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Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
A few notes even though you've found your network problem.

Don't buy combo modem routers, they are all horrible (there is one exception I'm aware of but it costs too much). Always get a separate modem and router. I've found simple modems have a lot less problems and you can select a router that will do the job well.

So long as you match the plug, voltage and amps for DC you will be fine. The input on the AC side doesn't matter provided you have purchased a transformer/power adapter suitable for local power requirements (plugs, voltage and frequency).

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Decius
Oct 14, 2005

Ramrod XTreme
I'm replacing my TP-Link TL-WR1043ND (running DD-WRT). Since I've aquired a Macbook Pro Retina in the meantime I wonder if it is a good idea to replace the router with a Time Capsule? The TP-Link had troubles reaching my office (about 12 meter away, with 3 walls in between) with decent speed (20 Mbps), so I switched this part to a Powerline (not great, but manages 44 Mbps). Should I expect a better performance from a Time Capsule despite no external antennas? Or would the Asus N66U be a better choice?

frogbs
May 5, 2004
Well well well
So i'm trying to help my brother improve his wireless setup at his new house and i'm realizing I dont know what im doing. Right now they have the modem/wireless router from their ISP in the liviing room acting as their main access point (it is P8IF2 in the image below). They bought a Netgear WNDR4500 to put in their office to act as a second AP, right now it is connected to their router over Cat6. The problem is that they have a huge brick chimney in one part of their house that almost completely blocks any signal in their kitchen/garage. I'm trying to figure out a seamless solution for them (they use their iPhones on wireless constantly). Would the best thing be to put something like this at one end of the house, and then another in the garage? Is there a way to make it so their iphones will jump to access points as they walk through the house, or will they always have trouble switching? They're house is pretty small so i'm thinking this chimney must be lined with lead or something.



Wireless is hard.

frogbs fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Nov 23, 2012

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

frogbs posted:

So i'm trying to help my brother improve his wireless setup at his new house and i'm realizing I dont know what im doing. Right now they have the modem/wireless router from their ISP in the liviing room acting as their main access point (it is P8IF2 in the image below). They bought a Netgear WNDR4500 to put in their office to act as a second AP, right now it is connected to their router over Cat6. The problem is that they have a huge brick chimney in one part of their house that almost completely blocks any signal in their kitchen/garage. I'm trying to figure out a seamless solution for them (they use their iPhones on wireless constantly). Would the best thing be to put something like this at one end of the house, and then another in the garage? Is there a way to make it so their iphones will jump to access points as they walk through the house, or will they always have trouble switching? They're house is pretty small so i'm thinking this chimney must be lined with lead or something.



Wireless is hard.

It's easier than you think. Set the same SSID and pass phrase on each router but put them on separate channels. You could even put the 4500 on 5GHz. Any devices will seamlessly switch between them. If the iPhones are reasonably new they'll work 5 GHz.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Decius posted:

I'm replacing my TP-Link TL-WR1043ND (running DD-WRT). Since I've aquired a Macbook Pro Retina in the meantime I wonder if it is a good idea to replace the router with a Time Capsule? The TP-Link had troubles reaching my office (about 12 meter away, with 3 walls in between) with decent speed (20 Mbps), so I switched this part to a Powerline (not great, but manages 44 Mbps). Should I expect a better performance from a Time Capsule despite no external antennas? Or would the Asus N66U be a better choice?

This is one item I tend not to advise on. There is no way to ensure that you will get good wireless performance. From experience I've found my time capsule to have a weaker signal strength than my net gear 3700. I suspect that an N66U might do better, or it might not. Multiple walls and wireless aren't a good mix.

MiltonSlavemasta
Feb 12, 2009

And the cats in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
"When you coming home, dad?"
"I don't know when
We'll get together then son you know we'll have a good time then."
I'm on an AT&T DSL connection with an i3812V router. I'm connecting to the internet fine from this machine, but it shows up as not connected when I check out the router on the 192.168.1.254 address in my browser.

I can't get the port Utorrent uses to open. I've tried putting this computer in DMZplus mode, but that didn't help. I now have it set to forward traffic from the port Utorrent is assigned to my public IP, but that isn't working either. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

Binary Badger
Oct 11, 2005

Trolling Link for a decade


I was looking at the retail packaging for the NT-56u and it says it's got software capable of detecting an iOS device like an iPad or iPhone on the USB port, when it does it sends enough power to the port to kill an elephant to actually charge the iPad or iPhone at the fast charging level.

