[binary visions]

I've had a handful of routers that all do the same thing: choke when you cram too many connections through them. Bittorrent is especially good at causing them to cough and roll over.

It's the same story every time. They all work great initially. I'll start up a few torrents and they'll run for a couple days, and eventually I start having connection troubles. Bittorrent usually keeps chugging along just fine, but everything else will stop connecting, stop doing a DNS lookup, etc. Even when I stop the torrents, nothing gets better.

Rebooting the router fixes it every time.

So, having had 3 Linksys routers that all do the same thing, I'm looking for something a little more hardy. I'd love to get a big Cisco 2600 or something, just for grins, since my CCNP classes start in the fall and it'd give me something to practice on/play with, but the money just isn't there.

I tried a couple of those software firewalls like Smoothwall but just never got it running well enough. Maybe it was just me. They functioned, but I ended up needing to reboot them occasionally and I'd rather have a small, low power router than a whole PC tower.

Suggestions?

 

[syadasti]

Well here is a consumer router chart:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/chart,124/

Looks like they top out at 200 with this Dlink on top. I have a router based on its predecessor and its pretty solid. I don't do much file sharing or bittorrent or anything though. If you are using XP I am sure you are aware of this.

 

[DRB]

If you weren't stealing music maybe karma wouldn't be so hard on you.

 

[binary visions]

Actually, it's that feature length, high definition midget porn that's causing problems. There's nothing quite like watching two midgets fornicate with a donkey in 1080p. It's really spectacular.

 

[Kornphlake]

I'd love to get a big Cisco 2600 or something, just for grins, since my CCNP classes start in the fall and it'd give me something to practice on/play with, but the money just isn't there.

This might be the only real answer. I'm not a real network guru, but as far as I know all consumer routers have problems of some sort.

I've got a D-link Dl-524 that's been pretty solid for the last couple years, but like syadasti I'm not doing any torrent stuff and I've only had 1 PC and 1 PS2 connected, never used the wireless, which could explain why it's been good for me.

 

[LordOpie]

uT
...

 

[bean]

How about moving over to the Linux firmware for the Linksys routers? If nothing else it might be fun to play with.

 

[H8R]

How about moving over to the Linux firmware for the Linksys routers? If nothing else it might be fun to play with.

Hmm....

Do they make Linux firmware for Dlink routers?

 

[binary visions]

Check out 3rd party firmwares, H8R. HyperWRT, DD-WRT, OpenWRT...

They work on a variety of routers. I had OpenWRT running on this Linksys before and it was pretty fun to play around with. Unfortunately, the claims of turning a $60 router into a $600 router are patently untrue - they give you the configuration options of a $600 router, but the processing power still sucks so you can't use a lot of it without overloading the router.

Still, fun to play with. I read up a bit and as an interim solution I installed DD-WRT on the Linksys. Several people indicated that it helped their problems with torrents.

Incidentally, read up a lot before you install the software. Go through all the installation instructions. Look in the forums. You don't want to brick the router.

 

[binary visions]

To clarify: the firmwares certainly give you a tremendous amount of usable functionality. I didn't mean to say that it was all useless because of processing power restrictions. Just that you can't turn on stateful packet inspection, layer 7 quality of service recognition, logging, VPN, IPv6 etc. all at once because it'll grind your router to a halt.

 

[H8R]

I must check into this. Since switching to Ubuntu a have found that the web interface w/ my DI-124 doesn't work anymore. I can go into the router and see all the settings but it won't let me make changes.

This might be a Firefox issue though, I seem to remember it having trouble in XP as well.

Grr.

 

[binary visions]

'zactly why I won't do the permanent switch to linux. Too many niggling problems with a hundred different programs/webpages/drivers/etc.

IMO, the open source community isn't driven enough to make the end user experience more pleasurable, they are too focused on development and the assumption that most of it can be figured out via Google/wikis/forums, so what's the big deal? Linux has come a tremendously long way but I don't think the attention to detail is there.

 

[H8R]

'zactly why I won't do the permanent switch to linux. Too many niggling problems with a hundred different programs/webpages/drivers/etc.

IMO, the open source community isn't driven enough to make the end user experience more pleasurable, they are too focused on development and the assumption that most of it can be figured out via Google/wikis/forums, so what's the big deal? Linux has come a tremendously long way but I don't think the attention to detail is there.

I think the main problem is w/ legacy Dlink hardware. I have the "A1" version of the router, and like I said it had problems under XP too.

Everything else I've used besides old Dlink stuff has worked great. In fact the scanner drivers in Ubuntu work much better than the original Umax ones for my ancient scanner. Same with my printer, etc.