The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date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 The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

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Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

My boss has had me playing around with DD-WRT running on a Linksys E3000 to get VLANs setup for demo units/proof of concept/possible sale stuff for clients. I'm rather proud of the work I've done getting wired and wireless VLANs setup and doing some rudimentary iptables stuff, but we need beefier hardware before we try putting it in somebody's office.

I've looked into MikroTik stuff, but my boss isn't really sold on it since it would require us to stock a bunch of MikroTik routers in case we get failures and managing MicroTik seems kind of hard and I'm not actually that good at computers.

Is there any DD-WRT compatible router out there with 256MB+ of RAM and wireless? It seems like 128 is the best you can get in the consumer arena right now, although I'm finding it super hard to actually find RAM data for most routers.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 23:26

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:56

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

CuddleChunks posted:

The gently caress you need that much RAM for? Let me rephrase - what crazy rear end consumer router needs that much RAM? A border router, hell yes but not something for customers.

I don't know. My boss is insisting on "MORE RAM!" just because, although we're going to use the E3000 I've already setup to run our entire shop so maybe he'll come off of it then. There is a new ASUS (I think?) high-end home router with 128MB which he'll probably buy at least one of, he just wanted me to look around.

quote:

It can be daunting at first but they are sooooo pretty deep down inside. VLANs and bridging and wireless and routing and true border routing (BGP) and crazy routing (OSPF) are all supported out of the box. The hardware is cheap and if you need beefier boxes they are available as well.

On the other hand if you don't have any experience with them they can be weird and offputting. They don't have a cuddly web interface like DD-WRT (though the newest 5.x series has made progress on that front). It's a gamble either way you go. If you stick with Linksys and DD-WRT you may get a decent price/performance ratio as well as having an easy path for replacement units most of the time. Mikrotiks are definitely hampered by having a really flaky supply chain.

Good luck whichever you choose.

I would like to play with the MikroTik stuff for sure, but cost and supply are huge factors so unless I buy one for home, it'll probably just remain a pipe dream.

EDIT: Also the lack of MikroTik routers with multiple LAN ports and wifi makes that pretty much a non-starter.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Mar 7, 2012

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 01:23

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Our customers hate spending money on anything. We have businesses who still ask why they shouldn't just go buy a computer from Best Buy to be their server since the ones we're quoting them are "too expensive."

Honestly I'm not even entirely sure what these routers are gonna be used for exactly, I was just told to track something down if I could.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 02:50

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Devian666 posted:

Don't worry we all have customers that don't understand the difference between value and cost. The problem is you have to give them what they're asking for and the knowledge that it could completely poo poo itself and cost them money.

Oh, we do that. Then they get mad that we're charging them to fix it. There have been people who insist on doing idiotic things and we'll explain step by step how it's going to break, then it happens and they call and yell at us about it.

I feel like I'm derailing the thread at this point though, since my initial question has more or less been answered.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 03:01

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I have never heard of those GE Hubs, is it just a big enclosure with a switch in it?

# ¿ Mar 8, 2012 03:37

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Tapedump posted:

Do I really need a punch down tool if I'm only installing a small handful of keystone jacks? $20-odd bucks isn't bad for a cheap, decent one, but I'd like to think there's something else that will do the job (other than a disposable tool).

For some of them you can use a butter knife. But you'd be better served getting a punchdown tool really.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2012 23:32

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Dogen posted:

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).

Moving the router is a good idea anyway. Basement routers are the devil.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2012 01:54

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

In DD-WRT, if I want to have a wired port and a wireless network on the same VLAN, how would I go about doing that? I already know how to create the VLANs, but not how to join a wired and wireless into the same one. Is it as simple as just creating a bridge for the two connections? This is on an E3000 running V24 preSP2 Build: 16785.

The VLAN documentation on the DD-WRT wiki is pretty incomprehensible to me.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Apr 3, 2012

# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 00:39

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

CuddleChunks posted:

I'm pretty sure you'll need to bridge the interfaces. Tag them as being on the same VLAN and you should be in good shape.

It ended up being dead simple: create 2 extra bridges, assign a VLAN to each along with wl0 and wl0.1, tag both and add a couple of lines to the firewall rules to stop the bridges from talking to each other.

poxin posted:

I have a stock Netgear WNDR3700v3 set up at work on a fiber line. Probably a dozen or so iPads and a dozen other computers connected via wifi. Would there be any particular reason why on 5G, I get the full speed of the fiber line (30/30) but only about half that on the 2.4 network? I know it's more than capable of providing that speed over 2.4 since my little WRT54GL at home can do it..

What kind of security do you have on each network?

# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 00:18

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

poxin posted:

WPA2 AES on both.

Well there goes my theory.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 00:23

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

The difference between switches and routers for 99% of applications is the lack of DHCP on switches. I think you should be fine with your setup since you have a router on the network, and as long as you hook up just the switch, modem and router at first so that the modem gives the WAN IP to the router and then everything else pulls from the router, it should work. Worst case you put the router in the basement and have to buy something to act as a WAP on the 2nd floor.