Evidently this is also available as a software patch on their PCs as well.. Interesting, I doubt I ever would want to charge my iPod on my router but it's nice to know I can if I want to..

diehlr
Apr 17, 2003
Remember not to use restricted post tags next time.

Mutar posted:

We have a winner?! I was able to keep my macbook and phone connected and streaming netflix/youtubeHD for an hour straight without issue. Then I connected my HTPC - within 5 five minutes I lose connection on all three devices, none of which even see the AEBS network as present. My HTPC is a Lenovo q150? I think is the model... its a POS but it is enough to run sabnzbd and MPC, which is/was good enough for me. I'm a fairly experienced guy with respect to basic network setup, and I've never seen anything quite like this before. Its a Nettop running win7, does anyone know what might cause this? I'm going to connect the HTPC to my old network and see if I can find a more current Wifi driver, but beyond that I'm not sure what I can do to figure it out...

EDIT: According to Lenovo I have the only version of the driver for wireless adapter. poo poo. Now what?

Hard-wire the HTPC into the old Buffalo router, assuming it is running either dd-wrt or tomato. Put Buffalo in client-bridge mode and call it a day.

Mantle
May 15, 2004

Mutar posted:

EDIT: According to Lenovo I have the only version of the driver for wireless adapter. poo poo. Now what?

One trick that sometimes works is looking up the OEM of the wireless chip. You can often find reference drivers from the OEM long after the "name brand" company puts the product into end of life.

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:

It's easier than you think. Set the same SSID and pass phrase on each router but put them on separate channels. You could even put the 4500 on 5GHz. Any devices will seamlessly switch between them. If the iPhones are reasonably new they'll work 5 GHz.

iPhones still aren't 5ghz I think? 4S and below are definitely not. iPads do 5, though.

serebralassazin
Feb 20, 2004
I wish I had something clever to say.
iPhone 5 will do 5GHZ.

frogbs
May 5, 2004
Well well well

Devian666 posted:

It's easier than you think. Set the same SSID and pass phrase on each router but put them on separate channels. You could even put the 4500 on 5GHz. Any devices will seamlessly switch between them. If the iPhones are reasonably new they'll work 5 GHz.

Do the security types need to be the same (WEP vs WPA)? One only does WPA and one only does WEP, so I think i'm screwed...

Fly
Nov 3, 2002

moral compass

Devian666 posted:

It's easier than you think. Set the same SSID and pass phrase on each router but put them on separate channels. You could even put the 4500 on 5GHz. Any devices will seamlessly switch between them. If the iPhones are reasonably new they'll work 5 GHz.

It would be a good idea to use one of them in bridged mode and have both of them on the same IP network so that they can share a DHCP server. This generally means disabling DHCP on one of the routers and not using the WAN port on the second device. Otherwise, if you get two systems with the same IP address because you roamed to the other access point, and something on the other access point has the IP address your system got from the original acces point, you might see varying degrees of network storms that may make the network at least while both systems with the same IP address are on the network.

Maybe modern switches can deal with that, but I remember taking down a whole section of a building in 1993 because I entered the wrong IP address on my X terminal.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

frogbs posted:

Do the security types need to be the same (WEP vs WPA)? One only does WPA and one only does WEP, so I think i'm screwed...

They must be the same security type from memory.

I believe the configuration is two routers with a wired connection. I assume a single dhcp server is already being used.

Dogen
May 5, 2002

Bury my body down by the highwayside, so that my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride

frogbs posted:

Do the security types need to be the same (WEP vs WPA)? One only does WPA and one only does WEP, so I think i'm screwed...

The WEP one ought to be replaced anyway, probably

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
WEP took about 1minute to crack on a slow laptop in 2006. It's not secure.

modig
Aug 20, 2002
I'm having what I think is a problem with my router's wireless, hoping to get some advice. Basically it seems to work fine most of the time, then occasionally load things slow, so sometimes video streams fine, sometimes it freezes and resumes. Sometimes we lose connection occasoinally. It seems consistent across the primary devices connected via wireless (MacBook Air, iPhone 5, Asus netbook running windows 7, MP560 printer, iPhone 4). I'm running DD-WRT v24-sp2 (07/28/10) on a Cisco WRT610 V1, and I normally use only the 2.4 GHz radio, with channel set to Auto. These symptoms seem new.

