My linksys router s*cks

D

dnsrunner

n00b
Joined
Nov 23, 2006
Messages
47
hello all,
i have recently been having some bandwidth issues and it came to be that my old Linksys BEFSR41 router is getting spotty. So i went out a bought a new BEFSR41 v4 router. My speeds were flying and i was almost happy till i see that my connection keeps dropping. It reconnects fairly quickly but i keep getting breaks in my transfers and general connection. Can't have this like this... I've had the router in place for all of one day and its already driving me nuts!

I think i need to return this piece of sheite and pick up something better.
I am considering getting the D-Link DGL-4100 which is $130 at compusa and $109 at newegg.

Can anyone suggest any good routers for a SOHO that are tried and true ? Speed and stability being the main concern

any help would be greatly appreciated
thank you
 
yessir
take the router out of the loop and the modem connection flies... its significantly faster
 
i have had nothing but bad experiences with linksys lately. when a cheap 10 dollar rebated router is more stable and faster than the premium linksys model, i dont think so
 
Linksys does suck.

My router constantly drops my internet connection (Bell Sympatico DSL) for no reason whatsoever. Really frustrating.
 
HUH....I have had no problems with any Linksys device....I do use third party firmware though ..
 
yea i'm still lookin at the D-Link DGL-4100 seems like that might be the one i go for unless someone can point me towards something else.

BTW what third party firmware ? i had to downgrade 4 firmwares to one that was released in 2004.


Crosshairs said:
HUH....I have had no problems with any Linksys device....I do use third party firmware though ..
Click to expand...
 
I've had no trouble with Linksys products that were released pre 2005. In the recent year, I've had 3 wireless cards returned to me for RMA's, let alone 2 routers and a PCMCIA card!
 
Get a Buffalo WHR-G54S for < $50 bucks and you'll be happy! It's a stable, cheap router with all of the features that you'll need and it's DD-WRT upgradeable with a bunch of info on the web, if you choose to go that route.

I've got one with 4 wired PC's and a wireless laptop and for Home use it can't be beat! Way more stable that my Linksys, this thing never drops a connection.

Good Luck!
 
Linksys seems to be on a feverish cost-reduction hunt lately. They have taken some of the worlds most popular routers (WRT54G and WRT54GS) and utterly destroyed them, not even having the balls to change the model numbers.

I'm done with Linksys.

I now use a DLink DGL-4300 and it's been absolutely great.

-Larry

dnsrunner said:
hello all,
i have recently been having some bandwidth issues and it came to be that my old Linksys BEFSR41 router is getting spotty. So i went out a bought a new BEFSR41 v4 router. My speeds were flying and i was almost happy till i see that my connection keeps dropping. It reconnects fairly quickly but i keep getting breaks in my transfers and general connection. Can't have this like this... I've had the router in place for all of one day and its already driving me nuts!

I think i need to return this piece of sheite and pick up something better.
I am considering getting the D-Link DGL-4100 which is $130 at compusa and $109 at newegg.

Can anyone suggest any good routers for a SOHO that are tried and true ? Speed and stability being the main concern

any help would be greatly appreciated
thank you
Click to expand...
 
dnsrunner said:
yea i'm still lookin at the D-Link DGL-4100 seems like that might be the one i go for unless someone can point me towards something else.

BTW what third party firmware ? i had to downgrade 4 firmwares to one that was released in 2004.
Click to expand...

DD-WRT.. v23 SP3 On a WRT54G..works like a dream :)
 
Too bad getting firmware on my WRT is a pain (version 6...damn).

I've had a much better experience with D-link lately. I picked up their 504 router for $20 this summer, and it's been awesome. The stock Linksys WRT54G firmware doesn't even allow you to set static IP's! What the hell? I mean, I'm on a laptop, and there's no chance that I'm going to go into my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house because I want to run torrents or a game server. Total crock of bull.
 
Klintor said:
Too bad getting firmware on my WRT is a pain (version 6...damn).

I've had a much better experience with D-link lately. I picked up their 504 router for $20 this summer, and it's been awesome. The stock Linksys WRT54G firmware doesn't even allow you to set static IP's! What the hell? I mean, I'm on a laptop, and there's no chance that I'm going to go into my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house because I want to run torrents or a game server. Total crock of bull.
Click to expand...

I've got a WRT54G V.5 with the newest official firmware and I had no trouble setting up static IPs. You sure something else isn't going on? Maybe it's different when it's running in wireless mode? (I'm not)

Edit: I see your running V.6. If they removed setting up a static IP in a newer revision, than I don't even know what to say, that would be crazy.
 
TechLarry said:
Linksys seems to be on a feverish cost-reduction hunt lately. They have taken some of the worlds most popular routers (WRT54G and WRT54GS) and utterly destroyed them, not even having the balls to change the model numbers.
Click to expand...

i'm going to go out on a limb and say that cisco systems probably got their evil hands on linksys to run the company into the ground and then offer their products as solutions to home users, at a higher price of course.
 
Totalgamefreak said:
Edit: I see your running V.6. If they removed setting up a static IP in a newer revision, than I don't even know what to say, that would be crazy.
Click to expand...
Well, I've spent a good three hours hunting for a solution and perusing every damned page of the firmware, and I can officially say this:

It's crazy.
 
I can't say for sure since i don't know much inside info on the topic but i would tend to agree. Seems a little while after cisco aqcuired linksys is when things started going down hill. :(
I think no more linksys products for me for a bit till they get their act together...

hmm Dlink 4300 eh? i'll take a look soon as i get a chance, Buffalo WHR-G54S too




mojavewolfpup said:
i'm going to go out on a limb and say that cisco systems probably got their evil hands on linksys to run the company into the ground and then offer their products as solutions to home users, at a higher price of course.
Click to expand...
 
I just bought a WRT54G v6 and it's been good to me so far. When I was working at Circuit City 2 years ago and we were first starting to get DLink, we had nothing but problems. I do enjoy my DLink switch, and it's good to see they may be getting better.
 
Martyr said:
i have had nothing but bad experiences with linksys lately. when a cheap 10 dollar rebated router is more stable and faster than the premium linksys model, i dont think so
Click to expand...

Did you try a "premium" model? Or just one of the befsr or wrt models?

I'm going to guess the OP is running those P2P programs..where any sub-50 dollar router will buckle to its knees. Gotta get a better home grade model that costs around 100 bucks, or get a business grade model which costs even more, or built yourself a *nix router.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Did you try a "premium" model? Or just one of the befsr or wrt models?

I'm going to guess the OP is running those P2P programs..where any sub-50 dollar router will buckle to its knees. Gotta get a better home grade model that costs around 100 bucks, or get a business grade model which costs even more, or built yourself a *nix router.
Click to expand...
I don't want to sound like a broken record, or an advertisement, but my D-Link router has had no problems with P2P and gaming at the same time. I guess it was one "outlier" on the price:quality ratio chart.

The only thing...ONLY THING that the Linksys router has on my D-Link is range. Currently I'm in a giant stucco house with walls seperated by chicken wire. The Linksys, placed in one upstairs bedroom, reaches the whole house with 3/5 signal strength bars. The D-Link? It's one antenna gets about halfway, and cuts out completely. Yet I still use it, because it's got fucking Static IP settings. Why the hell doesn't my WRT54G (with the latest firmware, I might add) not have a static IP page?. I'm on a laptop; i'm not going to change my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house just because I run some torrents.
 
i'm not a big fan of wireless quite yet so those issues do'nt affect me quite so much ;)
but as someone mentioned earlier i've changed my tune and am now will to spend probably as much as $150 for a wired router/firewall that i can rely on for good performance....
 
TechLarry said:
Linksys seems to be on a feverish cost-reduction hunt lately. They have taken some of the worlds most popular routers (WRT54G and WRT54GS) and utterly destroyed them, not even having the balls to change the model numbers.
Click to expand...
Very sleazy indeed!
 
Klintor said:
I don't want to sound like a broken record, or an advertisement, but my D-Link router has had no problems with P2P and gaming at the same time. I guess it was one "outlier" on the price:quality ratio chart.

The only thing...ONLY THING that the Linksys router has on my D-Link is range. Currently I'm in a giant stucco house with walls seperated by chicken wire. The Linksys, placed in one upstairs bedroom, reaches the whole house with 3/5 signal strength bars. The D-Link? It's one antenna gets about halfway, and cuts out completely. Yet I still use it, because it's got fucking Static IP settings. Why the hell doesn't my WRT54G (with the latest firmware, I might add) not have a static IP page?. I'm on a laptop; i'm not going to change my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house just because I run some torrents.
Click to expand...

You can set your laptop to a static IP... The only time you'd need to change it then would be if you leave your house for a public hotspot.
 
Klintor said:
Why the hell doesn't my WRT54G (with the latest firmware, I might add) not have a static IP page?. I'm on a laptop; i'm not going to change my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house just because I run some torrents.
Click to expand...

Stick DD-WRT on it. Get even more range, and DHCP reservations, and other cool features. It'll handle those P2Ps a little better too.
 
dekard said:
You can set your laptop to a static IP... The only time you'd need to change it then would be if you leave your house for a public hotspot.
Click to expand...
I know I can set my laptop to a static IP...with the TCP/IP settings in network connections. Trouble is, I leave my house daily with it. Can you say pain in the ass? :mad:

And yeah, I could stick DD-WRT micro on it, but it's this process that could leave me routerless if I screw up one of the steps in it. It's not like the V3 or V4 where I could just upload a firmware to it, no. I've got to upload some funky flash program to it, then FTP my firmware to it, then get the program to flash the FTP'd firmware...or something like that >.<
 
after reconsideration i think i'm going to go with a DLink DGL-4300 like you said. I'll just use the wired ports and then also be able to utilize the wireless when i feel i need that convenience.

I wasn't even aware that you could run a wired connection on a wireless router and simply turn off the wireless. Quick newb question: Is it possible to have a wired connection to 2 pc's and then have 1 for wireless simultaneously ? or do i need to go through a whole rigamarole to swap from wired to wireless?

TechLarry said:
Linksys seems to be on a feverish cost-reduction hunt lately. They have taken some of the worlds most popular routers (WRT54G and WRT54GS) and utterly destroyed them, not even having the balls to change the model numbers.

I'm done with Linksys.

I now use a DLink DGL-4300 and it's been absolutely great.

-Larry
Click to expand...
 
I'm using all 4 wired and 1 wireless PC and a few PSP's and a DS on my wireless with the Buffalo WHR-G54S. It's not uncommon to have my Daughter surfing and IM'ing with her friends while my Son plays Guild Wars or WOW online while I'm connected to work through a VPN connection. Never had any problems and the connections are always consistant. That I couldn't get with my Linksys!
 
First, you need to set the DHCP Scope. For example, tell it to start assigning IP addresses for DHCP at 100 (i.e. 192.168.1.100).

Then, you are free to use 192.168.1.2 through 102.168.1.99 for statics.

I like the Dlink DGL-4300's method better, where you can permanently assign a DHCP address as static to any machines NIC MAC address. This is the way corporate routers work, and it prevents you from having to run around all your equipment and setting them all to static entries.

-Larry

Klintor said:
I don't want to sound like a broken record, or an advertisement, but my D-Link router has had no problems with P2P and gaming at the same time. I guess it was one "outlier" on the price:quality ratio chart.

The only thing...ONLY THING that the Linksys router has on my D-Link is range. Currently I'm in a giant stucco house with walls seperated by chicken wire. The Linksys, placed in one upstairs bedroom, reaches the whole house with 3/5 signal strength bars. The D-Link? It's one antenna gets about halfway, and cuts out completely. Yet I still use it, because it's got fucking Static IP settings. Why the hell doesn't my WRT54G (with the latest firmware, I might add) not have a static IP page?. I'm on a laptop; i'm not going to change my TCP/IP settings every time I leave the house just because I run some torrents.
Click to expand...
 
As far as I know, you can have up to 254 computers connected at the same time, wireless or wired.

-Larry

dnsrunner said:
after reconsideration i think i'm going to go with a DLink DGL-4300 like you said. I'll just use the wired ports and then also be able to utilize the wireless when i feel i need that convenience.

I wasn't even aware that you could run a wired connection on a wireless router and simply turn off the wireless. Quick newb question: Is it possible to have a wired connection to 2 pc's and then have 1 for wireless simultaneously ? or do i need to go through a whole rigamarole to swap from wired to wireless?
Click to expand...
 
This is another area where the DGL-4300 shines. It is capable of handling 1000 TCP/IP connections at once. I think the Linksys routers are limited to around 256 or possibly even less.

Simultaneous TCP/IP connections and Wan-To-Lan Firewall Thru-Put are two area's that have been greatly ignored in home/soho routers for years. You can't any more, with things like P2P, Bit-torrent and ultra high-speed internet connections becoming the norm.

And you can't trust everything on the box either. Just because it has a 10/100 WAN side interface doesn't mean it can pass 100mbit/sec. A good example is the Netgear FVS-318, a so-called Soho/business class router. Even though Rev 3 has a 10/100 port, it is limited internally to only 12.5mbit/sec thru-put!

Ask about it on the Netgear forum, and your post will be deleted within minutes. I know, I did three times and it lasted about 15 min each time before it was removed.

-Larry


DevilDoc said:
I've upgraded every Linksys ever used in my house to alternative firmware. Currently running DD-WRT v23 SP2 (09/15/06) std.

With stock firmware my router would slow to a crawl when using bittorrent. The problem is that the stock firmware cannot purge old connections as fast as necessary.

More explanation here:
http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#Special_note_for_users_with_Linksys_WRT54G_GL_GS_routers
Click to expand...
 
TechLarry said:
This is another area where the DGL-4300 shines. It is capable of handling 1000 TCP/IP connections at once. I think the Linksys routers are limited to around 256 or possibly even less.
Click to expand...

That depends on which model Linksys you're talking about.

For the home grade routers...it can be increased a little with 3rd party firmware.

For their SOHO and business grade routers..it goes up, naturally because there's usually a faster CPU and more memory. Example..my RV082 router has a 533MHz CPU, 32 megs of RAM. Throughput is a full 200 megs. It'll take 4,000 concurrent TCP connections (it's capable of over 4x that...but Linksys crippled it so it doesn't compete too much in the PIX area)
 
TechLarry said:
First, you need to set the DHCP Scope. For example, tell it to start assigning IP addresses for DHCP at 100 (i.e. 192.168.1.100).

Then, you are free to use 192.168.1.2 through 102.168.1.99 for statics.

I like the Dlink DGL-4300's method better, where you can permanently assign a DHCP address as static to any machines NIC MAC address. This is the way corporate routers work, and it prevents you from having to run around all your equipment and setting them all to static entries.

-Larry
Click to expand...

Often you need to manually set TCP info...say you need to plug in a different gateway or different DNS and/or WINS servers. The basic DHCP service in home grade routers only usually only allows the same scope for all.
 
Yes, you can increase them, but you also need the processor power to process them. The DGL-4300 has this in spades.

-Larry

YeOldeStonecat said:
That depends on which model Linksys you're talking about.

For the home grade routers...it can be increased a little with 3rd party firmware.

For their SOHO and business grade routers..it goes up, naturally because there's usually a faster CPU and more memory. Example..my RV082 router has a 533MHz CPU, 32 megs of RAM. Throughput is a full 200 megs. It'll take 4,000 concurrent TCP connections (it's capable of over 4x that...but Linksys crippled it so it doesn't compete too much in the PIX area)
Click to expand...
 
Not sure where you're pointing here, but in the case of the DGL-4300, I use the DHCP Static reservation feature and it works perfectly. No need to set anything at the computers. They just get their same (allocated) IP address whenever they are started up.

-Larry

YeOldeStonecat said:
Often you need to manually set TCP info...say you need to plug in a different gateway or different DNS and/or WINS servers. The basic DHCP service in home grade routers only usually only allows the same scope for all.
Click to expand...
 
TechLarry said:
Not sure where you're pointing here, but in the case of the DGL-4300, I use the DHCP Static reservation feature and it works perfectly. No need to set anything at the computers. They just get their same (allocated) IP address whenever they are started up.

-Larry
Click to expand...

It's the same as the rest of the DHCP clients get. There are some cases, not on home networks, but on business networks, where you may have some servers that need different DNS/WINS settings for some reason or another. Just citing an example of some situations where you have to manually set TCP/IP settings. There's nothing wrong with doing that, very easy to do.

I'm not saying the DLink 4x00 series isn't a good router, it's one of the better performing "home grade" routers. But I wouldn't say it has the processor and RAM above all other routerse in spades..I believe it's a 250MHz with 16 megs...quite average for todays decent home grade routers.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Just citing an example of some situations where you have to manually set TCP/IP settings. There's nothing wrong with doing that, very easy to do.
Click to expand...
Easy, but still a pain in the arse for mobile computers.

Now, for desktop systems, it's quite easy and actually a good thing to do.
 
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