[Nottingham] In the market for a new router?

[Martin]

> Here is the current problem, the router does not seem to be strong enough to
> support all four machines at once most of the time it can only support two
> of them, and one of these machines has a wired connection.

A common problem is that you can easily exceed the number of
simultaneous connections that the router's very limited NAT table can
keep track of. You might only have one PC connected but just one P2P
session transferring/sharing just one distro iso for example can fill
the NAT table in one gulp. Merely viewing one webpage with lots of
eye-candy can blitz the table for a second or two if the page is
downloading content from multiple servers (as is commonly done).

Another thing that can fill the very limited RAM in a typical home
wireless router is if you are in a busy WiFi area and you are sharing
the WiFi channel with lots of other devices... Check channels 1, 6 and
11 and use whichever is the least populated. You shouldn't use any
other channels due to causing/suffering interference for anything else
nearby. A good fix can also be to move your wireless router to the
ground floor so that it can only 'see' your devices and not the entire
neighbourhood. Tweak the aerial for best results for your devices.
Hence don't try it in your loft space unless you really do want to
serve all your neighbours!

Otherwise, you need something better than a cheapie domestic router.
Or use a separate WiFi access point so that you don't need to run NAT
on it.


Myself, I gave up on the 'home routers' long long ago due to
unacceptable flakiness and now run my own low power fanless Intel Atom
uATX Gentoo system for DHCP, NAT and firewalling. My connection to the
internet is a VirginMedia SuperHub dumbed down to being just a dumb
modem whereby you shouldn't be able to run out of any system memory!
Works very well. There's also dedicated distros for easily doing that
job on almost any old hardware.

Let us know how you get on,

Good luck,
Martin


NB: The original narrow channel spacing was for low data rates. "g"
speeds spread across multiple channels and so now you can only use 1,
6, and 11 in the WiFi band. "n" will use the entire band.