Need a new CABLE Router.

InvaderGIR

InvaderGIR

InvaderGIR

Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2005
Posts
17,616
Location
Bristol
Well the brilliant (:rolleyes:) Belkin F5D7230UK4 I bought from the purple shirted people has died. I bought it in August, and it's been on 24/7 and died earlier this week...much to my amusement as I'm not currently at my uni house where it is. :D

What I'm wondering though is what's a good cable router these days? The Belkin is cheap at £40 and that's about all it has going for it. I'm after something with 4 10/100 ports, and has WiFi. Ideally it should also have a decent web interface, unlike the Belkin's naff one.

From looking around I'm probably going to have to up my spending to something like £60.
I only bought the Belkin as I needed one straight away at the beginning of term, and now the house mates that are in the house currently have done some really quite 'special' set up, something like a ringbus setup because they don't understand Proxying (which is sodding simple and they are ALL computing students).

Anyhow, now it doesn't matter so much when I get the router I figured I may as well get one online, but I don't know what is good and what is not. I understand networking etc. so it doesn't have to be a stupidly simple thing like the Belkin.
At home-home we have ADSL and have a Linksys router, which is great, but unfortunately I couldn't see any for Cable.

All help for a new router welcome.

InvG
 
This thing? Looks ugly as sin!

I forgot to mention, I've had Netgear stuff and they died lots. I also want one with proper holes in it for heat, the Belkin did not have them and I think that is part of what aided it's departure.

InvG
 
Caged said:
Sorry I forgot you wanted something that looked nice as opposed to something that worked.
Click to expand...

:p No, don't care what it looks like. Just thought I'd say it. :p

It won't be in my room, but I will have all the passwords etc. as my house mates aren't the most sensible of people.

Does Tomato have an internal IP network monitor thing? So can I monitor each PC's bandwidth and useage? As that would be quite handy, not needed, but handy. :)

EDIT - Cheers for the info Caged, I shall certainly look into it more, especially as it isn't too badly priced compared to what I was looking at. :)

InvG
 
Last edited:
It has a real-time bandwidth monitor, per-interface as opposed to per-device (so you can see how much is being used over wired, how much over wifi, and how much in total). It's really the best combination of hardware and software you can get for the money.
 
Ok, cool. Looks like I shall be ordering that one, on Monday (damn loans).

Will be nice to have a device that actually works, rather than randomly faffs about and half works. :)

InvG
 
Bringing this back to life...

As I can't see it on the Tomato site (may be being blind), does Tomato allow full blocking of things like Torrents?

EDIT - Can it log http requests?

InvG
 
Last edited:
Ok, got the router today, before I did anything I installed Tomato on it. Much nicer interface and to use than the linksys firmware.

Now I'm trying to set up the bandwidth monitor to save every 24 hours, to a drive on my box that's constantly on. I have it saving and everything, but I have run into a problem.

The file it exports is a *.gz which I can extract with WinRAR but all I get is a file with no extension, so I don't know how to read it.

How do I go about reading my bandwidth monitor files?

EDIT: I have checked the FAQ, the Readme and Wiki and it isn't mentioned anywhere.

InvG
 
To set up the file save.

Goto your PC and share a folder. I use a folder called Linksys_logs in the My Documents folder. Give a user full access rights to the share and folder.

In the router click Administration>Bandwidth Monitoring.
Click enable.
Set Save History Location to CIFS1.
Set the time period.
Save.

Then in the router goto Administration then CIFS Client.
Tick the enable box for /cifs1.
Fill in the full share name including the |PC IP address or computer name. I use \\192.168.1.101\Linksys_Logs because that machine has a fixed IP address.
Fill in the username and password that you gave full permissions to earlier.
Click save.
If successful the Total/Free will change from (not mounted) to a figure of how much space in on the drive.
linksys_cifs.jpg


Use the routers inbuilt monitor to see the used bandwidth by clicking Bandwidth and then one of the daily, weekly e.t.c. options.
To view the graphs you'll need Adobe SVG Viewer - http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/
 
Last edited:
Yeah, I have that set up, and it outputs a file. The problem I'm having is being on my PC and trying to read the file, I have WinRAR extracting the *.gz and then there being a file that has no extension, which means I can't read of view it.

It's all well and good being able to have these logs, but not if I can't read them :(

I run Firefox and Vista at the moment.

EDIT: So basically I can only open them via the router?

InvG
 
InvaderGIR said:
Yeah, I have that set up, and it outputs a file. The problem I'm having is being on my PC and trying to read the file, I have WinRAR extracting the *.gz and then there being a file that has no extension, which means I can't read of view it.

It's all well and good being able to have these logs, but not if I can't read them :(

InvG
Click to expand...

See my edit above.
 
bought a cheapy tp-link router couple of weeks ago

22 quid and absolutely fantastic same software as the netgear i had before and works great
wireless range is fantastic works round the neighbours and down the road :)
 
Foxtrot26 said:
snip
Click to expand...

Down the road? surely that's not all that good, I mean it's great that it has a huge range, but means more people can try to use it.

By the way I bought the Linksys, just didn't want to waste space by making more threads. :)

ns400r said:
See my edit above.
Click to expand...

I did one too. :p

So it saves all of them to memory, but saves the one you set to another PC as well to provide backups?

InvG
 
The router bandwith monitor viewer for Daily, weekly e.t.c uses the file that you save in the share (if you have that set) otherwise it uses memory for the data.. It can hold much more info than just a memory save.

You don't have to use the router to view them though. Google for a log file viewer, I'm sure you'll find loads.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom