Pair of nice little wireless routers...

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Speed wise, I just copied a GB of stuff to the flash drive over the wireless link and it took 10 minutes. Nowhere near as fast as having it plugged right into a computer but I'm not surprised.

 

[Bimmerbill]

I ordered the N version too. Will replace my old netgear wireless and linksys router with one router. Plan to set up QOS for my vonage too, as well as an external USB drive and USB printer. Will replace the BT slave computer I set up on the basement too.

Just built a Vista media center PC, so having fun.

 

[ERD50]

I did the QOS part too. Easy. Gives you four categories (games, downloads, web browser stuff and voip/video. You click on the apps you care about and it gives you little status bars to show which one(s) have the high and low priorities.

So does this mean that I could re-configure my VOIP from this:

Signal flow top to bottom -

ISP
v
[VOIP BOX]
v
[WL ROUTER]
v v v v v
<multiple computers>


to this:

ISP
v
[Fancy new WL ROUTER]
Ethernet port............ Antenna
v ........................... v v v v v
[VOIP BOX] ............. <multiple computers>

and then configure the router with the browser to give very high priority to VOIP? Currently, a heavy DL on the computer will chop up the VOIP pretty bad. I don't care if I get a slow DL when the phone is in use, I want the phone to have top priority.

Seems the VOIP box should already do this (they do tell you to put it first in line), but it doesn't seem to do a very good job of it. It's the D-Link AT-DVG-5102S that I got with CallVantage.

TIA - ERD50

 

[Nords]

Got it last night.

Very nice. Took about five minutes this morning to get it running, and the range is impressive-- whole-house coverage all the way to the bedrooms and out to the gazebo. A laptop in the next room is no problem. Since the router is in the back of the house, the signal is pretty much gone by the time the laptop gets out to the driveway.

So the router's all boxed up and hidden for the kid's birthday, when I'll let her take over the setup & configuration. Meanwhile I need to read up on invisible modes and MAC filtering again so that I can sound like I know what I'm talking about...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Played with mine for a few days with the stock firmware and then flashed it with dd-wrt.

That would have gone better, except when I first logged in and entered a new default password for the router I mistyped and then had locked myself out. So I had to reflash it.

I like the dd-wrt feature set. Some nice charts and graphs on current usage and usage over time. Now I can see how close I'm getting to that Comcast 250GB per month limit.

Very nifty 3d 'site survey' tool that shows all the AP's and clients within range, what they're associated to, what direction they're in and about how far away they are.

 

[Bimmerbill]

Mine will be here tomorrow. Should be a fun night playing with it!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

We're so nerdy.

Mine already gave me a valuable piece of information. My Roku netflix box sucks down a lot more bandwidth than I would have thought.

6.5Mb/s steady stream with SD content and "four dot quality" level.

I'd have been surprised to see it was half that much. I'm not going to bump into Comcasts 250GB/month limit, but I wouldnt be surprised to hit 150 at my usage rates.

Once (if) netflix offers HD content, I hope theres a better compression scheme available for the Roku box or I'll go right over that 250GB limit.

 

[neihn]

cute_bunny,

I just got my wl500w and intent to flash it with dd-wrt. Which version did you flash yours with? 24 or 24sp1 or eko NEWD.

BTW, can you outline the flashing steps?

Thanks.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I pulled up the wiki installation section and there was a couple of paragraphs specific to the wl-500w.

Installation - DD-WRT Wiki

I know who Eko is, but didnt look at any of his specific builds. I used mega v24sp1.

I think if I was going to use the USB storage and printer stuff a lot and wasnt real familiar with linux, or if I wanted tech support, I'd stick with the asus firmware. Otherwise the ddwrt stuff just has a ridiculous amount of power, features and little feature boxes that I can barely keep from checking.

I've never been able to check free memory, cpu utilization and watch bandwidth curves on a $60 router before.

 

[Bimmerbill]

Hehe, wonder if CiscoWorks or similar network management suite will report stats on it?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Simple Network Management Protocol - DD-WRT Wiki

Looks pretty plausible.

 

[Bimmerbill]

Got my router, plugged it in, its good to go. I clicked the QOS for VOIP/Streaming button. Is that all I need to do to set up QOS for my vonage? Or do I need to specify the Vonage adapters IP and port number, along with metric?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Should be no need. The QOS manager should recognize the VOIP packets and give them precedence.

If you're still not getting good results, then set it up by the mac address (I thought it was by mac, not IP?) and give it the highest priority.

 

[Bimmerbill]

Seems to work fine, a bit better sound quality- less of an echo, which I got sometime. Vonage adaptor must tag IP packets as VOIP, or does the router read the IP header?

 

[neihn]

I pulled up the wiki installation section and there was a couple of paragraphs specific to the wl-500w.

Installation - DD-WRT Wiki

Thanks cute_bunny. I flashed mine with the eko TNG mega (pre-sp2). Networking part works great now. I am going to work on the USB storage sometime this weekend.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Seems to work fine, a bit better sound quality- less of an echo, which I got sometime. Vonage adaptor must tag IP packets as VOIP, or does the router read the IP header?

Theres a lot of long answers, but the short answer is that VOIP generally uses a specific set of ports and a specific protocol (generally RTP) to do its work. So the router looks for RTP on those ports or just prioritizes any traffic to/from those ports.

Not sure how Asus has implemented their QOS, but there is much written about the dd-wrt version, along with its congestion control.

Neihn...whats in that version that isnt in the standard 24sp1 version? Anything good?

I have to quit fiddling with something that works perfectly well in the first place :

 

[neihn]

Neihn...whats in that version that isnt in the standard 24sp1 version? Anything good?

I have to quit fiddling with something that works perfectly well in the first place :

The new version fixed a UpnP bug (my son wants this for his xbox live) and the USB bug. I already got the USB storage up and running and sharing using samba, still need to work out the startup script -. I will write a summary if when I am done.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Oh goodie. I've got a 360, a roku box and a pair of directv HD receivers all using upnp with it. Although they all worked fine with it turned off, which was interesting.

 

[neihn]

For people who flashed the WL500W with dd-wrt. Here's the steps to set up the USB HD to share. Disclaimer: Try it with your own risk!

1. Prepare the usb HD - Partition

Down load gparted - GParted -- Download
and partition/format the USB hardrive as follow

partition 1 - ext3 - 1G - Use this to mount /opt to install optware
partition 2 - linuxswap - 512M - Use this to add swap to the router, 32M of ram is little small operation
partition 3 - ext3 - the rest of the drive - Use this for share storage

2. Turn on USB services via the web admin (http://192.168.1.1)

Go to services tab and turn on the following

Core USB Support
USB 1.1 Support (OHCI)Enable
USB 2.0 Support
USB Storage Support
ext2 / ext3 File System Support
FAT File System Support

Reboot the router with the USB HD attached

2b. Telnet to the router - telnet 192.168.1.1

3. Check if the drive is seen by the router - type

Code :
# dmesg


look for something like this

hub.c: new USB device 01:03.2-1, assigned address 2
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: SAMSUNG Model: SP2514N Rev: VF10
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
Partition check:
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2


4. If they are show up in the dmesg, next step is to mount all partitions

Mount /opt and /mnt

Code:
# mount /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /opt
# mount /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 /mnt

Set up optware

Code:
# wget http://www.wlan-sat.com/boleo/optware/optware-install-ddwrt.sh -O - | tr -d '\r' > /tmp/optware-install.sh
# sh /tmp/optware-install.sh
# export PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:$PATH
# /opt/bin/ipkg update


We want to have swap since 32M is not enough to things like
- bittorent
- ftpd
- samba
etc...

Install optware's busybox so we can use swapon to mount the swap patition

Code:
# /opt/bin/ipkg install busybox

Turn on swap

Code:
# /opt/bin/busybox swapon /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2

check to verify swap is on

Code:
# free


5. Install/setup samba

- Install samba

Code:
# /opt/bin/ipkg remove samba
# /opt/bin/ipkg install samba2


- create a new smb.conf using vi editor (you may have to learn vi)

Code:
# cd /opt/etc/samba
# mv smb.conf smb.conf.bak
# vi smb.conf

-------------------file begin------------------------
# Samba config file created using SWAT
# from 192.168.1.113 (192.168.1.113)
# Date: 2008/10/02 14:36:42

# Global parameters
[global]
server string = Samba Optware Server
security = SHARE
log file = /opt/var/log/samba/log.%m
max log size = 50
load printers = No
dns proxy = No
hosts allow = 192.168.1. 192.168.2. 127.

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /opt/var/spool/samba
printable = Yes
browseable = No

[tmp]
comment = Temporary file space
path = /tmp
read only = No
guest ok = Yes

[share]
comment = Network share
path = /mnt
writeable = yes
read only = No
guest ok = Yes

---------------file end -------------------------------


- Add nobody user

Code:
# echo "nobody:*:65534:65534:nobody:/var:/bin/false" >> /etc/passwd

- Change /mnt to nobody so that you can write to the share

Code:
# chown -R nobody /mnt

6. Connect to the share drive from windows

Click on Start->Run then type

\\192.168.1.1\share
or
\\wl500w\share (since I named my router as wl500w)


7. If everything works we want to those steps in a startup script

Open the web admin goes Administration->Commands

Past the following and click "Save startup"

#============begin startup===================
echo "Mounting Optware partition..."
mount -t ext3 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /opt

echo "Activating swap..."
/opt/bin/busybox swapon /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2

#echo "Checking user files partition..."
#e2fsck -p /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3

echo "Mounting user files partition..."
mount -t ext3 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 /mnt

echo "Masking etc/profile with /opt/etc/profile..."
if [ -e /opt/etc/profile ]; then
cp /opt/etc/profile /tmp
mount -o bind /tmp/profile /etc/profile
fi

echo "Add nobody user"
echo "nobody:*:65534:65534:nobody:/var:/bin/false" >> /etc/passwd

echo "Starting Optware programs..."
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
if [ -d /opt/etc/init.d ]; then
for f in /opt/etc/init.d/S* ; do
[ -x $f ] && $f start
done
fi
#==================end=======================

 

[laurence]

Thanks for all this, guys! Now to spend some money w/o DW knowing it.

(on a sidebar cutefuzzy convinced me to come out of the 802.11g stone age. A home NAS is just gravy!)

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

You might have to pool your lunch money for a week or two...

 

[Nords]

Thanks for all this, guys! Now to spend some money w/o DW knowing it.
(on a sidebar cutefuzzy convinced me to come out of the 802.11g stone age. A home NAS is just gravy!)

Heck, shouldn't you pick up a couple dozen at the office for security testing?

 

[laurence]

Heck, shouldn't you pick up a couple dozen at the office for security testing?

Wireless at work = verboten.

Ha! The problem is now I don't do any real work. I have people who do it for me. My biggest fear is becoming that ignorant manager the techies all laugh at. "He suggested a media converter for the OC3! What a rube!"

 

[Bimmerbill]

Yeah, wireless at my work is frowned on, but bringing them around. Using some FIPS 140-2 compliant radios, running stuff thru TACLANES for encryption. Should be cool.

Ok, another quesiton. I have my 120G USB drive, but wondering how to get it recognized by the router. EXT2 file system is what I'm supposed to use, but never played much with linux. So, should I download an EXT2 file system driver for XP and have at it?

 

[neihn]

Ok, another quesiton. I have my 120G USB drive, but wondering how to get it recognized by the router. EXT2 file system is what I'm supposed to use, but never played much with linux. So, should I download an EXT2 file system driver for XP and have at it?

If you just want to partition and format the drive, I recommend dowloading gparted live cd
GParted -- Download
Boot from the live CD and partition and format your drive.