Quest for router that doesn't reboot itself!

[DeathByMonkey]

Hello there,

I am an angry man. And I'm going to go on a rant, read it if you want....

My router reboots itself all the ******* time and it does my head in. And that's not the whole story either - every router I've ever had has been rubbish and not done its job properly. I try to be optimistic in my views, but I can't seem to find a single router on the planet that doesn't have issues - reboots this, rubbish interface that, new firmware, etc ,etc yatta yatta. So I want to know if ANYONE of you people have got a wireless router that JUST WORKS?

And I'm not talking just for the odd game of Counterstrike or BF2 - I mean the people out there, like myself, who constantly use emule, bit torrent, play games, surf the web, use WPA encryption on both linux and windows boxes, and have anything up to say 6 or 7 computers connected through the router using either ethernet or wireless, with file transfers goin on left right and centre. In a nutshell: the router gets some pretty heavy usage.

Can anyone tell me a router that will actually stand up to this level of use without crumpling under the pressure? I used to have some old Netgear thing which was utter rubbish and rebooted itself all the time. Chucked that in the bin. Now I've got a D-Link DI-624 which I was initially happy with but it also randomly reboots at the most annoying times (e.g. about to make one HELL of a tv missile shot on BF2 and you get "there is a problem with your connection" - AAARGH!"£$£%^&£).

I've talked with friends and colleagues at work who all have had bad experiences with brands like Belkin and Netgear, and since there is only really 1 wireless router to go for from each brand, the choice isn't amazing. Let's see what do we have?....

Netgear - had 2 in the past, both rubbish. Friend has wgr614 and its cack. wont bother again.
SMC - had one at uni and it worked ok but the interface was crappy and it couldnt do much. Haven't heard much stuff about their latest offerings - any good?.
Linksys - had a non-wireless router from these back in the day and it was quite good. Read a few bad reviews about the newer WRT54G though and reliability.
D-Link - seems ok on the surface but can't hack the pace. Seems everyone has the same problem of rebooting when you look into it on the net.
Belkin - not tried one personally but I've heard they are a pile of pap - anyone got any opinions?
US-Robotics - this company still exists?? Some ok reviews on the net. Does anyone have any experience/comments?
Buffallo - judging by the price these things go for they must be rubbish.
Any other brands???

From this we have, what, 3 possible, maybe's of good routers in the Linksys, US Robotics and SMC. But I bet if you go and have a look on google.... hang on ill do it now.........


....... 3 minutes later

Linksys WRTG54G - wikipedia reveals what looks like hideous problems with linux clients, and then it gets into all this flashing 3rd party firmware - sod that! Jesus i don;t want to pay good money for something that doesn't work until you've fiddled with it and probably voided your warranty. what a crock.

SMC2804WBRP-G - actually sounds ok - wow.

US Robotics wireless max g router - 5.9 out of 10 on cnet. Err i think that says enough.

Do some Googling and you'll find reviews saying the Netgear WGR 614 is the best. Others will tell you the D-Link DI-624 is great (I can say from experience this is not the case). In fact, depending on where you look, any one of the top brands are 'the best'. There's one fundamental problem with this - all these reviews only do a lab test of the router by testing it for, oh I don't know - 24 hours? You'll never uncover problems that way. You can find 10 web pages about how crap a particular router is for every 1 page you can find telling you its good. It's just ridiculous why can't they just make something that works dammit!!!?

I understand that these things have to process a lot of stuff and the dedicated hardware inside is really expensive in the top-end corporate routers and switches, meaning that 'home/office routers' use somewhat shoddy components which is why they are ~£40 and not several hundred. But come on - there got to be SOMETHING out there that can do what I want without wimping out on me?

Feel free to comment, flame, blame, shame, mame or whatever I don't care.

rant over

 

[DeathByMonkey]

Yeah a Cisco or a NetScreen is your best bet if you want real reliability.

Having said that, when you say reboots itself, do you mean it drops the connection and reconnects or the router actually completely reboots - ie. the uptime is reset?

The works - sometimes connections are dropped but router stays operational, but most the time the actual router reboots. system log gets reset and you see startup status messages etc. It just did it 5 minutes ago and im not even doing anything on the network. Piece of crap.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

When you say it reboots, is it dropping the net connection and still allowing lan file transfers? It might be worth buying a little switch and only having the one connection from switch to router and see if that helps. Make sure the router has plenty of air around it. All my routers have run really hot.

When I say 'it reboots' I mean it totally reboots. All computers on the lan get disconnected (Windows reports a network cable is unplugged) and it takes about 20-30 seconds to come back up and everything to get reconnected. All transfers stop, games disconnect, as do torrents and the mule.

The same thing happened with my previous Netgear WGR614. Phoned Netgear for support and they told us not to use bittorrent or emule as they use 'too many connections and the router can not handle it' - pathetic.

The router has plenty of air - it's on an open shelf with space around it, totally exposed to the air in the room. Doesn't feel too hot to the touch. Might crack it open and see if any of the components are overheating maybe slap a fan on it lol.

