Even this isn't enough. I remember arguing with a network card ages ago under Linux, for which they provided no drivers, Linux's autodetect didn't work because it saw it as a card that it knew had a different chipset, and it was virtually impossible to figure out how to fix it.

If you've reengineered a product, give it a different name, at least in firmware.

Draytek?
I've had good experiences with their hardware. Good stuff, incredible amount of user settings. A decent Draytek router costs about 2 to 3 times the amount of what an 'high end' Linksys or D-Link costs. (so that's what I would call 'mid-range') Well worth it IMO. Never failed me yet.

Perhaps I'm unfamiliar with this type of equipment, but how the heck do you buy their products?

I've always bought their stuff online. Almost every online shop carries their products in Europe.

Edit: what I also like about DrayTek: you can browse almost every firmware of their products when you select a product and then click the 'live web demo' link in to the left of the product. Eg. This is the live web demo for their newest router, the Vigor 2110 series : click.

Interesting. It appears that they have almost zero presence in US online stores. Their products aren't on Newegg, which is almost my sole source for computer equipment these days, and a quick search on Pricegrabber turns up nothing for them.

It does appear that there are some products on Amazon, but it doesn't look like they have the latest stuff.

And on a side note: why does almost all networking equipment look like complete crap? I understand that you're not really going to put this stuff on display or anything, but nearly all of it (that Draytek stuff included) looks awful. There are some exceptions (this Netgear is pretty nice), but those are rare...

Yeah, their US web site is kind of bleak. No "where to buy" link, and a desperate plea for resellers:


This is concerning, though:


Sounds like they want to sell through the dreaded "value-added reseller".

Hmmm

After giving out on my old Netgear WAP that couldn't cope with more than half a dozen wifi clients I tried that Thomson that turned out to be a pile of crap.

After the Thomson I spent a lot more and got a Draytek 2820n. I have to say I am underwhelmed.

For example I had to give up using the DHCP server on it. I tried all sort of things, but I could not get it to give out addresses to wifi clients reliably. It also crashed a lot until I upgraded the firmware.

When I did upgrade the firmware the web UI became unreliable when accessed over https, you have to hit refresh a few times to get it to work if not used in a while and if you leave the browser open on the routers page it can cause the router to slow down and crash.

It wasn't quite the premium experience I was hoping for. A read of their UK support forum suggests I'm not the only one with these specific problems either.

So let me ask you folks this:

Which router would you suggest for supporting 100 people, with no price barrier? How about for under $1000? Under $500?

Well, no one's ever been fired for buying Cisco. If you want to put a price limit on it, I've been pretty happy with ~$500 Sonicwalls, I've got two deployed, and have never heard a single complaint. They want support money for continued firmware upgrades however, which does bother me, but the product is pretty solid.

By router, do you mean wireless? Because most of the "high"-end stuff is not going to be all-in-one. That is, you'll have a separate access point and router.

I haven't by any means tried everything, but the only access point I've never had any trouble with in an office environment is a Cisco, an 1131.

As far as routers themselves go, I've never had any significant problems (quibbles, yes) with any of the major players: Cisco, HP, Juniper, Foundry (now part of Brocade), Extreme, … I'm sure that there are more I'm missing.

For firewalls, all I can suggest is to stay away from Cisco. Their firewalls are just complete junk.

Yes, I just meant routers, but thanks for the access point recommendations. I may have to outfit a building with access points at some point in the future. That might be a post for later, though.

So, forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but are most higher-end routers not also firewalls?

Most, if not all, firewalls are routers, but not all routers are firewalls, no.

These days, you usually see a few classes of devices in the commercial networking arena:

• Low-end routers, often with "odd" network interfaces, like a T1 interface, used as edge routers.
• Low-end switches that still generally have more features than you'd see in consumer switches, like 802.1Q VLANs and STP. You tend to find these in remote network closets attached back to a main switch with a fast trunk of some nature.
• Mid-range switch/router combination units. Sometimes you see these referred to as "Layer 3 Switches", which I think is a misnomer at best. These tend to have far more ports than a regular switch and also do routing. These are the real workhorses of a big network and are usually used as core routers.
• NAT devices/firewalls, which usually only have a handful of ports and often sit directly behind the edge routers. If the edge connection is ethernet, these can sometimes be used in place of an edge router.
• Access points. Many can actually support multiple SSIDs at the same time.

I'm sure I've left some stuff off.

The Time Capsule arrived today. First impressions are good, and I am testing the old dead spots by writing this message from one of them, if you can read this then it means they are all gone

The thing runs quite hot, but it is backing up about 600Gb as I type so I guess the drive has been spun up a while. It's very quiet, and surprisingly heavy. I would have preferred in a sleek aluminium look, but hey ho.

