Because Everyone Needs a Router | Hacker News Reader

Because Everyone Needs a Router

codinghorror.com

73 pointsduck41 comments

I find it disturbing that a supposedly perfectly functioning piece of hardware was replaced without reason. Yes, it's just $80 and he's a geek. But he never explained what was wrong with it other than it gave him the jeebies because the hardware was 3 years old and the firmware one year old. Looks like a geek status symbol thing to me.

The obvious answers are:

- hardware failure of the previous device

- hardware that can't keep up - an older WRT54GL class device will have trouble routing more than 20-25Mbit/s, which is getting pretty close to what is available from consumer level internet service

- Local speed. Gigabit wired and N-wireless are both valid reasons to upgrade, if you're going from 10/100 and G-wireless.

- Power usage - if you need gigabit networking and have very few devices, it makes sense to not run an older router and a gig switch - consolidating to one device is power efficient and probably pulls less power than older devices.

There are probably plenty of other reasons, but these came to mind immediately.

There was one reason about range of the wireless that he mentioned indirectly.

I read it like an infomercial, wondering the whole time what kind of pricing structure he uses and how he establishes the relationships with the vendors; does he initiate or do they contact him first? I just assumed that part of the story was fabricated and included so it didn't read so much like an infomercial. Maybe I'm too cynical.

I do agree with you on that one. You have to realize that Buffalo has a business relationship with DD-WRT. DD-WRT licenses their firmware to Buffalo. So part of the promotion dove-tails a lot with Buffalo. But, there are two different manufacturers here, but the Netgear is priced as more expensive.

I felt the same way at first, but later he finally mentioned a problem: He was having range issues.

He never says that's why he did it, and it appears he just got tired of everything being exactly the same. He even complains that there were no firmware updates. But he did have at least 1 problem that he was confident the new router would solve.

Speaking of range issues: Is there a good way to do multi-WAP installs in a house? My router is situated right in the center of the house, and the fridge blocks out the backyard.

To my limited knowledge:

1) Easiest, most bullet-proof solution is to wire a central router to more routers acting as wireless gateways. If the stock firmware doesn't support this, dd-wrt does with ease.

2) The open source solution: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WDS_Linked_router_netwo...

3) The apple solution: http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

Yes, the hardware isn't very old at three years, but one year without security patches is a pretty long time, considering that most people rely on their router for DNS-caching and such.

I'm not really a big fan of Linux for routers; too hard to administer. I run OpenBSD on an old Mac Mini (with a $15 USB Ethernet adapter), and it's the best router I've ever had.

(OK, it won't boot unless I shove a resistor into the DVI port. But it's an Apple product, so it's not expected to be useful for anything other than buying iTunes movies.)

Anyway, with OpenBSD I have a fast OpenVPN endpoint, full IPv6 support for my whole home network via a Hurricane Electric tunnel, flexible QoS, and of course, proper firewalling and NAT that actually works. The consumer-level router I had before was a joke -- even when I put my main machine into the "DMZ", it still blocked my IPv6 tunnel. What a piece of shit. (ddwrt probably doesn't have this problem, but pf is still nicer than iptables.)

With that thing gone, I can browse kame.net in all its dancing-turtle glory!

My favorite feature is the QoS. If I'm downloading a TV show on my TV and something else on the network decides it wants to download something, I keep enough bandwidth allocated to the TV to keep the stream from being interrupted. And, I prioritize ACKs over all other traffic, so I get full download speed even when the uplink is saturated. And, my ssh sessions stay interactive no matter how much other traffic there is.

My only complaint is power consumption -- the thing runs pretty hot even when it's not loaded, and that's a waste of electricity. But a computer I already had was cheaper than a Soekris device, so...

Core to post your config files somewhere?

Sure: http://github.com/jrockway/openbsd-router-config

In what universe are the web GUIs of tomato and dd-wrt harder to administer than your unix system?

I'll take http://www.polarcloud.com/img/ssbn100.png running on $50 hardware any day. And yes, it does QoS (http://www.polarcloud.com/img/ssqosg108.png).

Clicking stuff in the GUI is fun, but hard to maintain. Who knows what security problems you're exposing. (CGI scripts written in C and sh? I think the entire Internet crashed in the early 90s because of that...)

The problem I've had with cheap routers (Linux or otherwise) is that their state table fills up and then it stops accepting connections. I was at a conference with flaky Wi-Fi once, and kept losing my ssh connections. Eventually, after only about 10 dropped connections and IP changes, the router's state table filled up and the thing was dead to the world. No ping, no web interface, no routing, no ssh. Dead.

