[Scottish] Scottish Digest, Vol 355, Issue 1

[Roland Ward]

OpenWRT is a really good solution for routers - as long as you have the
storage on them (the flash drives can be very small!) you can do
anything you want with them. Oh plus the ability to SSH back home to
your router is always good (yes I know you can port forward your Pi for
that too)  I've not really used dd-wrt and I hear that's also good but I
really like the documentation on OpenWRT. Be warned though you need to
be really careful to get the exact model listed.

I'd also recommend the Draytek routers. They are more expensive but they
have a wealth of features - QOS, separating wifi traffic, syslog etc.
I've always used the 2800 and 2820 series and they've worked really well.

The rest? Well you get what you pay for sadly. I'd rather pay more for a
router that does the right thing. It's going to sit there for the next
5-10 years doing it's job well and not causing problems. So what if it's
not just £20?

On 09/12/13 12:00, scottish-request at mailman.lug.org.uk wrote:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2013 22:16:23 -0000
> From: "John Gordon Ollason" <john at houseofdeer.co.uk>
> To: scottish at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Subject: [Scottish] Router suitable for a small home network
> Message-ID: <op.w7sn5l1ztnf7sa at tabitha>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> I have a small domestic network comprising my linux box (wired), my wife's  
> PC (wireless), an Iyonix (a computer that nobody has ever heard of)  
> (wired), the tv (wired) a RaspberryPi (wired), and a network printer  
> (wireless). I am connecting to a bog-standard dsl broadband ISP.
>
>   On Thursday last at 0640 we had an almost directly overhead stroke of  
> lightning: flash, bang, and the lights went out. We were lucky: the only  
> casualty was the router; a neighbour lost all of his electronic equipment.
>
>   I went to town to the only computerish shop and bought the only  
> replacement router that they stock TP-Link TD-W8961ND and I am not very  
> impressed with it.
>
>   The web-interface is extremely slow and hangs a lot. The router seems to  
> be rather sensitive to temperature and has needed to be restarted after  
> only about 8 hours of service, and with the feeble web interface, that  
> took about 20 minutes. In fact the web-interface has died altogether now  
> so I can't reconfigure it or do a soft reboot, but at least it's talking  
> to me.
>
> So off I went to PCWorld was sold a Netgear D6200, get it home and  
> discovered that it can't be configured by an ethernet connexion: it has to  
> be configured wirelessly. So I configured it and it was easy to get my  
> wife's PC online. Then I tried plugging in the ethernet connectors.  
> Nothing, Downloaded the manual from Netgear: nothing helpful. Fiddled  
> about with the connectors and got two out four connected but only for a  
> short while (the sockets have a nasty floppy feel about them). So it's  
> going back to PCWorld tomorrow.
>
> So can anybody recommend a decent no-frills, solid router with at least  
> four ethernet sockets and wifi that can be reliably configured from a  
> web-interface?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>

-- 
Roland Ward
Primitive Designs 
http://www.primitive.co.uk/