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Router Built for Gamers
VL writes "Ping times suck? Too much lag? If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth with P2P and torrents, you'll want to check out the D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router. This is a router designed for gamers that also happens to be a great router for regular folks."
$120? What makes this router so special? In fact, what the heck IS a gaming router? My $20 Netgear wireless router with logging and access control works fine and it's $100 less. It might not have glowing blue lights and make a front page Slashvertisement, but it works fine for me.
blurb from TFA? How lazy can you get?
More Slashdot commercials... tho I hate to admit it, this one looks niiice.
had a review of the D-Link a while ago
To me it just seems like a normal router with some fancy lights and colors and some QoS software built into the router (most other routers have QoS as well, at least the Linksys ones do). To me though, it doesn't seem all that interesting.
8dimensional.com posted about this almost two weeks ago.
Not to be flip, but if one of the reasons you come to Slashdot is to hear about neat hardware and read the articles, go to 8dimensional.com first. If the follow-up discussions matter, then ok, yeah, keep coming here. But what the heck is going to be said here that couldn't be predicted anyway?
A router with QoS already defined for well know games and a easy setup to add new games.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I am sceptical about D-Link products - Even though a relatives WLAN Access Point works pretty well, I have made quite bad expiriences with them. Even their USB 2.0 HUB didn't work as promised with my G5 (anyone same experience?) - it only worked in USB 1.0 Mode (although USB 2.0 devices were attached).... So sounds kind of vaporvare to me... But thats just my humble opinion...
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
"Okay, now you're a judge, how do you know when someone's guilty? Let's say.. let's have this scenario: You've got a guy there, nineteen year old, driving around in top of the range router with the lights and everything, leather seats, bitches in the front, bitches in the back, sitting on the woofer speakers, gold tooth, UV light underneath, big drum and bass coming out, the guy never done any work in his life. Is he a gamer or is he a dealer? considering he never touched any joystick or held a fire button ever in his life? Are you going to send this man down?"
"sales in a slump? Got some free time at work? Cull your product tag-lines onto /. and profit! The editors no longer care!"
/. and a story because I updated my art website this morning.
Since everyone's just shamelessly plugging stuff, maybe I can get an "art" category on
stuff |
This is a router designed for gamers that also happens to be a great router for regular folks.
:: Military-Grade : Civilian.
You're stating the obvious.
Gamer : Regular Folk
yep, but this time, the QoS software is already configured for popular games and has a easy setup to add new games.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Seeing as how TFA is /.-ed
Here is a review of the D-Link DGL-4300 Gaming router. They even test the unit with PCs running Fedora Core 3.
Reviews
http://gamesfirst.com/v4/index.php?m=l&i=372
http://www.gamingillustrated.com/dgl4300.php
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/d-link_dgl-4300/
Competition
http://www.dlink.com/giveaway/monthlyGiveaway.asp
According to the ExtremeTech review, the ping times are around 300-400ms when the connection is being heavily utilised. Well, that's useless for the target market. Alex Clouter's QoS scripts did a lot better 2 years ago:
http://www.digriz.org.uk/jdg-qos-script/
Try updating the drivers.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
This is certainly overrated - at least it's slashdotted for sure :-)
The key to good ping times is to have 2 things:
1) A stable, low-latency connection to your ISP
2) Short TX queues.
In essence, 1) is recursively defined by having 2) at your ISP, but ISPs aren't too keen on having minimal TX queues, because that will limit the throughput slightly. Since people behave ridiculous if they get 53 KB/s instead of 55 KB/s, it's a hard compromise between latency and throughput.
Since there is nothing you can do if your ISP isn't up to snuff, I don't see how this router can anything important. If you ping 200, how can that be fixed by carving off something like 10ms?
(yes, I did read as much as possible of the article, which was only page 1 I'm afraid..)
With great numbers come great responsibility!
Looks like they added some neat sounding features and packaged it i a neat looking package. They give you gigabit switch ports for LAN. This is more hype than anything as the majority of the traffic will be rolling out to the internet and a much slower rate (via the 10/100 WAN port). Even if you wanted to play locally, the gigabit speed would do nothing to improve play. (but hey, it's nice to have and who knows what the future holds)
They added some firewall policy content for current popular internet games so you don't need to configure ports which I suppose is a plus for most players.
