Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

codinghorror.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 137 posts

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#31

Post by martinp »

btgeekboy wrote: post #7

No mention of Mikrotik? I picked up a RB750GL last week, and so far, it's everything DD-WRT/Tomato/etc wish they could be. It works as a basic plug-and-play router, but it's incredibly flexible beyond that. Check out http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:RouterOS_features if you're interested. You can download the OS and run it in a VM if you want to give it a try before purchasing.

Another vote for Mikrotik. I bought a RB751G-2HnD myself about a month ago, because I needed a router with decent features and fast enough to handle a 90/10 Mbit connection.

The feature list is very impressive and on par with professional-grade gear (Cisco etc.). Only downside is that it's not open source, but it's updated about every month or so. [1]

[1] http://www.mikrotik.com/download/CHANGELOG_5

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#33

Post by stcredzero »

msh wrote: post #23

Well, I have been very impressed by the performance and stability of my 4 year old Apple Airport Express.

Yes, I note that I have no problems browsing while downloading bittorrent with my Time Capsule, whereas my housemate's Linksys with DD-WRT would bog down.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#34

Post by merlincorey »

dustinupdyke wrote: post #29
jtreminio wrote: post #21

One thing Jeff didn't mention is that due to the high CPU and RAM in that ASUS router, you can be downloading several different torrents and the internet experience in general won't be degraded. With my Verizon FIOS's router, if I try to torrent anything it gets throttled down to less than 10KB/s, and on my old Linksys, attempting to torrent would make browsing the internet nearly impossible.

Curious if it is possible to take the FIOS router out of the equation entirely?

Yes, you certainly can. At my last place of employment, I built a custom BSD (packetfilter) based router using the nice multiport gigabit intel NICs. We had static IP configuration, which meant all I had to do was put the default_router and standard interface configuration into /etc/rc.conf and, as they say, voila, internets!

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#35

Post by cheald »

I'm running this same setup - same router, same firmware.

I'm using the MultiSSID functionality (so I have my home wireless network, and a heavily throttled guest network), QoS (basically what Jeff wrote about), VPN (so I can be assured of a secure connection while on the road, and have effective LAN access via TAP), as well as all the standard stuff. It tickles me a bit that I'm getting a featureset for $80 that you'd have to pay several hundred for to get it out of the box.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#37

Post by nodata »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #17

I posted this "Ask HN" awhile back about my desire to pay for a router-as-a-service: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to…

Doesn't Meraki do what you asked for?

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#38

Post by AceJohnny2 »

zdw wrote: post #4

I'd pick a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, or -AG300N rather than either ASUS he picked. Both ship with DD-WRT preinstalled, and full source of the firmware is available. The older ASUS routers are stuck on Linux 2.4.x permanently in OpenWRT (which DD-WRT and Tomato are derived from) because of proprietary Wifi or Ethernet drivers or firmware blobs and poor CPU support.

Buffalo shopping with DD-WRT is an extra selling point for me. I actually got the -AG300H (such similar model names, ugh) because it had the best hardware specs according to OpenWRT's hardware table.

I haven't yet taken the time to tweak it to perfection, and unlike Jeff Atwood haven't benched its wireless performace compared to others. While it works well for me, I'd be curious about comparison info.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#39

Post by mattmanser »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #17

I posted this "Ask HN" awhile back about my desire to pay for a router-as-a-service: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to…

One of the guys did answer you with:

[We do sell this but] We limit the number of offices in a minimum order to 10. This was a hard lesson. We started off dreamy-eyed with onesies and twosies but were rapidly buried under a sea of "and it also has to...".

Pretty much says it all.

Also over here in the UK you get a free wi-fi router when you sign up for broadband from the major providers. No QoS, but auto-updating. Do you not get that where you are? If they do, where's the market? The router shelf space in local stores has already dwindled down to a single dusty shelf from the aisles it used to dominate.

Post reply on HN