OT: Wireless routers

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: "filePro Mailing List" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 8:34 PM
Subject: OT: Wireless--and a vendor NOT to use.


> You know, a few years back I got a D-Link card in my last system and a
> matching D-Link wireless router.  I've always had a real problem with
> latency
[...]
> Just put in a new server, and I had a Linksys card put in it.  I tested it
[...]
> Last night I bought a DIR-615 in the vain hope that it would improve.
[...]
> I just got a lovely Linksys WRT54GR, and I can say that the latency issues
> have been cut by 99.9% given what I've seen in the last hour and a half.
[...]

Most dlink and netgear have been crap the last few years, they were both ok back in the days when they both had steel cases. And, linksys has been ok for most of that same time.

But today with the N-routers things have reversed (except for the netgear, it's still crap)

I personally purchaced and tested all 3 gigabit wireless-N routers, Netgear, D-link, Linksys
with a brand new Sony Vaio TZ-150n which has the brand new and excellent Intel 4965 A/B/G/N wifi tranceiver.
(maybe by now Belkin has a gigabit N router but, blech Belkin...)

The D-link DIR-655 is hands down the best, both in terms of throughput, latency, firmware software features, stability, responsiveness (the cpu and ram is actually up to the task), ability to actually handle gigabit lan traffic at least as well as my connected machines hard drives can. I never did a real good test where I had a gigabit server directly on the wan port, but it has a gigabit nic on it's wan port and at least it does fully handle my 5mbit up / 50 mbit down wan connection. It's been up for months so far since it's last power-cycle, providing remote access to several machines at home and handling a fair bit of traffic. I use my gallery and ampache servers a lot and rsync back & forth a lot.

The Netgear WNR854T at least worked but was kind of slow, kind of flaky, mostly worked ok but not good, signal was weak too. It should be noted that Netgear now has 2 new wireless N with gigabit models out since then that advertise better specs. The WNR3300 and WNR3500. Perhaps they don't suck.

The Linksys WRT350N, much to my surprise was absolute garbage. I even took it back and got a different one because I couldn't beleive it was that bad and figured I must just have a defective one. Nope, same garbage with two different units. I don't know where to begin, or stop, describing the ways in which it sucked. Mainly, I couldn't get my notebook to actually connect to it wirelessly unless I forced it to use only wireless-G mode, and my ip phone failed to negotiate dhcp with it. Basic functionality not merely worked poorly but plain didn't work at all.

The only downside I see to the D-Link DIR-655 is not being able to use OpenWRT or dd-wrt.

I had an early version Linksys WRT54G with openwrt and it was rock solid. It was fine out of the box too with the original firmware. So have several others been at client sites and friends houses.
For WRT54G and openwrt and for quality in general you do have to know to look for old versions on ebay, do not get new ones. They aren't improved, they are the other form of progress, as in "ok so now that it works, let's see how much we can get away with removing...". Some versions came with as much as 8M of flash and 32M of ram, and some came with as little as 2M of flash and 8M of ram.

-- 
Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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