I've tried pretty much every single firmware for this DI-624 and none seem to do the trick. It's just really frustrating.

Thanks for the info though. Had a look at Draytek I'm actually quite tempted but it is quite expensive at about £180. One to think about, though if it's as reliable as you say.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

The main problem caused by too many connections is not so much overheating (though it could be a side effect I suppose). The problem is that more connections requires more memory. It's like juggling - try and juggle too much in a small space and you run out of space - given enough space and enough speed to co-ordinate though and more can be handled. The problem I believe is that none/most of the routers discussed don't have enough memory, and run out when too many connections are made. Thus the router crashes and reboots to clear out all the connections. Obviously the solution is to get a router with more memory, which is what I had hoped to get from my ZyXEL.

This is why my old P3 box running m0n0wall is so stable - it's got 256mB of RAM in it. For the same reason I am now wary of routers which don't specify how much RAM they have. No doubt someone more knowledgable than myself will point out that RAM is not the only factor but I would imagine it's still a good measure all the same.

If you're considering £180 on a Draytek I really do think you would be better getting a m0n0wall for £150, switch for £25 (if you don't already have one) and an ethernet modem for around £30 (though you could save money and set up one of your old routers as a modem only).

If the Draytek is anything like my ZyXEL was (and they are often compared and rated similarly) then it will indeed handle a single public IP fine without using the firewall fine. However when I switched to multiple public IPs (and therefore needed to use the firewall since I wasn't using NAT on everything), that was when it became unstable. Just something to bare in mind since the two options are going to cost similar amounts.

edit - This is the whole problem with people saying 'I have such and such and it's rock solid' - It may well be for their purposes but for someone else it could be completely different. All the ZyXEL reviews claimed it to be 100% but of course I learned otherwise. For this reason I think it's better to overengineer (and is then more future proof too), unless of course you can actually get hold of a router to trial out in your own home on your own network and can then be sure of whether it will work.

Hope this helps, null

I am interested in this idea as I have spare parts a-go-go in my house. I think I'll definitely look into it. Thanks.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

OK this m0n0wall thingy: I am interested. null, can you explain how I'd set it up and what exactly I'd need (just in brief).

I've got my blueyonder cable modem separate, i can build a spare machine with 256mb ram and a pIII450, 10/100 ethernet cards are dirt cheap. What else do I need? How would I set up the wireless access point - I'm a bit hazy here.

You say I need a spare switch.... so what would the topology look like?

modem - - - - switch - - - - m0n0wall box ------ <lan pcs>

or

modem - - - - m0n0wall box - - - switch - - - <lan pcs> ?

Or am i missing the point here?

Thanks

DeathByMonkey

 

[DeathByMonkey]

The latter. A PC running anything (m0n0wall or whatever) will never come up to the performance of a proper switch, and connecting a switch to the cable modem would be pointless - you have to connect all the machines to the other side of the m0n0wall box, the same as any other router.

lol this is a good point. Wasn't really thinking straight there

Ok so the wireless part - Do I need like a wireless switch or what? Or a wireless AP connected to the switch? I'm a bit lost here.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

As for recommendations go, my G-1000s haven't caused me any trouble.

These g-1000s ..... do they support WPA? What about other security? Just had a quick look (not much spare time cuz I'm at work) and it says it's got WEP 64/128 but doesnt mention WPA.

I'm deffo interested in this setup, cuz it means it would give me something to tinkey with and potentially I'd have a very stable network. Might cost a bit, I'll have to do some costing up to see how much it will set me back total.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

Hi apologies for jumping into thei thread and hi-jacking. However I was wondering, I don't have a spare switch nor the funds really to buy one.

However I do have a second PC with 4 NIC's ... can I run something like monowall on this? and plug other PC's into this and have the spare PC handle firewall, DHCP etc.? or do I specifically have to have a switch?

Sounds interesting, however sans wireless. null - you seem to be the man with all the knowledge - spread the wealth

 

[DeathByMonkey]

Nothing stopping you running m0n0wall, but expect all your LAN traffic to hit the m0n0wall box's CPU, PCI bus etc.

I get ya... learnt about the basics of routers and so forth and that a regular pc can end up being a bottle neck because of the lower bus bandwidths on the motherboard (like you said, pci bus would be the culprit). But how much of a performance hit would it actually take?

If i can't notice any real world difference with this new setup, and the reliability is rock solid, then i might just go for it.

 

[DeathByMonkey]

They originally were WEP only but since first release were updated. When I bought mine a year ago they had WPA support out of the box no firmware upgrade needed.

Hope this helps, null

Thanks man. Been working some stuff out and reckon I can get this "separate stacker hi fi" of a router set up for about £85 - £90 so I might go for it. 'Bout £20-ish for a 8 port switch (always think 4 is too low) and then about £65 for a wireless AP (the zyxel g-1000). Not too bad if this setup works well, but I think I'll lull it over some more before I make a decision.