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Don't use Linksys routers

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Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#121

Post by A1kmm »

jthol wrote: post #95
fencepost wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to 5 GHz. You'll need a new router and WiFi adapters, but they're available. You won't have quite the range, but even business locations with dozens of 2.4 GHz networks (e.g. Physician office buildings) will have 1-2 5GHz networks total, and most off the shelf consumer laptops don't support it right now so adoption will take a while.

Stop telling people to do this. I like my roomy uncluttered 5ghz spectrum.

Part of the problem with 2.4 GHz in big buildings is that it passes relatively well through building materials, so that in a large building you get a lot of noise from equipment owned by other residents.

Someone measured the difference in transmissivity for different materials at 2 and 5 GHz (http://www.ko4bb.com/Manuals/05)_GPS_Timing/E10589_Propagati...) - the difference is quite large for brick and cinder block; unfortunately, they didn't measure insulation foil, which I expect would be quite a good RF shield, especially if earthed.

So if everyone switched to 5 GHz, the interference situation might still be better than if everyone was on 2.4 GHz.

Of course, being an early adopter of 5GHz probably helps with the other problem in apartment buildings, the 'prisoners dilemma' type problem where everyone who knows how ups their transmit power because of the noise, making the problem worse for everyone else but temporarily better for them, when if everyone lowered their power, everyone would get better speeds (exactly analogous to how everyone ends up shouting when having a conversation with the person next to them at a party, when if everyone talked quietly instead communication would be more successful).

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#122

Post by pjmlp »

ansible wrote: post #118
dhughes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If possible increase the transmit output milliwatts, to "shout over" the other signals on the same channel. Increase the beacon period of your router/AP to the fastest it will go, usually 20 microseconds. I think this is the best solution of anything you could try. Maybe play around with the DTIM interval but I'm not sure what a good number for that is; too low supposedly drains batteries of wireless devices and too…

I actually design wireless devices for a living and in my opinion, this is mostly bad advice. The best bet it to switch to 5GHz, but that isn't practical for use with mobile devices. Option B is to turn off the higher speed modes like 802.11n. Just try to stick with 11g. If you are still having connection problems, maybe switch down to 11b, but that will be real slow even when it works. If you use an access point wit…

Thanks for the tips.

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#123

Post by driverdan »

jwr wrote: post #104
NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

The modern equivalent of a Linksys WRT54GL is the ASUS RT-N16. It runs OpenWrt, DD-WRT, and Tomato variants really well, does 802.11n (only one frequency) and has plenty of memory and flash storage for extra hacking. The ASUS RT-N66U is frequently advised if you want 5GHz 802.11n as well. The other router mentioned in this article, the Linksys EA2700, doesn't seem compatible with third party firmware. And apparently…

Tomato works fine until you need QoS. Then it hangs sporadically. Verified with two different router types.

Interestingly I found the N16 stock firmware to have the best QoS of any router I've used. It requires no configuration and always seemed to work great. DD-WRT's QoS, on the other hand, can require significant effort to configure correctly.

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#124

Post by kragen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #17
TylerE wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be shocked by the power bill for running one of those older beasts 24/7.

Idle power consumption, measured at the plug by a watt meter: Dell Optiplex (1.4GHz Pentium III): 32W ($5.76/month @ $0.25/KWh) Mac Mini (1.25GHz G4): 17W ($3.06/month @ $0.25/KWh) Even if a WRT54G uses zero watts, you're still talking about a year before you even recover the $50 cost of one, and in any event ~$50/year is not a very expensive hobby.

A one-year payback time means an IRR (hope I'm using that term right!) of 100%. If you're choosing between putting your money into paying down your mortgage at 6%, investing in the stock market at 3% (plus or minus enormous volatility), insulating your house at 20%, or replacing your old PC router with a cheap MIPS box at 100%, go for the cheap MIPS box!

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#126

Post by nnexx »

jrabone wrote: post #91

Just buy Draytek. Playtime is over. Pricy but mine lasted 7 years before I replaced it with another Draytek (for dual WAN support). Bomb proof and great VPN support out of the box. I bridge my parent's network to mine over VPN, and the Linux servers at either end provide failover DNS, mail etc. So useful, especially for remote support.

> Just buy Draytek. Playtime is over.

I went to their website (draytek.us) and got this:

> Database connection error (2): Could not connect to MySQL.

