes it very easy to configure and has all kinds of cool stuff on it. Firewall, IPS, VPN, etc.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6200/index.html

Take a look at the spec sheet. It's well worth it and I wouldn't think twice about getting another one.

The Old Man: Can't you just do a driver rollback or system restore?

I was looking into building a Smoothwall box and sticking 2 linksys or cisco APs in my house...

what is the price of that cisco 871 though... im drooling and my tax return is on the way :D

A little off subject, but has anyone ever bought a Belkin product and liked it. I ask because I have tried a few different product and had the same experience every time. If it works out of the box it will be dead within a weak. The last two thing I tried where a USB KVM switch and a cell phone charger. The KVM worked for an hour and the charger messed up my phone.

We have a linksys router at our apartment and every week or so we have to reset it because it freezes up. Cheap routers and especially Wireless routers never work the way they should.

I always told my friends that routers(<$100) are as reliable as network printers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MadBeaver

A little off subject, but has anyone ever bought a Belkin product and liked it. I ask because I have tried a few different product and had the same experience every time. If it works out of the box it will be dead within a weak. The last two thing I tried where a USB KVM switch and a cell phone charger. The KVM worked for an hour and the charger messed up my phone.

---

I've been using Belkin KVM switches for several years. I'll admit that the last one I bought was probably 4 years ago... but all of them are working fine.

Other than that, I think I've used some Belkin patch cables. It's kind of hard to screw those up?

Oh, I also use some of their half racks (2 posts) for SOHO sites. Again, kind of hard to screw those up?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by br_fusion

We have a linksys router at our apartment and every week or so we have to reset it because it freezes up. Cheap routers and especially Wireless routers never work the way they should.

I always told my friends that routers(<$100) are as reliable as network printers.

---

If you load the dd-wrt firmware on it, you can schedule a cron job to reboot it every x hours or at a specific time. I always rebooted it around 4:30pm because I knew the GF would be getting home around 5:00 and would likely be getting on her laptop shortly after. Seemed to work out ok. On occasion, she'd have to reboot it manually on the weekend.

I have 2 D-Link routers for home use, the 624S & 634M. The 634M just died on me (hardware issue) and the 624S is a work horse with an attitude problem. It seems like D-Link products vary on quality and not just with different routers.

I have worked with the DI784 (which is now discontinued) and my first purchase worked great under heavy stress loads (from multiple computers) for over 2 years with very few reboots. And then, I purchased another one that simply stopped working shortly thereafter with virtually no stress loads (only one computer was using it).

The only lesson I learned is that you take a gamble every time you buy something and routers are no exception. c'est la vie.

I am looking at that cisco for sure.

for now im going to build a smoothwall router and get a cisco wireless AP

then il get that cisco router... and il make the smoothwall router my gaming router for lans... we kill routers 9 times a night at lan parties

Quote:

---

anyone else have problems like this with home networking?!

---

I had to do an IT job at a local Doctors office. They purchased a Linksys wrt54g v.5 <---man what a nightmare. Take it home on my home network works perfect.

I have a DLINK DI-604 ethernet broadband router I had since end of 2004 still works perfect.

I have found the biggest problems with the Linksys wrt54g series than any other make and model of routers.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6200/index.html
Cisco 871 Integrated Services Router - Cisco Systems

$849.00 USD

thats like 3 paychecks for me..

I will not buy another linksys router... I am going to build a smoothwall box and get a wireless accesspoint

Well, I've been using a Netgear wgr614v5 and haven't had any problems thus far..maybe a reduce in internet speed but that's expected..although I've only have it for about a month..

I've got a Mentor router, and I've got to say that up till now it's been ok. I've had it for a few years now with basically no worries. Up till now I'd have to reset it once in a blue moon, but the last week or so I have to reset a few times a day. What's happening is that it seems to lose the ability to transfer data outside the network (as in all the local ips are fine and the comps can talk to each other).

