Topic: No wireless

[scottws]

I never realized how much I really rely on wireless in my house until it was gone.

I have two Linksys WRT54GL routers, both running Tomato firmware.  One of them was my main router/gateway/access point and the other was just a WDS bridge to connect my Xbox 360 to the Internet because I had previously sold off my wireless adapter for it.

Well, my main one started acting funny after upgrading the firmware from v1.27 to v1.28.  Basically, if I restarted the router, wireless wouldn't work.  You could see the wireless network, but it was only half strength and you couldn't connect to it.  However, if you turned the WiFi off on the router and then back on, it would work fine.

I was able to manage a few months like this, but then suddenly it got much worse.  Basically out of the blue it started doing it.  You would get kicked off wireless and again see the half strength signal but not be able to connect to the wireless network.  Sometimes turning WiFi off and back on worked right away, but sometimes I'd have to keep doing it over and over until it finally decided to work.  Finally, it became too much trouble and I retired the main one and reconfigured my WDS bridge one as the main one.  But this time I left the firmware on that one alone.  I think it was at v1.25.

Wireless was good again.  For two weeks.  Just a couple of days ago I started noticing that the WiFi was acting strange.  I would see the connection drop and then get re-acquired, both on my laptop and Android phone.  I got an app for the Droid that watches for WiFi traffic and saw that every few minutes, the wireless would go all funky.  It would go from like -50 dBm to no signal at all every few seconds, for about fifteen seconds total.  Then it would straighten itself out again and average around -50 dBm again for a few minutes.

I thought maybe it was just the Droid but it sees other wireless networks too and those were not showing the same behavior.  They were much more steady than my wifi network.

I saw this behavior with pings too.  When I was associated with my WiFi network, I would get about 30% packet loss pinging the router 200 times.  Not good and it wasn't always like this.

I'm starting to think I took a power surge a few months back.  From another thread you might recall that I had to replace my motherboard in my desktop recently because the southbridge went bad.  I also have a DVD player that had its power light dimly flashing green and it wouldn't turn on.  When I removed power and added it again, now I just have a solid, but dim, green light and it doesn't do anything.

But I've had both of these WRT54GLs about the same length of time and I was always concerned about the transmit power level set by default in Tomato.  It was at 42, but if I recall after initially trying out DD-WRT, the default with the Linksys firmware and DD-WRT was 15 and they recommended not increasing it because it will just increase noise and reduce life.  I never changed it in Tomato because I thought maybe it was accounting for the power level differently.

Anyway yeah, sucks.  With the WiFi basically non-functional I'm finding that how I use my Droid at home is really killing my data usage on my plan.  I'm also home from work right now working upstairs using the cable that normally goes to my desktop.  I usually work in the kitchen at the table when I'm home.  Also, no Netflix on the Wii and Xbox Live is non-functional as well.  I'm not used to life without WiFi at home.

For replacement, I bought a Buffalo WHR-HP-300N for $53 on Newegg.  I wasn't about to spend the $110+ for a Linksys wireless-N device, especially when they are rated so poorly.  It comes with a customized version of DD-WRT on it, but I'll be loading the standard DD-WRT firmware because I've heard it performs much better that way.

I'd like to run the 5 Ghz Wireless-N, but alas I already purchased 5 Ghz cordless phones a few years ago so they wouldn't interfere with my Wireless-G.  I suppose I could replace them, but I'll wait until they start flaking out before I do that.

[Cobra951]

Are the Linksys G's gone, or going away?  It would be an emergency here if mine failed.  My mother hooks up wirelessly, and she'd have a cow without her internet.  So does the Wii, but I haven't used that on the net in forever.  At Sandy's, it would be a catastrophe.  She has a laptop, 2 printers, and a Bluray player with Netflix, all wireless LAN-based.

[scottws]

No, you can still get all the old Linksys stuff as far as I know.  Newegg is still selling the WRT54GL; however that is the only "old blue" I see on there.  They aren't selling the regular WRT54G anymore or the non-wireless BEFSX41.

I thought about getting another WRT54GL, but I figured I had the opportunity to start building a Wireless-N network and probably should start.

Ouch in your case.  Wireless printers.  I absolutely refuse to support them, even for close family.  Regular printers are flaky enough.  The last thing I would want to do is introduce wireless into the mix.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, this new HP printer/scanner is a diva.  Some days it works fine, others it's a pain in the ass, particularly scanning to the computer.  The old laser jet is on a printserver (Linksys) and that required tech support to drive the laptop from India, or wherever.  What a nightmare.