Cheers

Cris.

My Airport Extreme gets hot with no drive in it

Same here. Which Time Capsule did you get Cris?

The new 1TB version, I looked at all the options and it seemed a good one. I got a bit of a discount too

The wireless range seems much improved over my Express and the previous 2Wire router I was using. Even though my house is made of basically cardboard, it has 3 floors and find that in my bedroom at the top of the house I got various little deadspots, now even with the fire doors closed I get good signal quality. I think it has something to do with the amount of other WiFi traffic going on here, I have maybe 10 others listed when I look. The Time Capsule seems to be doing a good job of finding some space.

The back up was pretty slow, but now it's done I don't even notice it doing it. I have no idea why I haven't used this feature before.

One thing I can't get to work is Back To My Mac, but this has nothing to do with the Time Capsule. I need to install uPnP on my Clarkconnect box and am too much of a dumbass to do it. I think it time for a review of my internet solution anyway, that may mean a replacement of the Clarkconnect after 3 years of faithful service. One of the HD died the other week too, so there is a little motivation to do something with it anyway.

Cheers

Cris.

Count me in now as another happy camper in the Tomato patch.

After our recent DSL woes, I decided that a second DSL line might be a good investment while sorting out the primary line, so we had a second pair installed.

Meanwhile, the first pair is also working reliably again now, after multiple visits by various grades of Bell workmen.

So.. bonding the two lines using ML-PPP seemed the obvious thing to do, especially as we have TekSavvy as the ISP on the new/second line.

And for that, I decided to finally entrust firewall/router duties to a WRT54GS that we've had on the shelf here for a couple of years.

The WRT is now running Tomato/MLPPP firmware, bonding the two DSL lines together into a much faster connection than we were used to having here in the boonies.

The original line runs with a 2496/640 interleaved profile, and the new line has a 3008/800 interleaved profile. The two DSL lines combine seamlessly into a single connection now, giving 500KB+/sec downloads and better than 130KB/sec uploads. Woohoo!

I know that sounds rather pedestrian to anyone closer to a DSLAM than we are, but to us it's nearly heaven. Especially since a side-effect of ML-PPP is that the local Bell telco's packet-inspection based throttling no longer works!

Tomato itself took some getting used to, as I found the plain paper page menu layout confusing at first (no visible cues as to the existance of sub-menus), but it does make more sense now that we've figured it all out.

Cheers

I just upgraded our freenas at work to the latest release and straight out of the box it works as a time machine target (no "plist" hacks required or manual sparse image building, time machine sees it as a proper supported target and automatically sets it up), it quite happily syncs both of our macs to it, good stuff.

This makes a lot of sense. I've been running 2 bonded DSL lines for some time now, giving me faster downloads/uploads along with an automatic fail safe. It has saved me a few times over the past year alone, and I don't think people who rely on the internet as a place of business can afford to skimp in this area.

During my time as a DSL engineer I daily met people who were really desperate to get the internet back on, I very often didn't have sympathy for them if they are daft enough to base their whole business around a £20 product with no SLA in place and with no backup. I decided I wasn't going to be one of those muppets.

The cost of internet access is stupidly cheap in my opinion. I pay one of my SPs, O2, £7.50 a month for ADSL 2+ line giving me 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. My other SP is even cheaper, I think Sky are charging me about £5 a month!!!

Cheers

Cris.

With two DSL lines, each maxed near the limits for our 5.2+Km loop, it seemed handy to have the line status (noise margins when "up") available at a glance. Thus..

1st line: SpeedTouch ST516v6 modem, 3008/800 Fast,
2nd line: TP-Link TD-8841 modem, 3008/800 Interleaved.

Hmmmmm, I want that

Cheers

Cris.

Yeah, handy that. Simple too.

Meanwhile, today it turned -18C for the first time this winter, and the TP-link modem went on the fritz.

I thought perhaps the cold was causing some of the bridge tap splices to open up on our F2 line. But when I got home from work (client's site), I noticed the TP-link modem was hot. So I powered it off, cooled it down, and now the line is fine again.

'Guess I ought to heed my own advice.. I had that modem mounted horizontally under a shelf, rather than vertical in freer space as I do with most other stuff here.

So.. hopefully it was the heat on the modem, and not the chill on the line.. should find out tomorrow, as the deep freeze (-24C tonight) is due to continue for a few days.

Cheers

We don't get temperatures like that here in the UK very often, but I would expect it does effect line characteristics over a long distance.

Here it was once a common thing that SnR values would fluctuate even in heavy rain, but there has been significant investment in sealing up the network to try and prevent that, and certainly towards the end of my time at BT had gone a long way to reducing HR Disconnection and poor SnR faults. You only need one bad crimp on a run to have a massive effect, weakest link in the chain and all that.

