what router brand do you use? - Page 3

I use pfSense 2.0.1 - 64 bit.

For wireless, Airport Extreme and a Time Capsule extending the 5 ghz network.

Perfect streaming to my Apple TV as well as the Boxee TV.

Ray

teracopy is what I use. I've never really looked at that, suppose I will next time.

Did you get it? I have WZR-HP-G300HN and I, like you, don't do wireless much but it is solid for gig LAN. I picked it up on SS over a year ago and it has been up ever since. The only time it hasn't been up is when I take it down or the time we had a power shortage last summer.

No. Unfortunately, when I checked back at the tech.woot site they had already sold out.

Too bad. That was ½ off basically. I got my for $60 on that SS deal so not too bad.

Yeah, it was a great deal. The good news is that I probably don't need to replace my router after finding out that the onboard NICs in my PCs are apparently the major bottleneck in my network.

Made another interesting discovery about the Intel NICs I'm using. The one I originally had was an Intel EXPI9301CTBLK. This is the one I installed in my unRAID server. I picked up a pair of used Intel Pro 1000PT PCI-e NICs (Dell U3867) on ebay and installed one in my main PC and the other in my HTPC. When performing a transfer between my main PC and the server I got rates over 100MB/s. When transferring to my HTPC the rates dropped to around approximately 20MB/s. I swapped out the NICs between my server and the HTPC and performed transfers between the respective PCs. The rates flip-flopped between the two. The high transfer rates followed the EXPI9301 NIC and crapped out with the Dell U3867. I have since ordered two more of the EXP9301 NICs from Newegg via ebay.

The bottom line is that all Intel NICs are not created equal. It could be that I have a flaky Dell NIC, but since they're used I don't know if they're just bad or if that's the way they actually function. I haven't tried swapping out the two Dells between PCs yet to see if that makes any difference as I've been mostly performing one-way transfers from my main PC. FYI - the EXPI9301 is a current model and the Dell U3867's were system pulls.

With lower-end consumer gear, you'll save yourself a major headache if you don't worry about getting close to full theoretical GigE speeds. It's not like 100/T gear, where you can throw anything together and it will run full speed right out of the gate. Many vendors are still half-assing the details and not providing quality documentation or drivers. They can usually do decent speeds in an isolated test, but don't deal well with curveballs.

If you are getting 70-80MBps with the occasional drop to 50MBps under normal conditions, I would call that good enough. If it's not, then depending on your setup, there may be a more efficient solution, such as using a dedicated link for a specific connection (like a HD capture box to a storage server) or just getting more local storage for the clients so you aren't shuffling data around so much.

I use IPFire linux as my router running as a virtual machine on a VMWare ESXi server with two dedicated NICs. I get 50Mb/s up/down fiber internet service and SOHO routers really aren't up to the task.

I made another interesting networking discovery last night. I found a utility on-line a while back called TCPOptimizer thinking that it would help fix my networking issues by using whatever settings are optimal for my scenario. I had used it on several PCs, but I can't say that it appeared to make much of a difference until I tried it again on my HTPC last night. When I ran it I noticed a slide controller on the GUI that I really hadn't paid much attention to previously. I had just been checking the "Optimal settings" radio button and then saving it. What I didn't realize was that the slide bar set the maximum throughput for the NIC. Apparently it was using whatever default setting was implemented when I installed the Intel NIC. I slid the bar all the way to the right and set it to maximum. I saved it along with checking the optimal settings button and it prompted me to reboot. After it rebooted, I tried a file transfer between the HTPC and my server. I got a transfer rate approaching 80 MB/sec, which is faster than anything I had seen so far on any of my PCs. I ran TCPOptimizer on my main PC using the same settings and got transfer rates around 67-70 MB/sec between the main PC and the HTPC.

Here's the link if anyone else wants to give it a try:

http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

The latest version also supports Windows 8.

Count me in as another home built unix router guy, pfsense is what I've been using lately.

The cheap stuff just can't handle higher bandwidth with a lot of connections smoothly, especially if you need to do anything complex. If you do VPN at higher speeds its really bad, even a lot of SMB or "pretend" enterprise hardware stumbles here.

You can sometimes find good used real enterprise stuff pretty cheap, but it tends to be noisy rackmount gear, and often it still can't do quite everything a good router distro can.

You can breathe a lot more life into some consumer gear with the custom firmware packages but at a certain point their embedded chips don't have enough grunt. I'm at the point where even an atom cpu is too slow (and thats far quicker than any cheap MIPs stuff) and high speed connections aren't so rare these days (mmmm FIOS) so I'm not alone.

I still use openWRT on various consumer routers for wireless AP duties, its excellent for that.

I'm running a trendnet TEW-639. I had an opportunity to buy a brand new wireless-n with gigabit for under $30 and I decided to take the chance knowing this is a sketchy brand.

When I got the router it was terrible. Daily reboots due to one device or another not being able to connect. After I did a firmware upgrade the router works "flawlessly".

My reciever uses the gigabit lan. My upstairs theater in a box system used the lan as a 10/100 speed device as does the Wii. Our Phones, bluray in theater, and tv in theater use the wireless-n without a hitch. Our laptop and 3g ipod use wireless g. All of this can happen at once without ever having a single issue. Also the wireless range is enough to get a good signal anywhere in the house including the basement theater.

The real test for this router will come in the next year as I plan on adding a NAS and a media streamer. I will test the wireless-n out transferring iso files. The streaming device will most likely use the gigabit lan but I don't see the lan having any trouble keeping up with the demand of streaming. At some point I will have to try some large file transfers over the gigabit but I currently don't have any computers with gigabit capability.

I wonder if I just got a good unit with my trendnet. If they all perform this well after the firmware upgrade I would recommend this router to everyone. The only thing the router lacks is a usb port for portable hard drives or remote printer setups.

I upgraded my WNDR3700 v.1 to v.2 of the same model. Works just as well but is far more stable.

I just got the ASUS RT-AC66R tonight. Have yet to do anything but just hook it up. That said - I had the Linksys EA6500 for a day-and-a-half before I returned it. It wouldn't let my DMA 2100 talk to my second HTPC and they have a dumbed down interface that you can't manually allow it. It also ran so hot I don't see how it could even make it a month at the temp it was.