It provides wireless connectivity as well. Since they are holding the hand of users in the firewall port configuration, I am hoping they stress wireless security concerns. Overall it looks like a nice device.
I spent a long time trying to get a sister product, the DI-624, to work.
First of all, I never tried their MIMO gear, but the range and power on all the previous XG gear I tried was shockingly less than I expected. You felt lucky to penetrate two walls, or go 30 feet. Yes, of course, this is all construction materials and background noise and so forth. But in general the way these devices are marketed you do not realize how unlikely you are to see the performance numbers they claim, or potentially even use the device in a meaningful way at all.
For the first YEAR I owned this product, the firmware was unusuable! The device would work, sure, but gradually you would see latencies and packet loss creep up over a 24-48 hour period until the network was unusable. Some kind of resource leaking... And then you would also see occasional random lockups. Only power cycling the router would help.
Can you picture a cron job that wget's the router reboot URL? Now you are getting the picture. And I know from the forums that earlier DLink adopters had it worse, in many cases much worse. DLink, of course, was just in no hurry at all to fix the problem. AN ENTIRE YEAR. Imagine my amazement when they finally fixed it at all.
I actually tried a competing Linksys product. It was worse, both in terms of analog performance, and also that it would lose 40% of its speed with WPA encryption enabled. Pathetic. The biggest draw there is a GPL firmware you can fix yourself. But don't get me started on the whole Sveasoft evilness. But in general GPL firmware is the way to go, and it's what we need to encourage. It just kills me the Linksys hardware is under-powered.
Of course, none of these chipset manufacturers can be bothered to cooperate on a high speed standard, so you are throwing in your lot with either Atheros or Broadcomm. The DLink XTreme G's are Atheros. So, if you bought in, you didn't just get the router, you got a bunch of cards, too, and you are locked in if you want to realize their high-speed modes.
And don't get me started on the Linux support. There is no GPL driver for these products. None. You can use MadWifi, which is a GPL wrapper around a binary, closed-source "HAL." This disables all the "Xtreme-ness" of the network, and MadWifi, according to their faq, is in no hurry at all to fix that. However, this is the ONLY stable linux driver solution I have found for the newer Atheros chips. You can use NDISWrapper or DriverLoader, however, neither is stable.
Overall 802.11g and derivatives are an ugly, ill-supported, overpromised nightmare, and in hindsight I would never have gotten within 100 yards of one. My advice, stay away unless you have no other choice, and just absolutely love troubleshooting.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Viperlair.com, after reviewing thier weblogs, recently decided Cisco may have been a better choice for their routers.
Mirrordot
According to TFA, this router comes with no password and also lets you get at the admin tools via http rather than https.
OK, most routers are utterly insecure in their default configs, but for something relatively high-end I don't see why they don't require a password. (Not to mention the SSL bit, which is standard on my much older D-Link).
It's not that hard. All you have to do is only allow access to the admin tools until a decent password has been set, and have a hardware reset button that gets you back to that state in case you forget your password.
I suppose you could have an option for a completely open wireless network, but you'd want to require a few confirmation clicks with big fat warnings.
Am I missing something? Is that really so hard?
(And yes, I know people don't normally associate "high-end" with "D-Link" but hey, mine cost $30 and works just fine.)
This Like That - fun with words!
That examines the gaming packets and makes them go faster using the same technology Lucy Ricardo used when she was working in the bonbon factory.
Quit fucking advertising shit marketed to people who don't know a thing about networking that no respectable slashdotter would ever buy.
home theatre suckers who buy special $200 AC power cords for their receivers. The wire itself may look nice but even if it actually does some good what about all the potentially crappy wiring leading to and through their house? (Or in this case all the routers leading up to this one)
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
It's a shame to have an Ad article like that...
;)
If only it was something new. The only new thing is the marketing concept, the features are not.
I hope not to see such kind of articles anymore on Slashdot.
i-neo
PS: Fortunately they'll be slashdotted
There it is, the reason that QoS on the internet does not exist and will not work. This router allows anyone, including clueless newbs, to easily establish QoS policies for their favorite game. Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing inherently wrong with this but, what would it be like to have your internet phone call interrupted or preempted by some one else's fragfest? Or for that matter, I want to speed up my surfing so I set QoS priority for my port 80 traffic at the expense of your video stream.
The point is that it is just too easy to abuse QoS and therefore it won't be implemented on a global level. Not in its present incarnation, at least.
Demo Evaluation Unit - $0
Low Cost Web Hosting for your evaluation site - $100/month
Having your demo unit melted to slag trying to route a good slashdotting - priceless
There are few sites a little bit of traffic can't DDoS, for everything else there's Slashdot.
I'm very interested in this router and may purchase it (or the nicer 4600) in the near future. I don't play online games but I'm interested in VoIP, P2P, and Shoutcast hosting. Any combination of these things was impossible in the past but this router sounds like the answer. It got a great review in Computer Power User (CPU) magazine which I believe to be a very reputable source.
I'm a little wary of the claim of better ping times though. This may be a statement concerning QoS packet scheduling because I've heard from a few sources (including Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel) that 1000baseT has higher latency than 10/100. However, D-Link boasts that the router's onboard processor is much faster than most, allowing many more simultaneous connections, so perhaps it can direct packets more quickly than comparable products.
I should mention here that Linksys has absolutely abhorrent customer support and that I highly recommend supporting the competitive companies. I'm on my 2nd (non-consecutive) Linksys router and it's been very unreliable from the get go. Their tech support advised me to wait a while before calling back, and when I did they told me my 1 month replacement window had expired. 8 days ago after MUCH frustration with 3 techs and a manager they finally agreed to send me a replacement (shipped at my expense) in 3 working days and I've recieved no such thing.
Linksys is riding on its laurels. Hopefully they'll get the message when people start buying imaginative new products from competitors.
It's mainstream now, so expect these type of products hitting the market more and more in the near future. It's like video cards. There was a time when a video card didn't have to come with a flashy 3D collage on the box, but now, thanks to the mainstream culture, video cards have to look cool before they're even out of the box.
And now that joe six pack is playing multiplayer games more and more we see routers and other gear that was once only found in the domain of the geek eeking their way onto the plates of the masses.
It's not a bad thing, just something that happens every time something becomes popular. Companies try separating products for specialised tasks, even if the variance between these products is rather insignificant.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
The same can had for FREE using OpenBSD's pf and queueing on a spare pc with 2 nics...
I have 7 or 8 networking black boxes of various kinds from "consumer" ranges here, and the D-Link ones actually seem the most reliable and effective, followed by Zyxel.
...
Some of the others
So far, every D-link router product I have had has suffered from 'resetting' under heavy load. D-link's tech support was dismal and their end suggestion was to reduce the speed of the ports to 10mb, and reduce the broadband side to 2mb.. and 'don't put it under such a heavy load'.. What sort of garbage suggestion is that? They expect me to just surf web pages and not get any work done? No thanks.
Needless to say ay I no longer buy ANY D-link product and avidly recommend against them.
Will this new device suffer from the same defects, regardless of their promotion of 'features' ? Or have they finally got a clue and want to produce a useable product?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is, just paying more money for something with a decal on it?
I could see them preloading it to know about and priortize some traffic (XBox Live, and a handful of the top PC titles), but I bet it's just the same old router with an X-Treme GamAr sticker and a 100 dollar higher price tag.
If you go to EB you'll see "XBox Lan Party" kits, with a simple 4 port 100mbit hub (not a switch) and a few patchcords, and they sell for upwards of 100 bucks.
Or an "XBox link cable" (read crossover cable) sells in the gamerz section of Best Buy for 40 bucks, whereas a regular x-over cable in the comp section will be about 10.
Go Go Gamer Rip-off!!
