LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 1:55 am Post subject:

*laughs* wow... what a response.. ok the details asked for...

A) I've been right upto date with the firmware, constantly checking, hoping this problem would be resolved. My linkSys freezes up all the tyme. It does it most often when I'm either serving out a large file, or downloading a large file. This leads me to believe that the info is comming into the router faster than it can handle it, it bottlenecks, and the router panics....

If this is not what is actually happening... doesn't matter, the end result is the same. I have to march down stairs, pull the plug on the router, and then plug it back in. This of course kills all my connections, (they already died of attrition anyways...)

My preference would be to put a hardware firewall in place, BUT the cable modem/router/first switch are all located in my dads office. He will tolerate something small like a new router as a replacement, but he will not tolerate me setting up a 486 and parking it there.

Not to add to this the fact that I already hear about the electric bill, and a 486 is going to take up significantly more than a small router.. the router is 5v 2.5A... whats an old powersupply for a 486 run?!?!?!

NOW... it is entirely possible that this is not the routers fault.. [s]AT&T[/s] Comcast is sending crap on their lines. The modem could send crap down the line, or the netgear switch could be causing collisions... BUT regardless... no router should just freeze up in confusion... it should struggle, emit warnings, deal with it somehow... if it dropped packets, I could understand that... its logfiles should show that.. but instead it just goes to hell.

Linksys support suggests I downgrade my nics to 10/base-T .. yeah... spend all that money on a 100/base-T full duplex network just so I can let a shitty router make me work at 5-10% efficiency MAX?!?!? I don't think so.

Anyways, I've read reviews from various places... Some people say they have never had a problem with their linksys routers, then you have roughly an equal number of people who talk about freezing, dropped connections (which could be freezing), or other problems...

so I'm guessing this is a common issue somewhere within the router...
and then I also ask myself... are these people hard on their routers?!?!? cause I know I am.

Again.. ideal solution would be to put a boxen somewhere, fill it with NIC's, drop a router/gateway/firewall on it and let it do its thing... but its not gunna fly.

Anyways, I did have NewEgg send me out a D-link 704P (they want $54 for it, $5 shipping, and there is a $10 rebate = $49 not great, but I'm willing to pay this much)... and someone else has offered to send me something (their brother is a network engineer, and he recently disabled a network connection from a vpn'd office, and they told him to keep/throw away/etc the equipment... so he might have some goodies he could send me...

I suggested any non-rack mounted cisco stuff *L*

(pictures himself with a $20k cisco router downstairs.... think that would be considered overkill? for a 5 boxen network?)

anyways... hope this answers all the questions, explains the situation, and scared the hell outta ya all

-ciao

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 2:05 am Post subject:

fathertyme wrote:
*laughs* wow... what a response.. ok the details asked for...

**HEAVY SNIPPING**
My preference would be to put a hardware firewall in place, BUT the cable modem/router/first switch are all located in my dads office. He will tolerate something small like a new router as a replacement, but he will not tolerate me setting up a 486 and parking it there.

-ciao

Take a look here then. Ive got one of these and can recomend them.

For checkup on other peoples experiences go here.

Keep us posted of your experiences!

/Akely

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:39 am Post subject:

Only thing I heard about MS network stuff is that its not compatible with some systems and OS's. When I was looking for a new router they were the same price so I went with the hardware compay rather than the software guys.

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:59 am Post subject:

*gryns* looks like a great product, but its also about 3 tymes what I wanted to spend Smile

I'm trying to stay under the $100 mark Smile

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 2:40 pm Post subject:

FT, it sounds like you either got a bum router or (more likely), Comcast is indeed sending out crap. I put my L*nksys under extremely heavy use 24/7 and have not had to reboot it once in about 6 months (save for the time I unplugged it to move the whole modem/network setup...and one power outage).

When I say heavy usage, I mean heavy usage, both inbound and out. I'm on a 1500/768 Speakeasy DSL line with the Linksys BEFSR11 (one-port model) receiving from the DSL modem and sending it on to a Netgear 8-port 10/100 switch, all 8 ports of which are used. As far as outgoing traffic goes, I run several gaming servers on my dually, at least one of which is populated at all times. As for incoming traffic, I and one of my roommates regularly download massive files over Kazaa/IRC/WWW/FTP/you name it and have never had problems doing so. We also regularly play online games and pretty much everyone in the house (four roommates) is logged into messaging services such as AIM/MSN 24/7. The router serves roughly seven or eight computers at a time (a mix of both static and dynamic IP addresses over both wired and wireless), a wireless access point, and an X-Box, and everything works perfectly. I have never had an issue with port forwarding, DMZ, or any of the advanced features.

So in other words, if it can handle what I'm throwing at it, it should be able to take what you've got. I'd start by going to the store, getting a router, plugging it in, seeing if there's an improvement, returning the router to the store, and deciding what to do from there. If there was an improvement, then just pick up a cheap D-Link or Netgear router. If not, then it's just your line quality, my friend.