Things I've done.
1. started with some traceroute to google, noticed lots of variation in ping to my router
2. turned off the all devices except MacBook and Netbook
3. power cycled the router, aimed a house fan at it
4. ping to my router directly from my macbook air ~4 feet from router on ch 6. There is a lot of variability from run to run, but here are stats from one of the worse runs.
5. ping to my router from my desktop connected by ethernet, al 50 pings sub 1ms
6. turned on the 5GHz radio, ping form the macbook air again on ch 52
7. the DD-WRT under Status->Wireless lists my signal quality at 64%, SNR 43
8. tried changing to channel 1 and 11 in DD-WRT but it just reverts back to auto


2.4Ghz ch 6 ping posted:

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 37 packets received, 26.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.217/4.102/22.946/3.655 ms

2.4Ghz ch 6 ping repeated since the above one is particularly bad posted:

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.264/7.523/142.555/21.147 ms

5GHz ch 52 ping posted:

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.890/2.895/7.415/1.102 ms

I'm not sure what I should expect for wireless that is working really well, are my 5GHz results good?



Is this the wrong thread? Should I move to the Haus?

dpkg chopra
Jun 9, 2007

Fast Food Fight

Grimey Drawer
Is there any particular powerline networking kit you guys recommend? These seem to have the best reviews, but I figured I'd ask around first. My apartment is old as heck so I doubt it's gonna have te best wiring, so if buying slightly more expensive will help me mitigate that, I'm willing to shell out a bit more.

CuddleChunks
Sep 18, 2004

Modig -- download inSSIDer on your windows laptop and see who else is broadcasting. Then set yourself to the clearest channel.

modig
Aug 20, 2002

CuddleChunks posted:

Modig -- download inSSIDer on your windows laptop and see who else is broadcasting. Then set yourself to the clearest channel.

I figured out how to change channels in DD-WRT, you have to switch the channel width to a fixed number. Now I'm on 10 and things seem a bit better, also I put it on n-only, which seemed to help some. I'm not dropping as many packets, and most pings are 1-3ms, but it still spikes up to 100ms occasionally. I used something called Wifi Scanner from the mac app store since that was easier than running a windows program, it worked ok.

potentiometer
Dec 31, 2006

UncleGuito posted:

I'm trying to get wake on lan working so I can connect to my Windows 8 machine from my iPad while away. It works fine when the PC is in sleep but when shutdown, nothing happens. I have a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard with the most recent BIOS. I checked and it has Wake on PME enabled, but as far as I know, there aren't any other options that I need to set in the BIOS. Windows has all wake on options enabled in the network settings. Router is running Tomato 1.28, if that matters.

Any ideas?

I'm a little hazy on exact details since I was trouble shooting my wol problems last July, Wol would work flawlessly from inside the lan, but from outside the lan the issue I came up with was my router would flush the (arp?) table/cache (or wherever it stored the ip addresses) after I shutdown the pc so the router wouldn't know where to send the wol packets if the computer was not powered up. I tested this by immediatly sending wol packets to the computer after shutdown and it would power up, if I waited more than a minute or two the computer wouldn't power up. Apparently with some routers you're able to configure this table to remember the ip of devices on the lan whether or not they're powered up.

Sorry for the disjointed explanation, maybe someone who actually knows networking can explain this so it makes some sense, but it sounds like possibly your problem might be related.

Anyhow the reason I came here was to ask if anyone with the RT-N66U was having problems with wake on lan from outside of the lan?

frogbs
May 5, 2004
Well well well
My brother is thinking of picking up the Ubiquity Unifi 3-pack and doing the install himself. We're kind of new to this stuff, do you need to use shielded cable/connectors when using power over ethernet? Or is just bog standard riser cable fine?

SamDabbers
May 26, 2003



frogbs posted:

My brother is thinking of picking up the Ubiquity Unifi 3-pack and doing the install himself. We're kind of new to this stuff, do you need to use shielded cable/connectors when using power over ethernet? Or is just bog standard riser cable fine?

Regular riser cable should be sufficient. You shouldn't need shielded cable unless the run is very long and/or parallel to AC lines for a significant length. It can also help (with proper grounding) to mitigate lightning strikes, but you're probably mounting these indoors anyway.

frogbs
May 5, 2004
Well well well

SamDabbers posted:

Regular riser cable should be sufficient. You shouldn't need shielded cable unless the run is very long and/or parallel to AC lines for a significant length. It can also help (with proper grounding) to mitigate lightning strikes, but you're probably mounting these indoors anyway.