(I have an actual gaming router, linux based, that does prioritize xbox live, xbconnect, etc, and works great even when I'm bittorrenting the hell out of the connection).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
it's a D-Link, it'll SAY it has all sorts of useful and great features on the box, but when you plug it in and go to configure it you'll find out those features don't actually WORK, like D-Link's PPTP Client feature of some of their routers, it WILL connect to a PPTP server, but it's only a client for the router itself, not anyone behind the router, so it's not really all that bloody useful as a PPTP client now is it? I HATE D-Link, had 3 products from them, 1 had a meltdown turning a 10/100 switch into a 1Kb switch, 1 print server that fried after a year causing endless line feeds, and a VPN router that couldn't ACTUALLY be used for either end of a VPN connection. 3 strikes, they're out, screw D-Link!
It's not about port forwarding, it's about prioritizing packets, which I doubt this router does.
My simple linux based router/firewall prioritizes stuff basically in this order: VoIP, Xbox live/xbconnect/whatever PC game-of-the-week I'm playing, web surfing, ssh, openvpn, everything else..
You're probably right though. This is like the 40 dollar "XBox link cable" at EB games, which is just a simple crossover cable. Or the $100 dollar 4 port hub being sold as the "XBox lan party kit"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth... Unplug them! That's what I do when it's game time. "Sorry guys, the Internet is down again."
That is probably your problem, I have never seen a TCP/IP stack that works well for Windows 3.1
Nothing beats playing my favorite EA games over my SBC Yahoo! DSL connection using my D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router with a cool, refreshing Pepsi in one hand, my Logitech mouse in the other, wearing my Nike clothes and blasting a ClearChannel affiliate, my source for great new hits from 50 Cent and A Simple Plan.
Whoops, I meant to post that as an article.
I didn't see anyone mention this, but a BIG difference is gigabit enabled on the LAN ports. So not only do they have QoS preset for gaming, but you have the benefits of faster transfer speeds within the network while getting to keep the router and wireless together. You guys price a gigabit switch and a g-router then see how ridiculous this is (or is not).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I spent $110 on my Netgear router/firewall, and the Linksys router/firewall was free with sign up for VoIP.
My experience with D-Link gear has always been less than satisfying. And the price isn't right on this unit when other 802.11g gear with the same feature set is selling for
Too little, too late once again.
D-link sucks. Wireless sucks. That thing is a rip off. I would never use wireless for gaming, good old 10 Mbit ethernet is faster and more reliable than that 108G bullsh*t. I doubt you could get better than 1 mbit with that thing through a wall.
Come one slashdot, you can do better than this. This reminds me of the marketing guys at my work. They don't care about real performance, as long as they can throw around some theoretical numbers that make it sound faster in order to make short term sales. What those morons don't think about is the long term damage that it does to the company.
These types of products hurt manufacturers, people become disenchanted with the companies products when they buy something that claims massive speed increases and doesn't do squat. But then at the same time, I'm sure a few thousand jack asses will buy this thing and bring over their freinds and brag about their gaming router and claim getter pings on UT2004 than ever before (becuase they never really payed atention before). Placebo is a powerful thing, but true nerds will always see thourgh the marketing hype.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
does it have a Hemi?
I enjoy wathcing the creativity of marketing types. Take a product with modest success, turn on one software bit, and re-market the product to a whole new "specialized" audience.
Bean bag chair + appropriate logo = cool gamer's chair
Regular mouse + extra teflon sticker = cool gamer's mouse
Regular router + traffic prioritization flag = cool gamer's router
Regular PC + $3.00 of stencils and stickers = cool teenager PCs!
Regular mouse + retractable cord = cool travel mouse!
BTW: I'm not bashing the niche marketing, I really am facinated by it. It's great to see how certain products are re-branded or re-marketed and find huge success despite the fact that the underlying product is 99.9% identical as before. Of course, it's really entertaining to watch nich-marketing fall flat on its face.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
It turns out that for a whole range of applications, including VOIP, you can detect most of the packets that need QoS by simply picking small UDP packets. (In fact, almost ANY UDP packet, except for BitTorrent and file-sharing protocols, tends to be good prioritization material - and file-sharing shouldn't be going out over your WAN except through secure tunnels anyway.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your upload is the usual problem. It has less bandwidth and worse, there's an outbound buffer you have to work through. This buffer (often in modem hardware) is horrible (2+ sec), and the only solution short of queue jumping is to keep it drained by throttling the sources.