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#127

Post by darkr »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #53
brooksbp wrote: post #15

I highly recommend Mikrotik to anyone fed up with traditional consumer wifi routers/APs. I dont know how they compare to other vendor hw eg Asus + OpenWRT, but this little guy has been rock solid and a joy to use: http://routerboard.com/RB2011UAS-2HnD-IN

I have a Mikrotik/RouterOS device. Positives: Cheap. Powerful. Stable. Negatives: Harder to use than OpenWRT/DD-WRT or similar. It is still a web-interface, but doesn't "baby" the user. If you aren't comfortable manually setting up interfaces and then setting up tunnels through those interfaces for example then skip this. I love it. But I won't kid myself, it isn't for everyone. The documentation isn't comprehensive…

+1

I've got a pretty in-depth networking background and for my home network rebuild I wanted something less power-hungry than my previous big AMD box running Vyatta, but needed something that supported n+ layer 3 interfaces, BGP and VLANs (i.e a proper router). Couldn't justify the cost of a 1900 series Cisco and associated k9-sec license, so went for a RB1200 (512MB RAM, 1Ghz PPC chip, 10 physical ports, 5 of which can do hardware switching and wire-speed filtering) and a couple of Groove access points.

Getting tagged and untagged VLANs to interact together on a single port is a non-starter (not supported at all), and getting VLAN trunking and routing to work together simultaneously requires terminating the layer three interface on a virtual bridge, then for each VLAN you need to create a virtual VLAN interface for each physical interface, and then put that onto the bridge as a 'bridge port'. The documentation is very scant on this side of things and the command line interface is pretty arcane compared to IOS but does make sense after a while.

If they weren't 1/4 price (or less) than an equivalent product from $enterprise_vendor I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone, but seeing as they are - if you've got a networking background and can put up with some of it's quirks and limitations, there is very little out there that can compete with Mikrotik on price/feature set.

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#128

Post by josteink »

jseliger wrote: post #32
montecarl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the owner of an ASUS RT-N16. I purchased it when my Linksys WRT-54G died after 4 years. It really is a fantastic wifi router for the reasons you list. However, if you live in an apartment complex you might find the 2.4GHz spectrum very crowded. Especially if there are others with 2.4GHz 802.11n, which uses more channels than 802.11b/g. This might make it worthwhile to purchase a 5 Ghz 802.11n router.

Definitely. There appear to be more than 30 named networks within range of my iMac. That's one reason I've wired my iMac and my fiancee's iMac with cat6; as I wrote in another comment day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192837 : It's also amazing how prevalent Ethernet still is, even when wireless is a competitor. The other day I left this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052448 on HN, because in…

> They last forever, aren't subject to the level of interference wireless is, and, in many conditions, have faster data transfer speeds. Ethernet is still great.

Take away "in many conditions" and replace with "always, without exception" and replace "faster" with a "at least a magnitude faster" and we are in agreement.

If you need performance and reliability (like for instance for iScsi) there is really nothing which even compares to wired ethernet.

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#129

Post by IheartApplesDix »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

The modern equivalent of a Linksys WRT54GL is the ASUS RT-N16. It runs OpenWrt, DD-WRT, and Tomato variants really well, does 802.11n (only one frequency) and has plenty of memory and flash storage for extra hacking. The ASUS RT-N66U is frequently advised if you want 5GHz 802.11n as well. The other router mentioned in this article, the Linksys EA2700, doesn't seem compatible with third party firmware. And apparently…

Nobody here seems to realize that these firmware upgrades do little to adress these issues. Tomato explicitly says its a UI update only..

Re: Don't use Linksys routers

#130

Post by josteink »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

The modern equivalent of a Linksys WRT54GL is the ASUS RT-N16. It runs OpenWrt, DD-WRT, and Tomato variants really well, does 802.11n (only one frequency) and has plenty of memory and flash storage for extra hacking. The ASUS RT-N66U is frequently advised if you want 5GHz 802.11n as well. The other router mentioned in this article, the Linksys EA2700, doesn't seem compatible with third party firmware. And apparently…

> The modern equivalent of a Linksys WRT54GL is the ASUS RT-N16

When I was in the market for something like that one or two years back, I was recommended a specific type of Buffalo Router [1]. While I see my particular model has been superceeded by newer ones, I still thought I'd mention it because:

1. It was recommended to me by someone who had been served it extremely well by it in the past. It has now served me extremely well for years. It will probably do you good as well.

2. It's OK to support more than the top 3 vendors in the world with your money. This leads to more competition, more diversity and better products.

3. Putting stock dd-wrt or openwrt on it can be done all in browser and doesn't seem to involve brick risking procedures like bootloader updates, like I see you may have to go through for the Asus router.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0028ACYEK

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