And then when the states expired the next day, it was back again.

This is unacceptable.

I almost bought a new router recently because the connection was so unreliable, but then I decided to at least poke around a bit. Turns out that even if reception strength is shown to be very good, there can still be other problems killing the connection.

In my case, apparently the external monitor attached to my MacBook would disturb the signal somehow. Luckily, simply switching the channel fixed it. It just never occured to me to switch the channel because signal strength was always good.

What amazed me most is that I was able to find a solution even though I had 0 idea on how to debug a WLAN network. Buying a router with a stronger signal was my only idea initally.

Blog article: http://blog.blinker.net/2010/09/12/fixing-wlan-connectivity-...

I hate to be that guy, but as far as I know neither Tomato nor DD-WRT are fully open source. Both have some proprietary component (and not just wireless firmware blobs). The only fully open source distribution I know of is OpenWRT. I have that + X-WRT on my router, but it's about a year or so out of date. I absolute love it! A friend of mine just installed it on his router with the Luci front end and he was just raving about it to me.

Their source distribution is really nice too--they keep everything in a sort of ports style makefile setup. When you get the source and build, it ends up compiling the appropriate gcc for cross compiling (a bunch of times for different libraries), etc. It was all very pleasant.

I don't think I've replaced my router in about 5 years.

Could somebody give me a reason why I should?

It runs open-wrt, it does NAT, it does packet switching, it powers on in a few seconds.

What else could your router possibly do for you?

Routers are refrigerators, if they're still keeping things cool, don't touch them.

Wireless 802.11N

Its got plenty of bandwidth for most internet delivered video purposes, without hogging your entire house's bandwidth. Theoretically it could pipe full Blu-Ray streams across your home network though YMMV

I've had an old Linksys WRT54G for years running DD-WRT and thats the reason I'm upgrading.

Further qualification: Dual band models. Run separate channels on 2.4 and 5 GHz. Assuming you have upstream bandwidth and/or local traffic to warrant it. Also, 5 GHz may get you away from interference from neighbors' older equipment (router, or crap-leaky cordless phone or whatever else is noising up the 2.4 band).

(Be careful, though; some equipment has limited support for dual band operation, which you only learn from hard to find fine print or third party online sources. E.g. Only one band at a time. Or degrading all connections to G if any of them are G. Or effective throttling due to an under-powered processor. As a couple of examples I encountered a year or a bit more ago while helping someone buy one.)

As for me, still on my 54GL -- good enough for my limited needs at home.

It is a specialized computer - if the new model is faster and the old one isn't fast enough anymore, you upgrade.

tl;dr Jeff discovers router mods and open source firmware

...and seize the opportunity to feed his readership a few more affiliate links. Hehe, I still remember his post about SSDs, this one was really bad.

I have never owned a netgear router that stayed alive for more then a week or two before requiring a reboot. I will never go back to them.

I think that it is a cache overflow(maybe dns or arp) that is causing the problems in cheaper routers. I upgraded my linksys to dd-wrt and all the problems went away. I haven't had to reboot it in probably a year or so now. Before I did that I was rebooting every Sunday or so.

My experience with Netgears has been that once you reach a certain level of bandwidth usage, the router is unable to cope with it, freezes up, and requires a hard reboot. I've hit this point with a WRT54G running dd-wrt as well, but I've never hit it with my Airport Extreme.

There is a huge difference between the various wrt45g models. For example the "L" model has a lot more memory, and will prevent this situation. Firmware can only help a crappy router handle intensive activity like torrenting to a limited degree.

Tomato solves all problems (or DD-WRT, if that's your thing). My buffalo router had the same problem. For about a month, I was restarting it twice a week.

Then I installed Tomato on it. It's been six months and I don't think I've even looked at the router. It's fantastic.

Mistake numero uno when it comes to consumer grade networking equipment: thinking that brand means anything.

Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, Buffalo, pretty much any brand you can think of do not really do the heavy lifting of the design work on anything you're going to find on the shelf at Best Buy. Instead, they take reference designs from chipset vendors like Broadcom, Atheros, or RALink then brand the firmware and put the whole think in whatever plastic package they want.

What really matters when it comes to consumer networking gear is what internal chipset the manufacturer is using on a particular model; this can be tricky because manufacturers have been known to do things like completely change the internal hardware while retaining the same model number. Either way, the chipset is what's going to determine what the unit is capable of, whether it's hackable, and what problems if may have. Whether it says Netgear or Linksys on the box is of relatively little consequence.