Thanks, that's good to know. All runs will be indoors and shouldn't be longer than 80ft or so.

Tapedump
Aug 31, 2007
College Slice

modig posted:

I figured out how to change channels in DD-WRT, you have to switch the channel width to a fixed number.
Do you mean you don't see / can't change the Wireless Channel drop-down normally, unless you change Channel Width from "Auto," or something similar? Huh.

I've never see a version of dd-wrt that worked like that, but my experience is limited to about only eight different devices.

The Slippery Nipple
Mar 27, 2010
My internet is acting up and being slow as all hell and reading the OP leads me to believe the modem is the problem. We are currently using a Netgear DM-111P that we got from our internet provider hooked into an Apple Airport for wireless. As the modem was free I'm assuming its lovely as hell. How more expensive a modem/router will I need to get things to a workable speed? I'm on ADSL2+ if that helps.

I know I'm a bit light on the details but I don't really know what info helps with this stuff, I just want my net to work :(

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
I'm using the same modem and setup. You'll find your airport will need a restart occasionally so that your connection runs at full speed. Restart it within the utility or under advanced on the airport app.

ADSL performance depends on the distance to the exchange and could range from 2mb to 25mb depending on proximity. Then an the exchange the available bandwidth depends on how many other users there using it. What performance do you get when you run speedtest.net?

If you are having other problems like with wireless we need more information. What wireless devices are you using? What type of airport are you using? What problems are you experiencing?

Basically we need more details.

Devian666 fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Nov 26, 2012

Inspector_666
Oct 7, 2003

benny with the good hair

The Slippery Nipple posted:

My internet is acting up and being slow as all hell and reading the OP leads me to believe the modem is the problem. We are currently using a Netgear DM-111P that we got from our internet provider hooked into an Apple Airport for wireless. As the modem was free I'm assuming its lovely as hell. How more expensive a modem/router will I need to get things to a workable speed? I'm on ADSL2+ if that helps.

Just an Apple Airport? As in, the one that looks like a flattened out chocolate chip? If so, that's almost certainly a reason you're having issues. Those things are ancient and really like to become super-lovely with age.

Not to say your modem may not be hosed too, but if you're using a chip-style Airport, you're gonna want to upgrade that regardless.

The Slippery Nipple
Mar 27, 2010
Im using this:

Apple Airport, its also 500G external back-up drive.

Using ozspeedtest.com it sayd my line speed is 191 kbps and my download speed is 24kbs. I am in Australia and our internet is pretty lovely compared to wait you get in the states, but I can't even load 10 seconds of video with out it loving up.

Its usually only my laptop in use, a macbook.

Our internet used to be fine but around a month or two ago it started doing this, we've just switched to a new provider, who admittedly was not the best choice (Dodo) and in the process have changed from a ADSL 1 modem to the Netgear one, but have seen little change in performance.

The Slippery Nipple fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Nov 26, 2012

Gism0
Mar 20, 2003

huuuh?

The Slippery Nipple posted:

Im using this:

Apple Airport, its also 500G external back-up drive.

Using ozspeedtest.com it sayd my line speed is 191 kbps and my download speed is 24kbs. I am in Australia and our internet is pretty lovely compared to wait you get in the states, but I can't even load 10 seconds of video with out it loving up.

Its usually only my laptop in use, a macbook.

Our internet used to be fine but around a month or two ago it started doing this, we've just switched to a new provider, who admittedly was not the best choice (Dodo) and in the process have changed from a ADSL 1 modem to the Netgear one, but have seen little change in performance.

You need to narrow down the problem, first check your ADSL connection to see what speed you should be getting, to do that you need to log in to your Netgear DM-111P, the default address for this is http://192.168.0.1/ (user: admin pass: password) then from the Maintenance section of the main menu, click ADSL Line Status, it'll tell you the up/down line rate.

If that speed seems decent enough then try connecting your computer directly to the netgear with an ethernet cable and turn off your wifi, if it's any faster using that then the wifi is your problem.

DoDo are the worst ISP I've ever used, we had endless problems with their ADSL. Luckily our area got fibre and the problems stopped :)

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Work throught the trouble shooting. It still sounds like your time capsule needs a reboot from inside the software as I stated above. There's a possibility that it could also be a part of the issue as it's possibly 3 or 4 years old.

