The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

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Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

What you would want to try and do is put the speedstream thing in bridge mode, so it's only acting as a modem, and then have the wireless router that you have actually handle the routing duties.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2012 18:09

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:15

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

poxin posted:

So I just got fiber from tw telecom activated in our building. They gave me a sheet with static IP, dns, and gateway information. For the life of me I cannot get internet working with ddwrt.

Am I being dense and putting these things in the wrong spaces? Would I set the router IP itself for the "LAN Ethernet usable IPs?" There is one one IP listed for that, no block or anything.

There is information for:
Assigned LAN Netblock 66.xxx.xx.208
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.252
LAN Ethernet usable IPs: 66.xxx.xx.210
Default Gateway for LAN Netblock: 66.xxx.xx.209
Primary/Secondary DNS.

Yes, do that and then the router will share the public IP out to all your computers while giving them private IP addresses (192.168.x.x, or whatever you set it to on the LAN side)

# ¿ Jan 31, 2012 17:38

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

I'm having a bizarre network problem that I can't pin down.

My network is basically like

code:

                      Internet at large
                             |
                 Time Warner (via Korcett)
                             |
                   Ethernet jack in my apartment
                             |
                      Time Capsule Gen 2
  (wireless)  /              |            \           \
     Airport Express   Apt Extreme      Switch 1     Switch 2
             |               |             |           |
          Stereo        Office stuff     Living rm    Bedroom

So these Korcett characters are basically middlemen who maintain in-unit broadband connections for multifamily dwellings (apartments, dorms). The bandwidth for us is coming through Time Warner biz, but Korcett manages the connection and the equipment in the building (I am fairly sure). If you just plug straight into a jack on the wall, you have to go through a portal page on the web as one would on public wifi or something. You can also log in to your account and add MAC addresses for things that don't have web browsers so they can access the internet.

The much preferable option, which I have taken, is to have them set up your router with a public IP, which you do by giving them your router's WAN MAC address. I did this, and it worked great for 2 weeks. Now my connection is dropping out every 5-10 minutes. I've tried: reverting the router to factory settings and then manually re-entering everything, using the IP the router is assigned by DHCP as a manually entered address for the router, reverting the firmware (this conveniently coincided with a firmware update), and probably a bunch of other poo poo I am not remembering right now. edit: Ok, I reverted all my devices to the previous firmware and reverted them all at the same time, SAME drat PROBLEM.

The weird thing is, hitting 'Renew DHCP Lease' in airport utility fixes it, for 5-10 minutes. If I do nothing, it stays off. Basically when it's off I have total local connectivity, but packets don't seem to get to the first step past the local address for my router.

Anyone have any ideas? I called Korcett once already and they were pretty clueless.

edit: As I suspected, it seems like a config issue on their end. Someone else (totally different MAC) is getting my ip after about 5-10 mins. How the hell that happens, I don't know enough about networking to know. Now I have to wait for a senior engineer to look at it and sort it out. I kinda miss the reliability of my old uverse connection, but at least this internet is free with my apartment... though I guess you get what you pay for :sigh:

Dogen fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Feb 6, 2012

# ¿ Feb 6, 2012 18:59

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Yes, that is not uncommon. Switching to 5ghz is a good fix. Also you could try using your oven, that's a pretty long time to put anything in a microwave.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2012 07:35

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

I'm rocking a 1GB TC from around the time they finally became reasonably priced a bit more than 2 years ago and it's still going strong.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2012 17:22

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

If you use the same SSID and WPA2 key you should be good to go. Just set the downstairs WRT54 to not be a router or serve DHCP addresses.

From your diagram the upstairs->downstairs is wired, with ethernet running from your main router to a switch downstairs, right?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2012 02:29

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Still the best consumer router I've ever used. And yes it works with XBL just fine.

It uses NAT-PMP instead of UPnP, but XBL and PS3 work fine with it, so yeah.

I started using Apple equip for reliability based on the experience of friends despite it not having the rep for being the 'best' online and have yet to have anything go bad on me (knock on wood). I upgraded from netgear poo poo that had to be restarted every other day.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2012 01:43

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Much like everything else Apple, it costs more, is slower (well, maybe this is unfair to other apple products, but generally the airport line has less favorable throughput on wireless, doesn't support jumbo frames etc.), and less customizable, but it JUST WORKS. Which is pretty important in home networking gear.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2012 01:31

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

NOTinuyasha posted:

Are you sure about that?