[ScaryTooth]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115636&cm_re=hp_photosmart-_-28-115-636-_-Product

Got one of these things a few months ago. Not a single problem so far. Works fantastic. Love be able to print stuff from wherever I am in the house.

[scottws]

Well I have a desktop connected to my printer, so I can print from anywhere in the house as well (with my laptop using the shared printer).

[Cobra951]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115636&cm_re=hp_photosmart-_-28-115-636-_-Product

Got one of these things a few months ago. Not a single problem so far. Works fantastic. Love be able to print stuff from wherever I am in the house.

That's similar to what she has.  Hers has more bells and whistles, but I'll bet it works the same way.  A couple of processes run on the PC where its software was installed, monitoring for communication from the printer/scanner.  A window pops up when you scan to the PC, and you get a progress bar.  When it works, it's painless.  But sometimes it falters for whatever reason.  It could be she's doing something dumb; I don't know, and I'm not about to accuse.    I have yet to use it myself, except when I was setting it up for her.  Great idea, as long as it works reliably.

[scottws]

So the Buffalo WHR-HP-300N came in yesterday.  I was surprised at how small it is.  It is ridiculously small.  I've also noticed that my Internet is more responsive than it was before, wireless or wired.  Not from a bandwidth perspective though; I actually lost about 0.5 Mbps on both the up and down, but there is much less latency when clicking links and whatnot.  It's basically instantaneous where there was a noticeable display with my old router(s).

I miss the Tomato firmware.  This Buffalo actually comes with DD-WRT officially and DD-WRT has way more features than Tomato did, but I don't use any of them.  We're talking things like a VPN server and various wireless hotspot authentication packages and ad-delivery systems.  It also cuts out a few features I was used to in Tomato.  The Tomato firmware can handle up to three dynamic DNS services at once, including OpenDNS, so you don't have to install an agent on any computers unless you have four or more services for some reason.  DD-WRT only supports one and it doesn't do OpenDNS.  I am using both No-IP.com and OpenDNS, so that sucks.  The QoS rules are also much more complex in DD-WRT with less features, if that's possible.  Tomato not only allows you to set QoS rules by port or protocol or traffic type, but also by the amount of data transferred to or from your network for any of those things.  There is no such thing in DD-WRT.

I used the total data transfer per connection QoS settings for things like my web server.  I was giving HTTP traffic from my web server high priority for the first 1 MB of a given connection.  After that I was giving it low priority.  Basically this would allow someone to use my web server to look at something like an image I have hosted on there and it would be responsive regardless of what I was doing with my Internet at the time.  But if someone was going to spend time looking at all the full res images on my gallery, I'm going to give higher priority to other types of traffic like DNS requests and HTTP requests intended for external web servers and Remote Desktop.

I also sort of regret making such a snap decision on this router.  I was reading that Cisco and Nortel Networks and other higher-end networking companies use Atheros chipsets in their enterprise wireless stuff, so I was limiting my search to Atheros chipsets.  Tomato is only for select Broadcom chipsets, so that was already out, but I planned on putting DD-WRT on whatever I got so I was looking at the DD-WRT hardware support list (which is huge).  So I found this Buffalo.  It was inexpensive - only $52.  I knew before I got it, but it only has 10/100 Ethernet ports instead of gigabit ports.  Honestly I could care less about that at this point, especially because low end gigabit switches are total crap.  But what I didn't know is that it isn't dual band.  It supports only 2.4 Ghz b/g/n (standard with all devices these days) without additionally supporting 5 Ghz a/n (less common in SOHO devices, but the Wireless-N specification describes both a 2.4 Ghz and a 5 Ghz mode and can operate them concurrently and as such it is becoming more common for devices to have both radios.  I don't have any Wireless-N devices and I have 5 Ghz cordless phones, so this isn't a huge deal but if I had known this I would have looked for something else that had both radios.  Also, apparently DD-WRT's support of Atheros chipsets in general is pretty new and still very flaky according to reports on DD-WRTs forums.  Broadcom support is much better.

Well, I am probably just nitpicking.  It's not like I overspent on the device.  Hell it was cheaper than any of the WRT54GLs I bought previously.  With the WHR-HP-300N, the wireless signal is stronger throughout my house, rock solid, supports Wireless-N devices now, and has lower latency.  I also have fully featured DD-WRT firmware that is vendor supplied and supported, which is nice.

[Cobra951]

Wow, there is so much I don't know about wireless networking.  I'm just happy 802.11b/g is usually so painless.