Hai guise,
I've become rather irate of late dealing with the internet connection at my house. It's been in place for a number of years now and has over the past 18-24 months become dramatically problematic to the point where I am now having to reset my router upwards of 10 times a day to get Internet access.
Drawing upon the epic skills I learned in CS 101 many years ago and my Jedi training with mspaint I've made a very basic topology diagram to illustrate what my setup looks like:
http://www.theophany.name/topology.png
This is the fourth router that I've had now and I've never skimped on them either. In fact, I don't think I've ever paid less than 90 quid for one - this Belkin one is the flashy hundred plus model with the LED screen that gives you information on your upstream and downstream. Gimmicks ahoy.
Now, all the wired parts of the network are connected by standard Cat5e 10/100mbps ethernet cabling. The longest travels to a switch in my office (an outbuilding of the main premises, the cable is no longer than 50m; speed and stress tests show no signs of voltage drop nor lower throughput on any of the machines connected to the switch. The shorter of the two connects to another room in the house in which I game and thus prefer to have a reliable wired connection over wireless.
All the other machines in the house (3 laptops, various smartphones) connect via 802.11g/n (no machines or phones running a or b). Now, obviously with the amount of machines in the house there is a substantial amount of data throughput (sometimes as high as 150GB of web traffic, I daren't hazard a guess at how much local network traffic between boxes streaming media, per month) and at that value I'm prepared to reset my router once or twice every (couple of) day(s).
However, resetting it 10+ times every day is becoming ridiculous. The typical lull in traffic is during 9-5pm when I'm the only one at home using the internet purely for very light web browsing and transferring a few megabytes of data between machines over the network (documents, spreadsheets etc for backups and the like) and even then I'm having to reset the router every couple of hours which would suggest that the masses of data being forced through the router at peak times are not causing it to fall over, at least entirely.
Part of me is wondering if standard consumer routers are suitable for the size/complexity of the network I'm running. In my eyes, it's a pretty damn basic setup. The router is the DHCP server and all devices on the network, regardless of where they connect have to be assigned by the router. In my head, this is a pretty damn basic layout and with the exception of the smartphones (2x iPhones, 1x Blackberry, 1x HTC Hero) that my family use, every machine conforms to my iron ****ing rule of Windows 7 or GTFO. There were a couple of OS X machines in the past, but I exiled them because they were causing even greater headaches on the network.
The most common form of it falling over seems to be spuriously disconnecting all wireless machines, disallowing wireless reconnects and cutting the internet from all wireless machines (but allowing access via IP to the router's interface). The only way to get it to work again is to pull the plug, wait for the capacitors to discharge and then plug it back in. Resetting it via the internet browser admin interface does nothing... This seems to be the case with all the routers I have used, exhibiting the same (or very similar) ways of falling over with irritating regularity.
Anybody have any suggestions?
P.S.
In the ~10 minutes it took my to type this since uploading the image to my server, the router has fallen over again despite being reset 15-20 minutes ago. This is bat****.
I've become rather irate of late dealing with the internet connection at my house. It's been in place for a number of years now and has over the past 18-24 months become dramatically problematic to the point where I am now having to reset my router upwards of 10 times a day to get Internet access.
Drawing upon the epic skills I learned in CS 101 many years ago and my Jedi training with mspaint I've made a very basic topology diagram to illustrate what my setup looks like:
http://www.theophany.name/topology.png
This is the fourth router that I've had now and I've never skimped on them either. In fact, I don't think I've ever paid less than 90 quid for one - this Belkin one is the flashy hundred plus model with the LED screen that gives you information on your upstream and downstream. Gimmicks ahoy.
Now, all the wired parts of the network are connected by standard Cat5e 10/100mbps ethernet cabling. The longest travels to a switch in my office (an outbuilding of the main premises, the cable is no longer than 50m; speed and stress tests show no signs of voltage drop nor lower throughput on any of the machines connected to the switch. The shorter of the two connects to another room in the house in which I game and thus prefer to have a reliable wired connection over wireless.
All the other machines in the house (3 laptops, various smartphones) connect via 802.11g/n (no machines or phones running a or b). Now, obviously with the amount of machines in the house there is a substantial amount of data throughput (sometimes as high as 150GB of web traffic, I daren't hazard a guess at how much local network traffic between boxes streaming media, per month) and at that value I'm prepared to reset my router once or twice every (couple of) day(s).
However, resetting it 10+ times every day is becoming ridiculous. The typical lull in traffic is during 9-5pm when I'm the only one at home using the internet purely for very light web browsing and transferring a few megabytes of data between machines over the network (documents, spreadsheets etc for backups and the like) and even then I'm having to reset the router every couple of hours which would suggest that the masses of data being forced through the router at peak times are not causing it to fall over, at least entirely.
Part of me is wondering if standard consumer routers are suitable for the size/complexity of the network I'm running. In my eyes, it's a pretty damn basic setup. The router is the DHCP server and all devices on the network, regardless of where they connect have to be assigned by the router. In my head, this is a pretty damn basic layout and with the exception of the smartphones (2x iPhones, 1x Blackberry, 1x HTC Hero) that my family use, every machine conforms to my iron ****ing rule of Windows 7 or GTFO. There were a couple of OS X machines in the past, but I exiled them because they were causing even greater headaches on the network.
The most common form of it falling over seems to be spuriously disconnecting all wireless machines, disallowing wireless reconnects and cutting the internet from all wireless machines (but allowing access via IP to the router's interface). The only way to get it to work again is to pull the plug, wait for the capacitors to discharge and then plug it back in. Resetting it via the internet browser admin interface does nothing... This seems to be the case with all the routers I have used, exhibiting the same (or very similar) ways of falling over with irritating regularity.
Anybody have any suggestions?
P.S.
In the ~10 minutes it took my to type this since uploading the image to my server, the router has fallen over again despite being reset 15-20 minutes ago. This is bat****.
