[LUNI] Wireless & wired router recommendations?

[Mike Scott]

Been using a Linksys WRT54GL purchased from New Egg running ddWRT for
about a year and a half with no problems.  I don't use the router or
DHCP functions, however I just use it as a 5-port switch / WAP combo.

- Mike Scott

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [LUNI] Wireless & wired router recommendations?
> From: Gerald Guglielmo <gug at fnal.gov>
> Date: Thu, November 29, 2007 9:38 am
> To: luni <luni at luni.org>
> 
> 
> Hi,
>     My setup at home has some connections using wireless and some wired. 
> One the wired side: NAS (Netgear/Infrant); HP Ethernet printer;  Linux 
> desktop. On the wireless side: Windows laptop; Tivo; occasionally a 
> laptop from work. Over the past 3+ years I have tried in succession two 
> D-Link wireless routers (with four wired ports), models DI-624 and 
> DI-524. Initially they both worked great and were easy to configure over 
> time via a web interface (making it very Linux friendly). However after 
> many months to a year, they each started exhibiting problems on power 
> cycle. The initial symptom presented is that no network connections work 
> and all the activity lights are stuck on. Unplugging all connections and 
> power cycling (waiting at least 30 seconds each time) eventually works, 
> but sometimes it would take half a dozen or more tries. This got worse 
> over time as the probability of success (and number of repeated cycles)
> would increase as the month went by. Invoking reset from the web 
> interface would also cause the same symptoms as power cycling only you 
> could only do that once. That is the common symptom between both models. 
> They each also had a more annoying failure symptom which differed from 
> the others. The first one would randomly lose it's lease with the cable 
> modem and only power cycling all the equipment multiple times would 
> eventually resolve the issue (I was able to rule out the cable modem 
> after a lot of trial and error). For a while this happened about once a 
> week and I thought it was the cable company up to no good, but when it 
> started happening every 12 hours or less I replaced the router and the 
> problem went away.
>     The second router seems to have developed a more subtle problem. The 
> HP printer uses a 169.* private network address, while the router gives 
> out DHCP addresses in 192.* range. Until last weekend everything was 
> fine and both wireless and wired addresses could ping the printer and 
> print files. The wired connections can still ping the printer and have 
> no problems printing files, however the wireless connections cannot even 
> see the printer. At first I thought this was a Windows firewall issue 
> and I spent a long time trying to figure out what McAfee might have 
> done. However it now appears the problem might be that wireless 
> connections in general cannot see the 169.* addresses but the wireless 
> ones can.
>     So now I am in the market for a new router that will have at least 4 
> wired ports, does wireless with DHCP, and is easily configurable from 
> Linux. Needless to say I am not thrilled with D-Link at the moment, but 
> I do not have enough experience to know if the failure rate is typical 
> of home grade routers. Does anyone have any recommendations for the next 
> router I should try? I would greatly appreciate it, thanks.
> 
> -- 
> -Jerry->
> gug at fnal.gov
> Pepe's Theory of everything: "Under the right circumstances, things happen."
> -- 
> Linux Users Of Northern Illinois - Technical Discussion 
> http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni