Need a Router capable of Handling...

A

abudhu

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 28, 2004
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Need a Router capable of Handling the full load of a 16 connection Switch. What do you suggest? Along with that, what switch?

The current setup they/we have is a Cable Modem Box -- DLINK DI-604 -- 8 Port Switch -- 8 Port Switch.

If you can, please try to keep the prices down, but still good. For Instance, telling me to buy a 200 dollar router or switch is not reasonable. We are but poor college students :-D
Thanks.
 
Roll your own with a discarded Pentium and a linux distribution like IPCop.

It worked for this poor college student. :)
 
What exactly do you mean "handling the full load"? Do you mean the router can hand out 16+ IP addresses concurrently or ?
 
tdg said:
What exactly do you mean "handling the full load"? Do you mean the router can hand out 16+ IP addresses concurrently or ?
Click to expand...

Yeah pretty much. Hm, I be a little confused then. Perhaps the current problem should be addressed as well. Currenlty our poor little D-Link wasn't made to handle the amoun t of incoming data of two switches, thus it cuts every once in a while when the network load is too high.

Would these two (Router/Switch) work for my needs:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833124006

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833124001
 
Those selections should work fine.


Keep in mind if you need all 16 ports you're going to have to connect one directly to the routers ports becuase I dont think that switch has an "uplink port"
 
What is it that you're running which makes you think your current router cant handle it? That maybe...it's the load of 16 computers...and depending upon what you're doing...you're probably asking too much from your internet connection, making you think your current router isn't able to handle it.

You have cable, what's it benchmark at?

What apps are you running?
 
The cable provider is Cox, and measures at Download of: 3800MBPS.

On a daily basis, there are at least 7 people playing WoW, and the rest are surfing the web, Im'ing, Downloading God knows what, and Playing Massive amounts of Online Poker.

We should be switching over to Qwest at somepoint which will give us ~6000MBPS on the download from the provider.

Also, I never fully understood the Uplink feature, and the Google searches/articles I found didn't help too much. More of a visual guy, so perhaps if some one can give me the quick and dirty with some ASCII art =D

@ Carp: The Switch I listed does have an Uplink port. Port 16 is Listed as "16/Uplink" A bit hard to read on the picture but its there :-D
 
I don't know the bandwidth requirements for WoW....it's more of an RPG type game than a first person shooter, correct? Online polker certainly doesn't take up much. Downloading stuff, and the possibility of "who knows what" being warez and other P2P/torrent stuff...that stuff can suck up bandwidth like it's going out of style.

Makes me think no matter what kind of router you get......it's the fact that you currently have just 3 1/2 megs worth of download...and filling it up with a few P2P users and 1/2 a dozen online gamers...your bandwidth is consumed.

Even going to the 6 meg pipe...you'll have people competing for bandwidth. The downloads and P2P users will simply adjust and take on the extra bandwidth..all they can eat. Your 1/2 dozen WoW players will still be getting crunched into a corner bandwidth wise.

What you might want to look at, as the jury is still out on this new product, are some routers that are introducing QoS, a new type of QoS, as far as application priority. Most of them built on Ubicoms StreamEngine. Take a peek at DLinks DGL4100...it might be a decent upgrade for you.
http://games.dlink.com/products/?pid=371&#DGL-4100

"Uplinking"...older style switches and hubs....you'd often have an extra, or an alternative mode, for the last port on the switch. If you need to uplink a hub or switch to another hub or switch, or port on a router, you'd use an "uplink" port, which flips that port to "crossover" mode (MDI-X). Flipped to MDI-X mode, you take a standard cable from that port, to a standard port on another device...NOT another MDI-X port on that other device (unless you cancel that out by using a crossover cable..but lets keep it simple as it was intended to be).

Most new hardware is auto-MDI sensing though..it'll configure itself.
 
It sounds rather awkward that your router cannot handle the load. While there are usually only two people in my household using our internet connection, my Linksys (WRT54g v2) is handling an inbound VPN connection in addition to performing QoS on the outgoing traffic giving priority to non filesharing traffic. With [insert favorite Fs program here] I can still play CS:S at a ping of ~50. Are you sure that your provider isn't cutting your connection every once in a while?

Anyway, I guess I would like to recommend the WRT54g, however the newer versions of it are not as flexible as the older ones, you should do some research first.
 
you'd use an "uplink" port, which flips that port to "crossover" mode (MDI-X
Click to expand...

Actually the uplink will make the connections straight through. Regular ports are crossed. As you mentioned though, it doesn't make a difference much anymore with auto sensing MDI-MDX becoming almost the norm.
 
wow was desgined to be played on a 56k modem... just so you guys know, becuase they wanted to capture as much market as possible... when i run my port sniffers, i never see a data packet transfered to battelnet servers that is over 128kb, and even then it only transmits once every 6 to 10 seconeds... in IF on a server full day i see a constant 78kb stream, seems to trasmit almost constantly... even if you have 10 guys transmiting constant 128 kb packs... your still under the 1.5mb line.. even with retransmit errors...

your router should be able to handle 100mbs constant rip and static route... even at 6mb cabe connection.. you only useing 6%, usnless you got a really shitty router, i would look at your modem... even if your router is only capable of doing 10mb/s .. your still only at 60%... it should be able to handle it..

as for the uplink, you use it to dasy chain to hubs together.... (or switches)

Code: 
          hub/switch a
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-a1-a2-a3-a4-a5-a6
#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#--#--#--#--#--#
                                   ^                    hub/switch b
                                   1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-a1-a2-a3-a4-a5-a6
                                   #-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#--#--#--#--#--#

ports 1-15 on hub a will get full 100mb/s
ports 2-16 on hub b will get full 100mb/s
ports 16 on a and port 1 on b willl get 100 mb/s to each other
all pcs on a will talk to all pcs on a at 100mb/s
all pcs on b will talk to all pcs on b at 100mb/s
all pcs on b will share all outgoing data over 1 100mb/s connection they will talk with a over a shared connection, totally dependent on network usage if no one uses the network, you get the full 100... 2 pc its 50... 4 is 25 ect
all pcs on a will have full bandwidth out going, but will share all bandwith going to b band width comeing from b will not effect internal bandwidth on a, but will share outgoing bandwidth

thore
 
*Rubs Chin*

Thanks for the Info Thore. We did believe it was Cox that kept screwing our internet over, but we keep having them come out, and we kept calling them and they insisted it was not their problem. So No clue there, I suppose I'll try everything in my power to fix this and if it doesn't I can always return everything I bought.

In any case, perhaps I can describe the problem more fully now. Every since we switched over to our D-LINk DI-604 and Unknown Brand 8-Port (x2) Switches we have been having connection drops at random times. It has no rhyme or rythm, just drops when people are checking their email to playing online games. When it does go out there are a few things we can do, wait it out for a seriously random amount of time, or unplug the router, plug it back it, and all is well again...for a while. I also don't believe whoever setup the network before me did it right, because according to the diagrams I have seen, here and elsewhere, it looks a little different. Still works, but different. I am thinking of just pulling all the god damn cables and starting from scratch one by one. I also got to thinking it may have been that there were some conflicting IP's accross the network, which happened 1 or 2 times, which confused the hell out of me, but it any case I am going to tell everyone to assign a static IP for a while to see if it was just the IP conflicts that were the problem.

Any clues on this, before I buy this stuff and just waste my time. I tell you now, Cox (not trying to be an ass) but in our case, will not be of any assistance, as once again, they charge us around 40 bucks to come out and say its not their fault. :(
 
You might want to get a cheap UPS with AVR you put your networking equipment on. A circuit sees an average of 90 power anomalies per day. I have found cheap equipment (the DLink router) to be sensitive to power fluctuations.
 
ktwebb said:
Actually the uplink will make the connections straight through. Regular ports are crossed. As you mentioned though, it doesn't make a difference much anymore with auto sensing MDI-MDX becoming almost the norm.
Click to expand...

Yeah depends which side of the port you're visualizing..I always approached it from the outside, that's my habit, thinking of the cable I'd be using. Flippin the button to uplink mode replaces having to use a crossover cable. ///shrug///

Been so long since I've had to actually use a device with a button on the last port...
 
You might want to check and see if D-LINK has a newer version of it's firmware out for the device. I think assigning static IPs in the meantime is a good idea.

When people get dropped, does everyone get dropped at the same time? Or is it just one random person and everyone else stays online?

In any case I would recommend the D-LINK gaming router that YeOldeStonecat recommended. It will let you give WoW users (and other FPS gamers perhaps) priority letting them keep a decent ping and connection while the people downloading are still happy. From what I've seen it works wonders. I haven't seen it used with quite that many users, but I would think it would work well.

Out of curiosity what is your upload capped at?
 
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