EDIT: If you don't have a static IP from you ISP it may get annoying though, since when the lease renews one of your devices may end up with the WAN IP and then nothing will work until you reset it. I think. Honestly I'm not too sure about the logic routers use when they hand out the IP if the first thing they hit is a switch.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Apr 5, 2012

# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 01:30

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Hiyoshi posted:

Will it work if he has the cable from the downstairs switch plugged only into the WAN port of his router? I thought that the DHCP server only served IPs to the LAN ports. If so, he would need another switch upstairs with that router so that:
code:
                                           |---- Upstairs Router WAN Port
Downstairs Switch ---- Upstairs Switch -----
                                           |---- Upstairs Router LAN Port

That's a very good point, and you're most likely correct. There may be some way to work around it using DD-WRT or something but it's most likely more hassle than it's worth.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Apr 5, 2012

# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 02:08

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

It seems like most dedicated WAPs are still more expensive than a router anyway.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2012 22:40

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

bunky posted:

I'm not quite sure how to tell the difference, sorry. Everyone is losing access for around 10-15 seconds at a time, every 10 minutes or so, and then it reconnects.

Just for future reference, the way to check is when you lose your internet connection, open a command prompt and ping your router with a -t flag. If you can ping it without issue during the outage, the problem is with the modem or something further upstream. If you drop any of the packets to the router, it's a router issue.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2012 03:07

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

For basic stuff, DD-WRT isn't any more complicated to use than stock firmware. I'd say it's easier in a lot of cases since the tab names are actually relevant to the options under them, which I can't say about a lot of stock stuff.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 03:14

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Rexxed posted:

I believe the thread consensus is that the airport express is pretty bad, while its big brother is decent (the airport extreme I think?) There were some recent posts about it in the last couple of weeks. A better router would probably help a lot, being in the same room and having connection issues is indicative of a problem.

The Express is a serviceable WAP, but a terrible router.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 15:30

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

ryanbruce posted:

Currently, the Comcast modem unit is handling the DHCP/DNS and the WRT54GL's are upstairs and downstairs as just access points. I'm curious if one of these WRT54GL routers (which I'll stick DD-WRT on) taking over as DHCP/NAT/etc would make my life easier or if I should leave it as is. I would disable the wireless on it and use a different AP for the downstairs office.

Is the combo unit missing any features/abilities you need for DHCP/DNS or is it having issues? If not, there's not really a good reason to replace it.

EDIT: Also that setup offends me deeply for being stuck at G/100 speeds :argh:

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Apr 27, 2012

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 02:51

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

ryanbruce posted:

I work with what I'm given with

Yeah, my house is still stuck at 100 wired speeds and I'm not re-running poo poo so it will always be that way. Luckily there is 0 LAN sharing activity and it's not like my internet connection is being bottlenecked by it.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 03:38

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

FISHMANPET posted:

Can't you just replace the switches? Unless you're house is run with Cat4?

Oh right, Cat-5 can do that speed, not just 6+. The house is probably 5e anyway.

I could replace the switch and router, but it's not really worth it, and I would need a 24+ port switch. I really need to tone out the wiring in my house, since I'm pretty sure the majority of stuff I terminated and plugged into the existing switch doesn't actually lead anywhere. I was just going by cable color.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Apr 27, 2012

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 04:04

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

You could probably do it by setting up a DDNS/No-IP account and streaming out to the internet and back. It's a pretty terrible solution becuase it's gonna be slow as hell and if you have bandwidth caps you're hosed.

You could also try to get in with one of the building IT people and get them to turn off the port isolation for your apartment :v:

# ¿ May 4, 2012 01:30

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Oh right, I actually kind of glossed over the Xbox part. I'm not sure if it's possible in that situation.

# ¿ May 4, 2012 02:03

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I just put Tomato RAF on my home router because of all of the poo poo-talking of DD-WRT in this thread (and also because I have never played with it before) and it's pretty slick. I did prefer the dead-simple QoS stuff in DD-WRT, although the default QoS settings in Tomato seem to be doing just fine.

EDIT: I want to play with SNMP on it, but it apparently involves setting up CIFS stuff. Mainly I want to know what I need to do to not create a gaping security hole, I know somebody in a thread recently was laughing about people having "open" CIFS shares.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 06:16 on May 10, 2012

# ¿ May 10, 2012 01:31

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

NOTinuyasha posted:

The E3000 in particular is basically defective and that should probably be noted. Other Linksys products do have poor cooling, but the E3000 is basically unusable for some people.

I haven't had any issues with E3000s outside of a single refurbished unit that would constantly reboot itself.

# ¿ May 20, 2012 18:45

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Is there any non-MikroTik consumer router that does VLANs without needing DD-WRT? That's really the only reason I need to use it at all.

# ¿ May 22, 2012 03:17

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

YO MAMA HEAD posted:

What are the possibilities of hooking up a networked hard drive to the 360's USB port and being able to just transfer files to it over Ethernet? I don't currently have a NAS hard drive, so I'd be looking for a cheap enclosure.

