Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router • Hacker News Board

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#51

Post by gilgad13 » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:00 PM UTC

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, but it will require a call to Verizon to enable the CAT port on the fiber terminator box in your closet. You also need to set it up properly to keep Pay-Per-View and TV Guide working.

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

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#52

Post by cdr » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:01 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #39

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…

In the US, it depends on the provider. The two giant cable telecoms I've dealt with charged ~$5/month for a wifi router which is really highway robbery - especially considering the quality of the routers they provided. Their provided cablemodems were pretty much universally awful too, so you were better off buying both your own modem and router - but they obviously didn't advertise that you could do this, if you weren't technically savvy you'd never have a clue. One friend I helped out was amazed that they could get wifi without paying TW $5/month and how much better it worked without TW's equipment.

I'm currently on Qwest (formerly anyway, now acquired by CenturyLink) DSL. Qwest provided an excellent modem/wifi router for free, but I have no idea if CenturyLink would do the same now - I kind of suspect the giant teleco would probably provide inferior equipment and/or charge for it.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#53

Post by klodolph » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:45 PM UTC

wut42 wrote: post #46

In France, this need have been killed by the ISP themself. Is there any ISP in the US who does that ? Free (a ISP) started in 2002. It's a home-made modem router, who also does TV and Phone. Since that almost all others French ISP have created their *box (Livebox, BBox, AliceBox, Neufbox, …).

US ISPs generally provide a modem-router. The point of the article is that the router provided by your ISP is probably terrible.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#54

Post by corford » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:53 PM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #6

Maybe this is a reasonable place to ask for some advice: I have 2 broadband connections, one via my phone line (ADSL) (76/17) and one cable (50/4) does anyone have any experience with using 1 piece of hardware to manage them both, possibly load balancing (not important, but would be cool)? I currently have 1 modem and 2 routers... it's not a very power efficient set up, it's also a bad experience because they're all…

I'm not sure about your cable connection but if something similar to a Draytek Vigor 120 ADSL ethernet bridge modem exists for it, you could just build a linux box, stick 3 nics in it (one for each bridging modem and the third facing your internal network) and use that as your router.

You just bond the two public facing nics together with ifenslave, setup pppoe and write an iptables script.

Also, IIRC (been a while since I did it), normal bonding only gives you round robbin i.e. your max speed is limited to the bandwidth of whichever external link your connection is forwarded through at the time (unless you use an ISP that can do MLPPP - which is rare). If you want to combine the bandwidth of both connections into one fat virtual pipe, you could get a cheap VPS and then run an Open VPN link over the bonded virtual interface on your linux box at home to the VPS box (I think! I last played with this 4 yrs ago and details are hazy...).

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#55

Post by corford » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:56 PM UTC

ragmondo wrote: post #48

Draytek Vigor. My go to router of choice. built in vpn from the off, so you can drop in these bad boys and then (once set up) auto route all your traffic that looks as if it should go to the remote site TO the remote site. Easy to vpn back "home" if you are out and about. QOS built in. VOIP server built in to the higher version. They are as cheap as a typical router but they pack the punch of any router out there. ..…

+1 for Draytek. IMHO they're as close as you can get to professional level gear without spending more than $400.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#56

Post by soapdog » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 9:58 PM UTC

I like my mikrotik, best router I ever used. So powerful and configurable that I don't need 80% of what is available to me =)

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#57

Post by recursive » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 10:09 PM UTC

ad_hominem wrote: post #19

Really? I didn't expect to find a "consumer device roundup" article (along with sidebar ads and referral tags for the products being reviewed) to rate so highly on HN, even if the reviewer is Jeff Atwood. I doubt that flashing custom firmware on a router or QoS settings are a new concept to anyone on here. All I'm gaining by reading the article is some knowledge on some consumer electronics that will probably no long…

I'm using a ~5 year old router that probably came from some big box electronics store. I didn't even know this was a thing.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#58

Post by zxoq » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

While that router may be beefy enough for multiple downloads. Installing an open-source firmwire degrades WAN performance a lot. I've tried a few different routers and dd-wrt / tomato generally reduces the WAN speed by 75 - 90% (from 500-1000mbit down to <100) in comparison with the default firmware. That is simply unacceptable, although understandable since this is probably not something that hits the devs very hard since most people are not on 1gbit pipes.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#59

Post by rmk2 » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 10:15 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #33

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.

Does your bittorrent client by any chance use uTP[1]? If so, not experiencing any problems has nothing to do with your router and all to do with your bittorrent client throtteling its own speed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#60

Post by paxswill » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 10:22 PM UTC

tnorthcutt wrote: post #47

dugmartin wrote: post #5

As I commented here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082351 The part of Tomato I like best is its simple DNS interface that lets you have one hosts file that is shared across all the machines connected to it. This is where I define my local dev domains so that I can test across devices that don't allow local host file changes (namely non-jailbroken iOS devices).

Whoa, that's pretty awesome. Does anyone know if DD-WRT can do this as well?

DD-WRT usually includes DNSMasq[0] which can do some fairly advanced stuff for being so small. The downside being that it's all manually configured via the equivalent of a config file.

[0] http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html