How about just updating your ISP to a better one, assuming that your in an area where you have multiple ISP's and a choice.
You need a specific router ? take an old dusty forgotten box, 2 NICs, install a routing specialized linux distro. Tune it at will : there are plenty of iptables scripts available on the web for every game.
IMHO, it is cheaper & more versatile.
I'm suprised no one has mentioned this yet, but if you have poor pings or too much lag, then stop using wireless. Wireless is great for surfing in the garden, not for serious gaming. Of course this wont fix the problem of other people in the house riding the eMule, but a sharp stick should sort them out.
I've had mine for a month or two and love it. Besides the packet shaping (which I don't use heavily) the key benefit of this router is that it also includes gigabit ethernet for (of course) wired conenctions. When connected via ethernet I get a connection that can actually utilize the gigabit cards in my several laptops, workstations, and server.
It's a geek gadget for sure and only worth the extra $$$ if you're into these sort of things. I've enjoyed it, but if you just need a vanilla wireless router I can see why you wouldn't want to pay $120+ for it. And I don't think D-Link expects you too either; if you go to their consumer wireless router page you'll see it's not even listed. It's a niche product with a niche price...
But what if you're trying to play latest game on your home PC over ssh from work?
D-Link sux. Use Netgear, at least they know what they are doing. D-Link and Linksys are nothing but problems, especially in the wireless area.
-- DuckWing
As soon as a read this article to myself I started to laugh, well, at least inside (I was in a public place and a geek laughing at a bunch of text on the screen might not be the best thing for his image). Anyway; this specifically reminds of the products that Creative advertises as "Gamer's Soundcards" that they specifically sell targetting towards gaming.
The fact is; any decent soundcard would do for gaming and you don't need to buy the specific product. But because of the fact that it says "Gamer" on it, and that they're giving away some cheap games with it, people buy it. You really have to love the marketing twists that TPTB put on the consumers.
I'm f#$king magic!
What about blatent adverts?
"It's like, some people only do things because they get paid, and I think that's just sad."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
mirror of all pages here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm just curious as to how many people do the 'roll your own' route and use an old box like a P2 or K6-2 or something, put two $10 ethernet adapters in there, and use iptables with QOS to do almost the same thing? Now I realize that that is much more involved, and there is definite worth in purchasing a consumer level "router" and dropping it into place (not to mention the actual learning curve involved in setting up your own router), but I find it's given me so much flexibility (and it rarely runs into weird firmware problems, random freezes, and the amount of connections it can hold have never been a problem - this with seven PC's, running and seeding torrents) that I'm surprised when people get excited about routers like this, especially on slashdot.
Note that with that many torrents running, QOS is very important, and I seem to have it down pretty well - we've had four people playing online with the previous mentioned torrents running, and our pings still hold steady in the 30-70 range (yes, we have a nice set of data lines, but QOS is still important at keeping the torrents under control ).
The gigabit ports are nice, of course.
I'd almost choose this to replace my present gateway but I dont see SNMP in it anywhere?!
I mean, even the cheaper basic ADSL modems have it which is useful for graphing your traffic load or in my case for my custom script to collect the current IP address from the PPPoE interface (for use with home brewed nsupdate dynamic IP's and the like)
Add SNMP and this would be a killer product.
-- Jim
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
The Linksys WRT54GS is cheaper at $75, is more powerful than the aforementioned D-link router, and the WRT54GS runs Linux, so its firmware is opensource and therefore its feature set is easily extended with the main selling points, quality of service and bandwidth shaping, of the more expensive D-link, by using the open source Sveasoft firmware.
I personally own a WRT54G, the older model with a slower CPU and less RAM, and I also bought the newer WRT54GS. The WRT54GS is the end all be all of low-cost routers/wireless access points/wireless bridges. I use my WRT54G as an ethernet to wireless bridge in my theater room so that my Xbox can stream movies wirelessly from my file server in my computer room. My computer room as a WRT54GS running as a wireless access point and as a gateway/firewall between my home LAN and the Internet.