For a minute there I thought I'd screwed up my computer (just installed dhcpcd over whatever it was I had before), but no -- power on/power off on the router and I'm resolving hosts fine again.

Think I'll buy a new one soon.

ac

I can't even log into my router... as soon as i type in the IP for the web front end it power cycles

i wonder if a mix of high traffic and unstable power is killing it.
it smells like burning silicon

So my next routing solution will be using a cisco 24port fasthub 400 as my hard lined connection, and 2 of these http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satel...VisitorWrapper

as my wireless APs... connect them all to UPS's

the traffic in my house is alittle high... xbox on live, my comp on WoW and bf2142... limewire on 4 comps, bit torrent clients on 4 comps all downloading at high speeds

im going to install smoothwall in a VMware enviornment and mess around alittle

I just set up a WRT54G at work as a wireless access point on our domain.
A dep't head needed a temporary solution for 3 weeks worth of meetings
and put me on it. I got it set up fine by assigning it a static ip address,
disabling DHCP, and plugging it up to the network via a LAN port (vs. the
WAN port). Worked great, tested fine on three laptops for a couple of
days. Since then, one problem after another.

1) The subnet mask changes on me. Our domain uses a 255.255.0.0 subnet
which is not in the programmable range of the router (it only uses 255.255.255.0
and up). After fixing the static ip address and booting it up on the domain,
it did indeed pull a 255.255.0.0 subnet. That was at the end of last week.
Today, after logging into the unit and testing it, I couldn't access the web.
Took a look and it's was now pulling a 255.255.255.0 subnet. Using the
built-in diags, I couldn't ping Yahoo, but pinging the gateway was fine.
The test laptop was my own personal unit not joined to the domain (worked
last week!). Power cycled the router to no avail.

So later today I pull out a company laptop that came to me for troubleshooting
and logged into the domain via wireless, it works fine! That laptop pulls an
ip address from our DHCP server with the correct subnet. Tried my laptop,
the one that failed earlier, and it works now, too. Chit...

2) Part of my task was to monitor wireless usage. Wireless has not been
used here before because of security issues. I set it up with WPA-TPIK and
did a basic tutorial for our users. Enabled logging only to find out it will only
monitor the WAN port and shows no traffic whatsoever. Well, because of
some company politics and being a contractor, I don't exactly have run of
the domain despite being a domain admin. Looks like I'll be resorting to a
sign-up sheet to know who's using it. Ugh, I'm glad it only up for 3 weeks...

3) Took a look at the firmware and found there's a newer version. In fact
the new version of firmware just came out last Friday, 2/9. But I can't download
it. The server's v-e-r-y slow getting to the download and then it gives me
a 0 byte file. Great.

There's about six different WRT54G's out there. The first four had about 4
mb's of memory for the Linux-based firmware, but after Linksys got pushed
to open up the sourcecode on this make so folks could turn these into überrouters,
they totally reprogrammed the firmware and reduced the memory to 2 mb's.

Yar!, I wonder what tomorrow may bring...if you ask me, hardware mfg'ers can't turn JUNK out fast enough for consumers who love to shop for cheap chit. Cisco's definitely the way to go...

brokencrow: If you can get a model to load dd-wrt on, then you can use rflow collector. You can also enable logging and dump the inbound/outboud connections to a syslog server.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/

http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/rflow.php

I've only used ddwrt on wrt54g v2 and v2.2.
I had no problems with either of those versions.

I have had problems with ver. 4, 5 and 6

I hate the linksys firmware and ever since I've used the wrt54g, I've used sveasoft (which is now closed) and dd-wrt (a fork of sveasoft).

I agree with you though... Cisco IS the way to go if you have the spare pocket change.

The developers of ddwrt recommend buffalo tech hardware over linksys. I have never used it, but I plan to in the future.

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/pr...?productid=124

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

we have buffalo in the precinct at work running our wireless network... its ok... AOSS is kind of useless...

the webmenus are really weird as compared to linksys or cisco...

have fun with them, range could use some help but otherwise we work thoes routers pretty hard... never reset em