Our current setup is a confusing double-router thing to accomodate for the Airport Express's lack of local Ethernet ports.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Just setup the non-AEBS router as a switch and get rid of the double-NAT issue.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2012 03:21

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Uber Kosh posted:

Edit: Resolved.

I was going to reply to your original post with suggestions, so just for my own curiosity, did turning off PPPoE on the computer and using DHCP fix your issues?

# ¿ Jun 10, 2012 03:15

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

They're still making WRT54GLs? I didn't know you could have one that was just a year old anymore.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2012 03:35

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Unless you really need 3rd-party firmware or a browser interface, the Airport Extreme is the best thing you can buy right now in the consumer market as far as I can tell. The transmit power is ridiculous and as have already been posted, the specs are stupendous.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2012 05:02

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I need to replace the WAP in my kitchen. I'm planning on just getting an Airport Express, but I haven't kept up on the access point scene at all. It would be wired into the network, so it doesn't need any wireless repeating capability or anything.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2012 23:17

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Yeah, we have the new Expresses in my shop, so I've seen them and set them up. I really like the new look and having an actual cord of them is pretty great a lot of the time.

I didn't realize they were still only 100 mbit though. That's not a total dealbreaker since the rest of our network equipment is still only 100 mbit for the most part, but I would like to start switching over to gigabit, so buying new equipment (especially at Airport prices) without it seems useless.

I guess I'll just go with my original plan of buying a mid-range router and setting it up as an AP.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2012 23:38

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Tres Burritos posted:

I'm no expert or anything, but that cabinet looks like it gets really hot. Maybe some ventilation might be in order?

I'm pretty sure I just put a bunch of stuff in that same model cabinet, and there's an exhaust fan on the top, plus lots of perforations around the glass up front. It's not that bad inside.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2012 00:34

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

It seems like the phone service is just totally loving up in terms of the "ring" data, for lack of the knowledge to state that better.

I would try setting up some QoS stuff on the router to try and limit the data use of the iTalkBB stuff, which will probably take some fiddling to get the right balance of call quality and bandwidth usage.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2012 04:14

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Chick3n posted:

It is a travel router though, so I have no idea how good it would be for home use. Googling it seems like what you want is a router that supports "Wireless ISP Mode" or just Wireless Bridging.

Wireless Bridging might not always cover what he's looking for, since it may just mean that it can take a wireless connection and convert it to wired. Repeater/Repeating Bridge is the term DD-WRT uses for exactly what he's trying to do.

Also SnoPuppy realize that in this setup you're going to be double-NATed, which may interfere with certain applications.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2012 00:17

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Clown Meadows posted:

In using DD-WRT for wireless bridging, do the two routers have to be the exact same model or can they be completely different brand/models?

As long as they can both run DD-WRT it should work fine, but since they're both running DD-WRT it's a crapshoot.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2012 05:24

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

manero posted:

It's probably going off the MAC address of the wifi. Try changing it to the MAC of your old router's wifi hardware.

Would that even matter? Isn't the geolocation just related to the WAN IP?

Check the address they give you here using your WAN IP: http://www.whatismyip.com/tools/ip-address-lookup.asp

We recently got a Static IP put in where I work, and the pool they gave us is geolocated to Quebec (we're in southern New York), but using that lookup tool it actually shows both the Quebec location and the proper one, so I don't know what the gently caress.

I would say call your ISP about it, but if your issue is just "It's mistagging my Facebook updates!" I doubt they're gonna do anything.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2012 01:03

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

GobiasIndustries posted:

Also, should I decide to buy a new router for whatever reason, if I set it up with the same SSID & password, all machines familiar with the old router should detect the network seamlessly, correct?

You need to use the same SSID, password, and the same encryption type. It's the last bit that usually slips people up, especially since some newer routers default to WPA2 or Mixed without really telling you.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2012 18:57

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

EDIT: Whoops I didn't read back enough.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2012 04:41

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Also, something that gets overlooked a lot: consider putting your demarc on the first floor, centrally located. So many people put it in some dank corner of the basement and it means the router that goes there will probably be worthless, wireless-wise. If you do the drops correctly, setting up APs will be trivial, but you might as well get some extra use out of the (hopefully) kickass router you buy to run the whole thing.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2012 20:04

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Farecoal posted:

That reminds me, is Clear/Clearwire considered a lovely ISP? My dad got into a two-year contract with them and doesn't want to pay the termination fees.

My friend just moved to Brooklyn and the apartment she moved into has Clearwire and she hates it. I don't know why, exactly, but there's my anecdote.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2012 02:58

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:56

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Citycop posted:

Screw wireless. I'm going back old school, it just works.

I loving hate nothing more than going into a 5k sq ft mansion that has just been completed and find that there is absolutely no Ethernet run anywhere and they expect me to be able to set wireless up everywhere with just a single router in the basement.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2012 22:50

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