It would be interesting to see a graph of line performance against outside temperature

Cheers

Cris.

Over a long period this past spring and early summer, we had an exact 1:1 correlation between SNR and rain density.

I eventually scaled the pole out back, found the breach, and taped it up. Rain no longer buggers things up nearly so much here now.

But then there's still the 20 or so poles (from the cross-connect box at the underground feeder cable) before the bundle gets to the pole out back here.. each with their own splice / bridge taps for a pole-mounted leaky F2 junction box..

-ml

I am not sure how accurate this is, but a figure that was talked about alot while I worked at BT was an average of 35 connections between the exchange and the end user. That is a hell of a lot of connections to go wrong!

Most of these in the UK network will be non-IDC twisted or crimped connections. I always found it amazing how a DSL fault can be cured by simple replacing what looks to be a perfect connection by eye. There are 2 tests we used to do when looking for bad lines, the first indicator is one anyone can do, can you hear the DSL hiss or tones over the phone even with the filter on? If yes line = buggered.

The other test involved looking of what we called "The Mole" I have no idea what the technical name was. Once you had done it enough times you could see the fault on the scope as the shape was often similar, then it was all running about trying different connection points. Now you'd be amazed how many guys at BT call that advanced diagnosis!

Cheers

Cris.

Mmm.. that line went bonkers again today. It's hard to say if it was due to the outside temperature fluctuations or not -- went from -24C to -11C this morning, and is now going back into deep freeze mode again.

Today I had the old Speedtouch 546 modem on the line, rather than the TD-8841 which had overheated previously. Very similar behaviour, though.

So, after work, I took the ST546 apart.. and ahha! Blown electrolytic caps inside on the PSU circuitry. So I've replaced those now, and we'll see what happens with it again over the next day.

I also checked the caps on the TD-8841. Visually, they look fine. But I might just replace them too, on principle.

It could also be a combination of the outdoor line conditions (temperature) and the bad caps.. hmmm..

Cheers

Your Mole wouldn't have been one of these gadgets, would it?

Yep, TDR, I knew there was a proper name for it. Although when I first started as a apprentice they didn't look like that! It was an analogue bit of kit with a retro scope on it, worked like a dream though.

There were various different units in use, but they all came under the same title for us. I found with all these testers that it was just repeated use that got me results rather that reading the manual and understanding how they worked. It was always useful to have a basic idea in your head what was going on, but I can remember boffins from the labs coming out with us one day and them not being able to understand what we were doing and why.

My most used tool was my old analogue meter. After using the thing for almost 10 years everyday I could pretty much connect it to a disconnected line and give you an approximate distance to the disconnection point just by reading the cap discharge when flipping the meter from AB to BA back and forth on the meter. I always preferred taking that £80 meter up a pole with me rather than the £1,000+ moles.

Ahhhh them were the days! If I could have just stayed your bog standard line engineer as we were pre-broadband I think I would be quite happy doing that again now. Shame BT are now screwing all the engineers into the ground, I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China now!!!

Cheers

Cris.

I think that must be a BT only nickname as engineers I've dealt with from other Telcos either called it a TDR or a 'tester', not very imaginative! I wonder how the name came about? Maybe because the process is like sending something the length of the cable to check it and given cables are often subterranian a mole is the most likely creature. Although ferrets tunnel as well, if I ever get a TDR machine I'm going to call it 'the Ferret'.

EDIT: It appears the device the other guys were using was in fact an OTDR. But I suppose it does the same sort of job, just with a different medium.

Openreach, the current engineering arm of BT is steeped in many years of history. There are still people who have worked there for 30+ years and this is considered the norm.

The strange terms for tools, testers and many other items often refer back the stores cataloguing system and it's strange way of calling things. The Analogue meter I talked about is called a 9083, as that is it's model number in the catalogue.

I've always assumed it was called a mole because it goes underground so you don't have to, it's a universal term used in every part of the country so it must date back to when the technology was first introduced.

The one I have no idea about is the Butt Phone. It's what we called the Yellow (now Blue, although they were originally Blue before they were Yellow) test phone that is used to test basic dial tone on the line. not sure why they call it a Butt Phone? Maybe because a complete arsehole uses it most of the time ???

I always found working on the cables fun, members of the public would often come up to me in the street when I had a box or joint open and ask "How do you know what to do with all those wires?" It's a very simple system using a very simple colour code which is most remembered by a simple rhyme (W)e (R)xxe (B)usty (Y)oung (V)irgins, not very nice but it sticks in your mind.

Cheers

Cris.