The Slippery Nipple
Mar 27, 2010
We had to reboot the Airport in order get it to recognise the modem when we got it, so I don't think that would fix it, though its age could be a problem.

Looking at the Modem speed it says downstream is 19477kbps, up is 760kbps. I hooked plugged the ethernet into the computer but it said that the ethernet was using a different IP address, so it wouldn't hook up.

Yea I think we're supposed to getting fibre too but god knows how long that crap will take.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
You should give a time capsule a reboot every few weeks otherwise it will slow down considerably. I'm not saying this because it's something nice to try out I'm telling you to do this and see if it helps. We can help you troubleshoot but if you don't try the first step it's not possible to help you. If you try this I can guide you through direct connection to the modem though given it's new and this model of modem is quite reliable it's unlikely to be the issue.

Gothmog1065
May 14, 2009
What is a good 5port or so switch that is cheap? Anything that supports gigabit or are there ones that are better? Going to run a switch behind each of TVs to help connect all of our stuff hard line. Is there anything I should beware when getting a switch?

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Pretty much all gigabit switches are the same these days. Manufacturer generally doesn't matter. If you are just running media then a generic 5 port will be fine.

The only time you step up price for switches is if you have a need for more than 2 gigabits of internal switch bandwidth, vlans or quality of service features.

The Slippery Nipple
Mar 27, 2010

Devian666 posted:

You should give a time capsule a reboot every few weeks otherwise it will slow down considerably. I'm not saying this because it's something nice to try out I'm telling you to do this and see if it helps. We can help you troubleshoot but if you don't try the first step it's not possible to help you. If you try this I can guide you through direct connection to the modem though given it's new and this model of modem is quite reliable it's unlikely to be the issue.

We only got the modem last week and I called up the Apple support line and had the guy talk me through rebooting and changing the settings etc. so haven't I already done that? If I am mistaken I will give it a go.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

The Slippery Nipple posted:

We only got the modem last week and I called up the Apple support line and had the guy talk me through rebooting and changing the settings etc. so haven't I already done that? If I am mistaken I will give it a go.

Something I discovered recently is that the restart option in the airport utility seems to fix a number of time capsule quirks which a restart by power cycling doesn't seem to fix. A curious quirk but this is how I fix any issues relating to my time capsule.

e: I've also found that to restart my network I have to restart the modem first and wait for it to connect first then start the time capsule. Whereas other routers aren't so picky.

The Slippery Nipple
Mar 27, 2010

Devian666 posted:

Something I discovered recently is that the restart option in the airport utility seems to fix a number of time capsule quirks which a restart by power cycling doesn't seem to fix. A curious quirk but this is how I fix any issues relating to my time capsule.

e: I've also found that to restart my network I have to restart the modem first and wait for it to connect first then start the time capsule. Whereas other routers aren't so picky.

Yea we did it using the restart button on the utility because the little pin-hole restart wouldn't work for some reason.

When I try to connect my computer directly to the modom via ethernet to see if its faster it says it cant connect because the ethernet is using a different IP adress, any idea how I can fix that so I can see if the wireless is the problem?

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
Shut down your computer. Change the plugs. Then restart your computer. Leave it a few minutes for the network to settle down. I'm assuming you're using Windows 7 as it gets very upset with any network changes. Open the network and sharing centre. When the network is having connectivity issues to the internet there is typically a red cross on the internet connection indicated with the internet icon grayed out. Click on the red cross and windows will attempt to fix the connection issue. Often this will resolve the issue without clicking on any troubleshooting options.

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CuddleChunks
Sep 18, 2004

modig posted:

I figured out how to change channels in DD-WRT, you have to switch the channel width to a fixed number. Now I'm on 10 and things seem a bit better, also I put it on n-only, which seemed to help some. I'm not dropping as many packets, and most pings are 1-3ms, but it still spikes up to 100ms occasionally. I used something called Wifi Scanner from the mac app store since that was easier than running a windows program, it worked ok.

You shouldn't have to fiddle channel-width. 20MHz is standard for 802.11b/g operation. Fancy N stuff can sometimes take advantage of 10MHz channels or be a huge goddamn hog and splatter its gross self over 40MHz of space.

If you're way out in the country and have nothing but N-capable gear then firing up the old 40MHz channels is great. If you're in the city, :argh:

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