Routerlopnik

"MM54" (mm54mk2) 09/02/2020 at 20:45 • Filed to: Home Networking!

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In 2011 I was just about broke and needed a router for my apartment (old one bricked itself) , so I bought a $17 TP-Link from A mazon. It worked great for 9 years!

Unfortunately it also is so old/cheap that it bottlenecked my speed (even hardwired) when Spectrum for ced me into a 100mbit plan (they don’t have anything cheaper...) a couple years ago to 60-70mbps down . This is plenty fast for me so I’ve ignored it for several years, but a coworker offered to sell me his secondhand Netgear R6400 for pretty cheap, so I’ve finally upgraded to what I think is a pretty nice router .

The old faithful tp-link visible in the background, it’s now a spare. Why yes, I did install an outlet in my closet for this equipment. I’ve been meaning to put up a shelf.

My closet is now full of blinding blue and white LEDs (instead of a couple green ones) and I can do about 115mbit down. Everything of importance is hard wired but I’m imagining the wi-fi is probably better too. The old one covered the whole house and garage just fine, so we’ll see how this one does. It did randomly drop out now and then, so theoretically this one should not do that too, which visitors will appreciate.

Normally getting this set up would be the sort of thing to completely baffle me but not much has changed with router config in the past decade, and part of my work involves industrial networking so unlike a lot of new tech, I’m fairly competent with this one.

Textured Soy Protein > MM54 09/02/2020 at 20:52

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I have an R6700. It’s solid. Somewhere in the config settings you can turn off most of the blinken lights.

MM54 > Textured Soy Protein 09/02/2020 at 20:56

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I found that, I don’t really mind it - the office closet door stays closed anyways. Mostly was annoying when setting it up since looking directly at them requires a welding mask.

ttyymmnn > MM54 09/02/2020 at 20:59

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Blinding blue lights you say?

MM54 > ttyymmnn 09/02/2020 at 21:00

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The modem is just as guilty, it’s in the office closet though so it doesn’t much matter now that I’m not staring directly into them during setup.

CaptDale - is secretly British > ttyymmnn 09/02/2020 at 21:14

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You can just turn them off y ou know

ttyymmnn > CaptDale - is secretly British 09/02/2020 at 21:19

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My wife had a 1988 Sentra back in the day. I took it to a friend whose dad was some sort of master mechanic in the Marine Corps back in the day to get some work done on it. Don’t remember what. Anyway, there was some oxygen sensor or something on the dash that was alight, and rather than fix it, he just put a piece of black tape over the light and said don’t worry about it. And I didn’t. It went for about 7 years with the tape over the light. 

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > ttyymmnn 09/02/2020 at 22:32

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This is the thing about this that you would know about.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > MM54 09/02/2020 at 22:45

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I just had to order a new router...

I was using a Linksys/Cisco E1200 V.1 running open-source DD-WRT firmware for years...at least like, 6 years and it had been ROCK SOLID. I hadn’t updated it the firmware on it since like 2018...went to update it a few weeks ago and somehow it got bricked despite me double-checking the hash of the file and upgrading it the same way I’ve upgraded it and others like it MANY times before....I couldn’t find a way to unbrick it. :(

....SO I pulled another E1200 V.1 out of my spares box and flashed DD-WRT on that with the same 2018 firmware the old one had that had been rock solid for years....and this one works fine, but the whole thing randomly dies and I have to unplug it and plug it back in...seems to die at least once a day, and it died 4 times today, so there must be a p hysical hardware issue with this one that I didn’t know about :(

SO.....I set up an old D-Link DIR-819 router I also had in my spares box, which I was loathe to do because I HATE D-Link and have had nothing but bad experiences with equipment failures both personally and for clients in terms of Dlink hardware...it seemed to work OK, all computers had decent connections and speeds for days with it UNTIL mom’s laptop randomly went down to single digit connection speeds over WiFi...restarting the laptop, nor the router made no difference...updating and backdating drivers on her laptop made no difference...resetting the router to factory and setting it back up made no difference...MASSIVE PITA. It’s not her laptop because it’s worked perfectly on EVERY other router I’ve ever used with it, so it’s somehow the shitty D-link, which then proceeded to start doing the same thing to all the other DEVICES in the house...(and no, it wasn’t an ISP issue either as immediately going back to the semi-dying Linksys instantly fixed the connection speeds).

SOOOO....I had to put the randomly crashing Linksys back because at least when it is working, it...works... and unplugging it once and awhile when it dies will have to do until the replacement TP-Link I ordered gets here in a few days from Amazon...

ARGH...

shop-teacher > ttyymmnn 09/02/2020 at 23:04

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The first "modification" I did to my Roadmaster, was put a piece of electrical tape over the ABS light.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > MM54 09/02/2020 at 23:17

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I have an Arris Surfboard of some sort that I found on Amazon for cheap. It’s pretty alright . It can handle the 15 or so devices in the house (smart TVs, laptops, phones ) just fine and I don’t have to reboot it daily like I did the one Comcast gave me. I manage 40-50/s from m y bedroom across the house and up close it’s nearly 200.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > MM54 09/03/2020 at 01:05

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A little more expensive than electrical tape, but might be worth it. I have some of the silver ones for my MacBook Pro.

MM54 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 09/03/2020 at 11:33

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I have used window tint on overly bright displays/lights before. I don’t much care if they’re excessively bright on this stuff though since it’s in the office closet.

MM54 > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 09/03/2020 at 11:47

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Sounds like the replacement will be well-needed. That was a lot of routers to have on hand as spares!

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > MM54 09/03/2020 at 11:59

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I have tw o more routers yet, actually, lol... but I’ve been keeping those for my brother and I f or when we get our own places...they’re already set up for the port fowards and all that stuff we’d both use...both of them are also Linksys E1200s, but the V.2 model and also running DD-WRT...