Re: Best wireless router & cards for high-speed cable connection?

[Timbertea <timbusenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

/\/\UF/-\S/-\ wrote:
> Check out US Robotics. Never had a problem with them. Also they had a
> firmware upgrade a while back bringing speeds from 100mbs to 125mbs. You
> should be able to find the 8054 for under $70. Security is TOP NOTCH. Here's
> a link.
> http://www.usr.com/products/networking/router-product.asp?sku=USR8054
>


I own a USR 8054, and a pair of 5416 PCI cards.  The router & PCI cards
have fantastic range and a good strong signal, but the downside is the
firmware from USR never seems to really resolve the problems.  The
"125Mbps" hack is basically combining jumbo frames and bleeding over the
bandwidth of other neighboring channels, you wont see actual 125Mbps
numbers of course as all network numbers are grossly inflated, but
relative to without it it is an improvement.

There are the usual limits of the firewall in it, is does not do
stateful inspection, & limited number of firewall/forwarding rules "20",
not as much of a problem if you use WinXP and plug-n-play aware aps, but
I have to use severial proxies for my windows 2000 network to get around
its limitations. *No syn/ack flood protection*, extremely limited lookup
table memory, very easy to kick offline if you know how to attack it.
Hardware wise its a Dlink Di-624, and there is a hack to run their
firmware with it (not supported of course) that claims to take care of
some of the stability problems with the penalty of losing turbo mode (I
haven't used it myself). The Dlink Di-624 users are sometimes using the
8054 firmware to get the speed boost. Pick your poison I suppose.

I had to RMA the first one I got after about 9 months, it had always ran
much hotter than the replacement so maybe it was just defective from the
get-go, no problems RMAing with them (2 weeks turnaround). At that time
they advertised WPA & 100Mbps and it didn't do either, even with the
firmware update. They did fix speed issue within a few months, but it
was almost another year before WPA support became available. Currently
WPA-PSK is so hopelessly broken & unstable that I can't use it, and I'm
not the only one having problems. The forums at broadband reports are
full of the same complaints: Router resets randomly, frequent reboots,
WPA-still-broken-after-XXX-& XXX-firmware update, Odyssey drivers for
the 5416 & 5410 unstable and wont reconnect even after reboots of the
computer (in WPA mode).

My opinion is, if you need WPA or WPA-PSK get something else. If you
aren't using windows, get something else - though most of the rules can
now be changed within other browsers, it still doesn't behave correctly
for all function outside of IE, aside from which the only driver support
for linux is through a third party wrapper for their PCI/PCMIA cards. If
you can live happily with WEP 256 bit security till/if they finally get
WPA right, it isn't a bad choice for what you get considering its cost.
I wont be buying another one though, I've had far too many headaches
with this one.