P.S. Hey Fido, any word on that networking forum Question

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 3:52 pm Post subject:

Haven't had any problems with my Linksys router, only thing I dislike is that port fowarding has a limit of 10. Maybe a firmware update will solve that, but I haven't checked it yet.

And yes, that networking forum will be nice. Smile

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:31 pm Post subject:

hrbib21 wrote:
While we're on the subject of routers, anyone have any idea if those Microsoft wireless ones are any good? They have some pretty good deals on those and am considering it.

I ended up getting my hands on a Microsoft mn-610 kit. I was not all that impressed with the it, but hey it was free. It wanted you to install there crappy software to configure the router and nic. That I don't like.

But I have it up on ebay right now if your interested Wink

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:50 pm Post subject:

What did you say about Linksys?

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 7:45 pm Post subject:

blahpony wrote:

What did you say about Linksys?

Strangely, that looks like my router that I just decommisioned...but why does it have a knife in its foot mount?

I have to agree with Jonathan, I had the BEFSR41 routing my LAN to my DSL Line. My current setup consists of my server (Web, FTP, DNS, Active Directory), and approximatly 4-5 local clients. I must admit I really dont put alot of stress on this router...it just recieves alot of light traffice, but I've never had to reboot it other than to move it, or due to power outages.

I just recently installed a BEFW11S4 about a month ago and havent had any major problems, just a minot issue with WEP Encryption on XP Clients (I believe this is a client nic card issue though).

Well I'm off now, and oh yeah, Fido that Networking Forum would be great...it would be my 2nd home right next to the Seti@Home Forum Smile

Big Dog Joined: 18 Oct 2000 Posts: 4410

Extreme wrote:

Well I'm off now, and oh yeah, Fido that Networking Forum would be great...it would be my 2nd home right next to the Seti@Home Forum

Noted...

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 8:00 pm Post subject:

Quote:
I just recently installed a BEFW11S4 about a month ago and havent had any major problems, just a minot issue with WEP Encryption on XP Clients (I believe this is a client nic card issue though).

Thats the same router I have, and I love it, no problems at all havent had to reset it at all in the 4 or 5 months I have had it. What firmware version are you running? Do you have more than 10 spots for port fowarding? Mine is limited to 10 as of right now. I'm curious if this is the same with the newer ones.

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 8:05 pm Post subject:

My Rt311 also only has 10 spots for port range forwarding.

Can't wait for that networking forum Fido Wink

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:49 pm Post subject:

smokinAMD wrote:
Quote:
I just recently installed a BEFW11S4 about a month ago and havent had any major problems, just a minot issue with WEP Encryption on XP Clients (I believe this is a client nic card issue though).

Thats the same router I have, and I love it, no problems at all havent had to reset it at all in the 4 or 5 months I have had it. What firmware version are you running? Do you have more than 10 spots for port fowarding? Mine is limited to 10 as of right now. I'm curious if this is the same with the newer ones.

I currently have the default firmware version of 1.44.2 (Dec.13, 2002). and Technically I have about 25 port forwarding spots, just as you should have.

There are 10 Port forwarding ranges where you can specify a range of ports to be forwarded to a computer. For example I have my Seti@Home Queue setup here. Ports 5517 to 5525 are forwarded to my server. I have 9 blank spots.

On this same page there is a button named "UPnP Forwarding" where you gain access to an additional 15 spots, the downside is 10 of them are predefined for you (FTP, Telnet, SMTP, DNS, TFTP, finger, HTTP, POP3, NNTP, and SNMP). Towards the bottom you have 5 additional spaces where you can forward external ports to and internal port/server.

For example, I have my VPN port of 1723 forwarded to port 1723 on my server, then I also have a Seti@Home port (Firewall safe port 443) forwarding to internal port 5517 on my server.

If you need more than this, may I ask what type of servers your running Smile

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 10:17 pm Post subject:

D'oh! Need to update the firmware then, Thanks.

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2003 12:49 am Post subject:

tyme, a 486 takes less power than a modern system, there were a lot less transistors in those. You could build a nice lil *nix box and set up a router and firewall, and even throw Apache on it. You might find an old pizza box style low profile system at a flea market, or a sparc 4 or something for $50 and you'd be jammin.

Contrary to popular belief, routers don't need a lot of cpu power. Our Ciscos at work (3640s) route traffic for 190+ devices over 100baseT and also 2 T1s for each router. SNMP tells me the routers have never gone above 10% utilization in the months I've been watching. At home I do backups over the network, and because the Linux server is the default gateway for the LAN it routes (at 100Mb/sec) and system load is negligible.

Your Linksys is the only one I've ever seen pack it in and we have a lot of them in circulation now. Mine's had no trouble at all, of course mine is only dealing with Internet-side traffic because it leads to a DMZ where the farside port of the server lives.

But if you want to get a dlink, I've heard lots of good things about them.