AP and router - Energy efficient

Offloading HDDs and other functions to remote NAS or servers is increasingly popular
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Schroinx
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AP and router - Energy efficient

Post by Schroinx » Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:41 am

Will change my ISP in a couple of days and the new one only comes with a ADSL modem, so I need a router and wireless AP. I have a Linksys WTG54, but it is old, transformer power supply, and needed to be restarted often when I used it (as the current s.... Zyxel my ISP gave me).

My home network consist of a WHS running a DHCP service and a Ge switch. I got the D-link green Ge switch and it has run without any hick-ups.

Any input to what kind of router I should get? Priority is stablity. I don't want to have to restart it. No fan. And low energy consumption.

Today there are the g and n standard. What to get? 100 mpbs would be nice for watching movies in the bedroom I guess.

Rgds.
Schorinx

Schroinx
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Post by Schroinx » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:29 am

Surfing around I have found this one. http://www.netgear.com/Products/Routers ... R3500.aspx

It seems to draw maximun 14-15 watts from the wall and have all the bells and whistles. Will look for some reviews....

larsolsen
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Post by larsolsen » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:37 am

it's been some time since i bought a new router, but i bought a nas box recently and found that http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ has some nice reviews of network gear.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:47 am

What version is your WRT54G? I have a version 2 and all I needed was to replace the firmware. I'm now running Tomato Firmware v1.23.1607 and it's been really stable so far. Uptime is currently at just 22 days but that's only because my mom accidentally turned off the power strip the router is connected to. Iirc, it's been running without hiccups since I installed it in February this year. Much more stable than DD-WRT.

Greg F.
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Post by Greg F. » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:56 am

I have a 2Wire dsl modem/router and while it has been running wired for maybe six months, continually without a problem, it uses 22 watts. I think that is somewhat high, but maybe not.

Schroinx
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Post by Schroinx » Tue Sep 22, 2009 12:43 am

Ahhh, just found the WRT54G in my piles of pc parts. It is a ver2. I'll try and get it running on the tomato stuff.

Ilo, what use does your router see? As I understand it from reading around the net, is that if you have a high bandwidth use and/or many connection as retriving the serverlist in CS, then a poor router will choke.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue Sep 22, 2009 6:46 am

Schroinx wrote:Ilo, what use does your router see? As I understand it from reading around the net, is that if you have a high bandwidth use and/or many connection as retriving the serverlist in CS, then a poor router will choke.
Quite a bit of torrenting for anime fansubs. ;) I did change some default settings to make it more torrent-friendly. Can't remember what they were, though.

Linksys makes pretty good hardware. The firmware, however, leaves a lot to be desired. The choking, I believe, is mostly due to the router running out of memory. By default, Linksys firmware stores connections for up to one week, I think. With the way bittorrent opens up connections, well, you see how it can grind the router to a halt.

Mr Evil
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Post by Mr Evil » Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:18 am

ilovejedd wrote:What version is your WRT54G? I have a version 2 and all I needed was to replace the firmware. I'm now running Tomato Firmware v1.23.1607 and it's been really stable so far. Uptime is currently at just 22 days but that's only because my mom accidentally turned off the power strip the router is connected to. Iirc, it's been running without hiccups since I installed it in February this year. Much more stable than DD-WRT.
Another vote for Tomato. My WRT54GL has a current uptime of 80 days, and that's only because I had to turn it off to move it to a different shelf. It's perfectly capable of withstanding heavy use too (e.g. P2P, streaming HD videos and gaming simultaneously).

jhhoffma
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Post by jhhoffma » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:12 am

+1 for any opensource firmware for the WRT54G. I used DD-WRT for a while on mine to boost the transmission signal. Worked quite well. Never had stability problems.

I've known others to use Tomato with great success as well.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:17 am

jhhoffma wrote:I used DD-WRT for a while on mine to boost the transmission signal.
Still using DD-WRT? I suggest you give this a read:
DD-WRT - An affront to the good will of the F/OSS community

Schroinx
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Post by Schroinx » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:18 am

Thanks guys.

I got the WRT54G dusted off and made it run on the tomato firmware. Seems fine, but I haven't tested the functionality yet, as I await the new ADSL line and a wireless card for my laptop (Yes, it is that old ;-).

I could see that I should change the default value for how long it remembers connections and there was a few others tweaks as well I'll try.

Schroinx
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Post by Schroinx » Tue Sep 22, 2009 12:55 pm

What settings do you use to prevent the router from choking in connections? Any linkage? Thx

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:03 pm

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=429052

I use different settings but I forgot what source I got them from...

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