Dan Murphy's Blog

Well my router purchase problems continue.  I decided I needed a new router when I woke up this morning and the internet wasn’t working.  One of the reasons I wanted this router was the looks, I was tired of the flashing lights and the big antenna’s sticking out of our entertainment center from our DIR-655 Dlink.  Also this one has some nice new features.  2.4 and 5GHz antennas, guest network access, gigabit wired Ethernet, NAS USB port, FTP server, IPv6 Compatible.

The FTP server was something that I was surprised by as well as the NAS USB port.  The nice thing with this USB port is it just puts my USB Hard Drive as a network share.  This is a way easier interface than my D-Link had which was web only and super slow.  Also now I can have my FTP server running on the router and not on another machine.  This helps with my monthly backups and makes things much easier security wise.  The hard drive must be formatted in FAT, but that is OK as I have a bunch of <100GB external hard drive sitting around and this is perfect for backup.  So to get to the drive all I have to do is connect to \\192.168.0.1\share and there it is like a normal hard drive awesome!

The guest network access is done slightly different than my last one.  This one there is no encryption on the network you just choose the guest network and then go to the browser and put in a password.  This makes things a lot easier when people just want to come over and hook something up to my network quickly.

Also decided that I would go my own hardware for the cable modem.  Looking at my last Comcast bill I am paying $7/month for the cable modem which means the $100 cable modem I bought pays for itself in about a year.  I picked up the Motorola SurfBoard 6121 with a gigabit switch and DOCSIS 3.0.  After a quick call to Comcast and adding the MAC address to my account everything works great.  I like this one as it is a little smaller then the last one that I had and also I think the blinking lights are less intrusive.

Also since I have 5 wired connections I need in my entertainment center (6 soon with my new home stereo) I decided that I wanted to pick up a 8 port gigabit switch for the wired devices.  Since there is a lot of heavy use on these devices I wanted them wired for the fastest connection.  I picked up a TrendNet 8-port GreenSwitch for this.

So with all this new network hardware I should be good for the IPv6 changeover as well as any expansion to my network at home that has about 17 devices on it currently.  It is nice to have the router out of the entertainment center on the top where it is not obtrusive and still easy to access and gives a great signal.  The switch is nice because it moves all the wires out of the router and puts it in a place where I can hide things.  Joys of being a nerd there is always something better to buy out there to make everything faster!

So I ended up picking up a new router after bricking my good old WRT54G which I have had for a long time and served me well but kinda left we wanting more.  That is probably why I was pushing a firmware upgrade to the router only to have it fail and brick it.  So after doing a bunch of research as far as what was available at MicroCenter and reading reviews from NewEgg and Amazon I ended up with a D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N.

The main thing I was looking for in a router was stability and supportability I had a few other things in my mind that I figured would be awesome if I could find but were not too big of deal breakers.  One thing that really led me to choose D-Link was their support network and the forums and their emulator of their firmware.  The emulator was nice because it let me test drive the options of the router before buying it, why more companies don’t do that I will never know.  Also you have the ability to easily download old firmware if you need to downgrade after an update.  The forum was a welcome support link for the router but as usual you have to take those with a grain of sand as there seems to be a lot of angry people out there!  Although I did take the biggest advice of the forum and did not upgrade to the latest firmware as it seems to have a lot of issues, and is not something you can remove after installing it.  I figured since 80211N just made gold that there would be another update coming soon anyways.

A nice feature of this router is I have the ability to set up schedules.  So I can open my FTP port for the 1 hour I need it to do my automated website backups.  I can also do some port mapping from incoming external port to another internal port in my network.  I also get some very useful logs and a whole bunch of other buttons and options to change (QoS, DHCP Priority Address, Guest Access, Email new Firmware, Uptime Clock).  I can also enable a second WiFi hotspot with a different security level for guests so I can easily open and close a non-secure wireless access point.  And it has a gigabit switch to boot so that is helpful for all four ports which i have plugged into my PS3, DirecTV, Media Center, and weather station.

It was on sale for $99 at MicroCenter and has turned out to be a very good router.  I have tested it by pumping a ton of data through it via Bit-Torrent and Hulu and downloading 1GB files from FTP all at once without a hiccup (well my cable modem did reboot but don’t think that was the router’s fault).  So this router gets my vote!

UPDATE – I have found some other settings that are particularly useful with this new router.  Looks like you can setup a dynamic DNS account and setup the router to ping the service and update your IP if it changes so you can have a static URL go to your home server.

As far as stability goes this thing seems to be fairly solid, it likes to reboot every once and a great while and does it by itself and just looks like it takes a long time for a page to reload when it happens, so no really effected services.  I have also been making a bunch of changes to the config of the router which require reboot so that kinda screws up my uptime counts.

Looks like Linksys finally decided to make their routers look like something that you would actually want to put in plain sight, which would make sense as that is the best placement for a router.  I constantly hear from my girlfriend how ugly our router is with its high gain antenna’s sitting on top of our nice cherry wood entertainment center so I think I might have a better chance of her being alright with the new router (WRT310N and WRT160N) pictured above next to my close friend and current Internet router (WRT54G)  No pricing available yet but the WRT160N is supposed to be sub 100 while the WRT310N isn’t probable because of some features such as QoS and fun stuff like that.

This one is kinda fun.  It is a router that has a range of a quarter mile!  It has the highest gain antenna’s that are allowed by the FCC to blast your 802.11b/g network all the way down the street.  As usual it has all the security of a normal router which you might actually use since your range is so high.  This seems like a great idea for those of us who have 5,000+ square foot house so not people like me.  Personally my WRT54G Linksys router with some high gain antenna’s do the trick for our house as we have no dead spots and no spots with less then excellent reception.  But I still wanted to post this as I thought it was pretty bad ass.  For $284 it could be yours from my favorite store ThinkGeek!

Not that I have ever had any luck with D-Link routers looks like everyone is in the game for that fancy OLED display of your stats.  I think that this is a great idea.  Seems they like to jack up the price on the ‘gaming’ routers just because they suppose QoS so this one is $240 and of course 802.11N standard.