Well, I'm basing that on a smallnetbuilder article from not too long ago. As it is, I don't think there's a lot of difference to the end user unless you are copying a ton of huge files all the time.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2012 22:27

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Tried setting up a bridge instead? Sometimes ICS just doesn't work.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2012 03:00

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

If you have the money and don't want to get balls deep in tweaking network configuration stuff, the Apple AEBS is a pretty reliable piece of hardware.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 18:07

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

I meant more in the sense that you don't have as many options to play with, which some people seem to want. Personally I have been very happy with the performance of my dual band AEBS.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 20:33

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Can you not set it to backwards compatibility N/G mode?

When the G device connects it will still slow everything down, though.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2012 00:55

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

SplitSoul posted:

I updated to v8.02 firmware. (The European D-Link sites only listed v8.01, even though it isn't the newest for EU models. ) I also did a factory reset and set it to /g/n mixed, touching nothing else. It seems to be working so far.

Back away from it slowly while avoiding eye contact. Never touch it again.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2012 21:03

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

No, but there is nothing wrong with wifi secured by WPA2 really. It's probably no less secure than whatever crazy VPN/terminal software thing you have. More a problem would be getting signal from the basement to the third floor. Can you just move the router out of the basement and somewhere more convenient to run a cable from? Considered powerline networking?

# ¿ Mar 29, 2012 19:05

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Moving the router is your best option so long as it doesn't screw with any other network setups already in the house, they should be able to do it (or honestly you can probably do it yourself, I don't know what kind of service you have).

# ¿ Mar 29, 2012 19:42

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Great, now I'm going to have to change my passkey when I get home.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2012 20:19

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

To avoid this problem I got a plastic mount that screws into the wall and just clamps onto my Time Capsule and it lives next to the wiring box. If you can live with the TC mounted on the wall I highly recommend it.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2012 03:16

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

I have an airport express and extreme subservient to my time capsule (the express is serving music to my receiver and the extreme is a switch on my office desk), both have wireless turned off for this very same reason. I didn't want to discourage your experimentation, though. I found it seemed to create more problems in the 2.4 ghz band since that space is ridiculously crowded in our apartments.

The express and extreme used to be bridges running on 5ghz to serve consoles/tivos etc. before we had in-wall cat5e.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2012 14:35

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

My house has been all Apple with some Dlink switches for a while and it's been pretty great. Compared to past experience with other products I don't have to fiddle with them or reboot them periodically.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 18:09

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

What kind of computer are you connecting with (Mac, PC)?

# ¿ May 2, 2012 16:23

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Vaginal Engineer posted:

Can the PC access the router page? If not, does the router respond to pings from the PC?

Yeah, this was going to be my further line of questioning as well.

# ¿ May 2, 2012 20:34

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

god this blows posted:

That is more in line of what I'm looking to do. Set the drat thing up and then forget about it. I have a Cisco WRVS4400N and while its labeled as Cisco its really just a rebadged Linksys down to the firmware. I've had to reset it every other day recently and even factory resetting it only gets it working for about 6 hours.

This is why I went apple on all my network poo poo about (well, except a couple switches) about 7 years ago now: so I don't have to dick around with resetting connections/routers/whatever on a regular basis.

# ¿ May 11, 2012 15:38

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Cablecos are using it in their boxes, I think FIOS uses it. The latest Tivo (XL4) supports it.

# ¿ May 16, 2012 20:04

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Is your neighbor's weirdly strong wifi stepping on yours, maybe? Check the channels? Additional stuff in the walls for stairs could also be the culprit, but I would rule other things out first.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 00:15

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

5ghz is even worse at penetrating obstacles, so if that's the problem as opposed to interference it probably wouldn't help, unfortuantely

# ¿ May 23, 2012 16:53

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

himajinga posted:

So basically I should try switching the laptop to 5Ghz as a barometer as to whether the problem is structural or interference related? If it ends up being structural, would powerline with a broadcaster upstairs in the bedroom be a good solution? If it turns out to be a perfect storm of structural nonsense and a too-crowded 2.4Ghz spectrum, do I add 5Ghz to that combo, or try my original repeater solution but with 5Ghz instead? I would totally run wires but we're renting, and I can't think of a clear path to run them through the walls; our floor plan really is as screwy as that MSPaint makes it out to be.

Maybe this is just me grasping at straws, but looking at the power over time graph, my broadcast seems really erratic relative to the other networks, is that normal?

Thanks for all your help so far.

1) You can try 5ghz, but like I said, if it's building structure related, it won't help most likely. If it is interference (which looking at your graph leads me to believe it's probably not, assuming that's a graph from the problem spot), it will help.

