Is There One Sane DSL Router?

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, September 4. 2006

Saturday night our DSL router died. The LEDs simply went off and even loud cursing and bashing against the wall didn't reanimate it. I'd like to forget about this piece of hardware as soon as possible anyways, so R.I.P Belkin. But please, never buy a Belkin router. I had to reboot mine every now and then, since I simply couldn't ping or reach it anymore. Also, the reallife bandwidth of this 54mbit wave-lan access point was a joke and competed with good old 10mbit coax.

So off to PC World and just get a new DSL router, right? That's what I thought. At first I came home with a shiny new Linksys WRT54GS. Luckily RJ discovered that a broadband router isn't necessarily able to connect via broadband before we opened the box. Their concept of broadband routing is to connect this Linksys to your DSL/Cable Modem - which we don't have. It was supposed to be in the router, that's why it's called broadband router. So back to PC World, returned the Linksys and bought a D-Link DSL-G624T. It features a real DSL-modem, that's the upside. It even runs a proper Linux kernel and BusyBox. That's another plus on my checklist. It even comes with proper QOS and ADSL2+ support. I'm impressed. But then it started... already the installation was weird.

First of all, half of the D-Link's web-interface is not functional with Firefox. It is slightly better with Konqueror and Opera seems to work for 90% of (the really extensive and featureful) web config. Seems to be a case of "Designed for Windows XP". Amusing when you know that it's driven by Linux

But ok we got a Windows Notebook connected to it, so we managed to deal with it. Strangely enough we couldn't connect with any other wave-lan devices to it, yet the access control was disabled. After a few reboots of all our devices it suddenly started working. Fingers crossed. But guess what? This device, just as the old Belkin that died, starts randomly shutting down the wave-lan port every now and then as well. Oh the joy of rebooting.

Sigh.

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Defined tags for this entry: belkin, d-link, dsl, linksys, linux, router

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Sounds like your DSL is perhaps to blame? I'm connected directly to my DSL modem, and it occasionally blinks out. It used to do it whenever I stopped a BitTorrent (I guess a few dozen connections being closed at once confused it). So it required a restart.

#1 Ian M on 2006-09-04 22:01 (Reply)

i doubt that it's the dsl's fault that the router shuts down the wireless port and stops responding on port 80...

#1.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2006-09-05 21:02 (Reply)

Well you could always do what my friend Alistair did and create a router/fileserver using an epia, a modem and a bit of creative thinking (Plus a heavily customised linux installation), or, like me, if you can't be bothered doing that, check out the Speedtouch modems/routers. I have a speedtouch modem which works like a charm, and my friends who have speedtouch routers all highly recommend them. I recently did a SSH tunnel so I could access the web interface of one of the routers on my machine, and I was very impressed. Worked fully with Konqueror, plus had a very clean, nice interface. So you know, might be worth a look

#2 TeaSea on 2006-09-05 23:13 (Reply)

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