(Though I will admit I tend to look at Buffalo gear first when I'm shopping simply because they're pretty good at putting out inexpensive, hackable hardware. As others have noted, their factory firmware on some newer models is actually a branded version of DD-WRT).

I use Asus WL 500GP with Oleg's firmware http://oleg.wl500g.info/, http://code.google.com/p/wl500g/ Learning how to cross compile my own programs for it using http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ was a worthy experience. It's amazingly slow producing the cross compiling environment. It's tricky. I experienced the effect of http://xkcd.com/456/

I found this timely as I am in the same situation, although I did do a brief stint of setting up the x86 option he also mentions. In the end I decided it just wasn't worth the hassle. I'm happy to see this article because I had been wondering what commercial router to get to run dd-wrt. I got burned on this once before when I bought a Netgear on sale at best buy a few years ago: it looked like the same as a model that ran dd-wrt and I even got an assurance from the sales person that it would run it, but when I got it home discovered that Netgear had replaced the inwards with a cheaper, incompatible version of the CPU and half the RAM, without updating the model number. Grrrr. I felt like they were taking advantage of the popularity of the open source mod to pull a bait and switch. I'm happy to see that routers now actually print the open source compatibility on the box. It feels like a rare victory.

You've had to be careful about this for years. There has been 10 revisions of the WRT54G and something like half of them don't work with DD-WRT/OpenWRT.

"Thanks to a wide variety of mature commodity hardware choices, plus infinitely and perpetually updated open source router firmware, I'm happy to report that now everyone can have a great router."

No, not really. When's the last time his mother or mother-in-law flashed their router to Tomato or even just updated the stock firmware? I've been running Tomato on a WRT54G for years now, and DD-WRT before then, and I love it, but you can't expect a normal person to have any interest in that. They buy whatever is shiny and/or the Best Buy guy tells them is good.

I've had very bad luck with routers. Apple Airport Expresses freeze up every week or two, I bought one horrible Netgear, etc.

Finally I did some searching and found that Buffalo makes routers which ship with stock openwrt firmware.

I bought one (it was $70) and it's worked wonderfully. It has only crashed once in the 3 months I've owned it.

I wish I'd kept the original Linksys router I bought 10 years ago and replaced when I upgraded to "G" a few years later. It never crashed.

Apple's AirPort works fine for me at the moment. I just wish that its support of IPv6 included DHCPv6…

What I don't understand is that most ADSL-modems include a router? I usually set it up in bridge-mode, like I did with the ancient Zyxel 650.

Funny development: I will now have to replace the modem because it has become the limiting factor: The maximum throughput of the modem is about 60% of what my current ADSL connection could handle.

FTA: "The magic router formula these days is a combination of commodity hardware and open-source firmware. I'm so enamored of this one-two punch combo, in fact, I might even say it represents the future."

I don't see a need for all the hedging. Commodity hardware + open source already "won" in various applications over the past couple decades. Here's another.

Sent from my iPad (just kidding)

ddwrt is pretty neat. I install it on most of the consumer class routers that I put in. That said, they tend to stick to the kernel source provided by the manufacturer with their userland and GUI bits tacked on. This sort of amalgamated approach works faster, but is harder long-term to support, IMO. There also have been some questionable licensing practices in the past with ddwrt - this is somewhat common in the alternate firmware community, starting with Sveasoft. There have also been some issues with browser compatibility (broken in webkit, mainly) for certain versions of ddwrt.

Personally, I think the future is going to be for the tech savvy to build their own firmware with OpenWRT (http://openwrt.org/), which lets you building from more current linux kernel sources (thus you're more likely to get patches to kernel level security issues), and pick your packages. It currently isn't as smooth of an install as ddwrt, but it's getting there quickly.

Has anyone benchmarked/stress tested dd-wrt? I worked at a place that had sometimes >50 wireless users actively using the net.

A lot of the coffee shops near me use it for the wireless offering. It can get slow but I think it has more to do with the dsl that they are using.

The newer routers have more memory. I think that was the main problem with the router crashing.

I use DD-WRT, and like it, but 2 weeks ago my router lost every single setting. Was not happy.

Get a WNDR3700 and install OpenWRT on it. It has gigabit, dual radios for wireless and is a pretty modern and robust router. There's also little danger of bricking it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com