2) I would say if your laptop is remaining stationary, it's not normal for signal strength to vary too wildly.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 18:49

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Sounds like your router could be flaky

# ¿ May 23, 2012 19:34

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

himajinga posted:

Thanks for all the help in the thread, I bought an RT-N16 and everything is working beautifully, the dead zone is gone and my PC has 5 bars instead of 3

Awesome, glad to hear it's working and that my diagnosis was probably correct. Having experienced lovely wireless AP/routing in the past I am familiar with the symptoms

# ¿ May 29, 2012 16:27

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

If you have it configured where the bridge RT-N16 is connecting as a client to the RT-N16 that is presumably running your network, it won't have any performance impact on your network. That happens when you are using WDS or the like to receive and then retransmit a wireless signal.

# ¿ May 31, 2012 15:11

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Devian666 posted:

I'm unimpressed with the new airport express. It's too expensive for too little features.

It's preeetty much the same as the old one, but with simultaneous dual band. It's good if you need a way to play your itunes library on your stereo in another room, a bridge if you live in an apartment or something (of course, you have to have a switch to pair it with more than one device), or a wee portable wireless router.

I'm sure not running out and buying a new one, as all mine does right now is play music on my stereo.

I did just take it on vacation to work with my appletv, which was cool.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2012 19:15

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

CAT 6 is probably fine.

Don't put a router or whatever up in the attic, drat. Run all the lines to another convenient point in your townhouse and have a patch panel there.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2012 15:02

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Infinite Monkeys posted:

All the computers, phones etc. in the house can connect to the wifi fine except my main desktop which is upstairs from the router - it occasionally gets decent speeds but drops down to ~10KBps at times too. I think it's because of the wireless adapter - it's a tiny thumbnail-sized USB thing. I had one which had a long wire that I could put on top of my desk and that worked better but I lost it, can anyone recommend an adapter that will be more consistent, preferably one that has a wire rather than plugging directly into a USB port.

You can get a USB extension cable so that you can reposition the dongle

# ¿ Jul 7, 2012 20:05

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Yeah stick your fixed devices up above 100 or 200 and then only distribute up to 100 or whatever.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2012 22:05

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Binary Badger posted:

FYI / anecdotal experience, the Airport Express is great for a tiny city apartment situation where you're in a studio/1 bedroom and you do most of your surfing in one spot, preferably in the same room (or at least adjacent to) as the AX. Do NOT expect it to reach your attic from your basement. Its transmit power is lower than that of its big brother, the Airport Extreme Base Station. Whether by design or not, that's the reality. Its range is probably better than its predecessor, the 802.11g model, but not by much.

If the power cord is too short for where you want to place the AX, you can just buy a standard figure 8 power cord that's longer.. Monoprice has a 10 ft. cord for only 2 bucks.

On the older model one I have, it is compatible with the extra portion of a macbook power cord, so I used that instead.

Really, it's good for getting your music to your stereo if you use itunes and your computer and stereo are in different rooms, and also as a little wifi travel adapter/router thing if you don't already have something along those lines. I bought it to split internet on spring break when I was sharing a condo that turned out to only have one internet jack and like 4 people were staying there (neeeeeeerd)

# ¿ Jul 27, 2012 21:23

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

UndyingShadow posted:

Buy a patch panel, wire them all up, plug a computer into one room and change the patch cable from the switch to the panel until you get a light on the switch...rinse and repeat?

Well, the cable tester should handle that part of it, assuming he also has a probe. But yeah, pretty much this.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 16:51

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

codo27 posted:

So I'm running Tomato and everything is pretty much the same as before, except now the router seems to think I'm in Virignia. I'm in Eastern Canada. I dont have a clue why, I didn't mess with anything other than the transmit power. This is evident when I post a facebook status, or do anything that uses location services, and both on this computer which is hardwired to the router and on my phone. I've gone through the settings in Tomato but I just dont know enough about it, and I dont know how to make it think I am where I am. Help?

Did you check outside to make sure that somehow installing tomato and changing the transmit power didn't lead to you accidentally inventing teleportation?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 19:56

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Here's an insane question: anyone setup a router with dial backup lately? Everything I see now is dual WAN or 3G card failover, but this guy wants some kind of backup without spending any extra money per month. I haven't set one of these up in years and at the price point we're talking about (spending a couple hundred bucks tops) in my experience they never worked that well.

If anyone knows of a router with dial backup that can use a USB modem that would be great, I am not having a lot of luck on google.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2012 15:25

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

1) your avatar is awesome

2) it should just work, as you say. How are you connecting the switch to the e2000?

# ¿ Oct 12, 2012 20:51

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:15

Dogen: May 5, 2002; Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

Are they all on with nothing plugged into them? It could be a dud, it happens, I would definitely think so if the lights are going berserk.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2012 21:21

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

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