Ask Slashdot: Enterprise Level Network Devices For Home Use? 241
First time accepted submitter osho741 writes "I was wondering if anyone has enterprise level networking devices set up at home? I seem to go through at least 1 wireless consumer grade router a year or so. I can never seem to find one that last very long under just normal use. I thought maybe I would have better luck throwing together a network using used enterprise equipment. Has anyone done this? What would you recommend for a network that maxes out at 30mbps downstream from the ISP and an internal network that should be able to stream 1080p movies to 3 or 4 devices from a media server? Any thoughts and or suggestions are welcome."
DD-WRT (Score:5, Informative)
Ubiquity (Score:2, Informative)
Use Ubiquity gear, saves you a lot of headaches and is very affordable
Re:UPS (Score:5, Informative)
no, that's not the problem.
as someone who fixes stuff like this, its the bulk filter capacitors (electrolytics) that 99% of the time, fail.
these are the fake chinese caps that are STILL in the market and supply chain. they burst (look at the telltale leakage at the top of the can, near the 'dents' that are supposed to burst if the pressure inside is too high). they can explode or just leak. they might not even show any physical signs of failure but they will fail, all of the, given enough time.
each time I get a failed cisco, netgear, etc; I look at the power inlet area and look for bad caps. I replace every one (the cans) even if they look fine. go to mouser.com or digikey.com and get ones of the same lead spacing (LS) and diameter and height. and of course, the same voltage level. the values are less critical, you can go up or down a bit if based on the stock in the store.
use good name brand parts from japan! those are trustworthy. and buy ONLY from places like mouser, etc. NEVER from ebay, those are guaranteed to be just as fake as the ones from the assembly lines in china, who built the cisco and netgear.
this is the problem. not ups or power spikes but just plain bad parts from china.
every single bad router or switch that got its caps replaced with genuine panasonic or nichicon (my 2 usual goto brands) has been working in excess of 5 years, now. before the replacement, usually a year before the PSU blows its caps.
get low ESR caps, too. ask a EE guy for help.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly you've never seen a vga connector after someone tried to cram it into a serial port...
Re:DD-WRT (Score:5, Informative)
I've heard the common cause of that failure is a degraded power supply... the wall warts apparently stop putting out enough current at rated voltage, and the RF range drops to almost nothing.
New wall wart often fixes it.
Good advice for the OP, too. (Score:5, Informative)
The thing that limits the old GL's aside from their pathetic RAM and flash space is that they simply don't have enough CPU power. NAT work on the number of connections today's computers and applications require is a lot of work for that aged ~200 MHz CPU. While it speeds up web browsing of course, it's more noticeable when you do more things. As my friend put it when I talked him into upgrading his router from a WRT54G v8 to a $50 dual band TP-Link unit, [amazon.com] "I was gaming on my XBox for about an hour, and I came upstairs to find out that my wife had been watching Hulu the entire time. I had no idea..."
They'd never been able to do that before without his game lagging constantly. It wasn't a bandwidth thing either. They have 6 Mb/s DSL.
I recommend this model [amazon.com] for the features. It'll run DD-WRT---you might want that too to ensure you have CoDeL support---but the stock firmware works great and has most of the same features.
Here's a screenshot [imgur.com] of DD-WRT's system status on the unit. I'm convinced that the version I'm running isn't quite stable.... hence the high load. It's also serving as an AP for me instead of doing NAT work. My NAT is done by a similarly-spec'ed device, a D-Link DIR-825, runs much better [imgur.com] and costs about the same, [amazon.com] but it only does 300Mbps on the 5 GHz interface. The D-Link might be a better candidate for DD-WRT if you're dead set on using it.