In conclusion, it is inexpensive and easy to get your hands on a WRT54GS, installing the Sveasoft firmware is extremely easy... it is like a standard firmware upgrade which router users should already be familiar with due to security updates, and the resultant feature set and performance is to die for. If you are buying a router for your home or even (very) small business, why would you waste your money on anything else?
i have one, i paid alot more then $120 and i'm happy.
2 nights ago, i was running 2 torrents, teamspeak and eq2.
I had no noticeable lag in eq2 (just the usual cpu lag i always get), and my teamspeak didn't breakup once.
My (granted) old linksys would freak out if i tried this with just 1 torrent.
... when you can have a P200 with a wireless card running a flavour of BSD running pf+altq ? (or linux, for that matter), giving priority to gaming packets ?
Anyone have a link on a HOWTO for doing something similar with a Linux router box instead?
The best routers have twin WAN connections. DSL and cablemodems each have something like 99.9% uptime: that's 9h downtime a year, scattered annoyingly through broken connections that take longer to recover. So your apps actually get disconnected for the equivalent of days a year. But a pair of WANs combined gets 99.9999% uptime, or 30 seconds a year, a negligible amount for consumers. It's reliable enough to use for a primary phone on VoIP.
There's also some tech for connection "training", which would let a single TCP/IP connection use both WANs at once, for their full bandwidth, but I've never heard of it working satisfactorily. But a good way to use the tech is to cooperate with a neighbor, one getting cable, the other DSL. The routers all loadbalance, and multiple connections get put over whichever WAN is more available at the moment. So multiple connections get to fully use all the bandwidth of the pair, while adding the increased mutual uptime. Of course downtime on one WAN cuts the bandwidth, but it's better than nothing for the duration. And service requests for the down WAN can be transacted over the up WAN.
Connecting a router to two independent WANs moves the single point of failure to the router for both LANs behind it. Since they're cheap ($300), a spare router can be kept for swapin. Word to the (un)wise: if both WAN ports are connected to the same WAN (eg. two RoadRunner cablemodems, even from different theoretical providers), the WAN is still the uptime bottleneck, and all you'll get is more bandwidth. With multimegabits for under $100:mo, and WAN redundancy, small/home offices can finally get the kind of Internet connectivity that only banks used to get, for $thousands less. And the qualitative uptime threshold for serious apps can be crossed affordably.
--
make install -not war
A perfectly American open-source enthusiast, has just told me, compiling Mozilla with -march=opteron is not supported, because it is "an exotic" compiler flag.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Can something that is vaporware exist?
I got a cheap Gigafast and it will do everything but let me play Battlefield 1942 or Battlefield Vietnam. NOT SERVEING mind you, just playing. Heck I open the ports for serving just in case that worked.
I call it the ANTI-GAMING router. Pbbbtthht!
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
I think the point of this router is to let "JOE USER" set up priorities without having to know how to do the same thing some other way. I think packet prioritization is exactly what it does.
I think it pretty obvious that anyone that knows how to set priorities is NOT going to spend extra money on a device like this, average people that run windows do NOT know how to do this. That's where this device comes in.
D-Link: Strong enough for a Tech, but made for a Gamer.
Come to think of it, some gamers could use some deodorant.
It's awful. Latencies average around 30ms, with spikes to 120ms. Before we installed the Sveasoft crap, we could drive our robot vehicle remotely, using an older Linksys 802.11b unit with stock Linksys firmware. Now, the latency is so bad we can't. Fortunately, we usually drive it autonomously, and E-stop is on a completely separate radio link.
Worse, the Sveasoft software garbles TCP packets. If you have several TCP packets in flight, the later ones tend to get garbled. We've put packet sniffers on both sides of the link, and we can see the TCP packets getting trashed. It looks like the packet queueing is badly broken. Worse, they don't get trashed randomly. The trashing is repeatable and the TCP connection never recovers. It looks like some kind of stateful TCP firewall has gone horribly wrong. We have the Sveasoft firewall turned off, or at least as "off" as is offered by its options.
Non-TCP packets don't seem to get trashed in this way. So remote file access (NFS, QNX native networking) still works. And HTTP out to the Internet works. But local high-traffic TCP connections fail.
Most users probably don't see these problems because they're using these units to connect to the Internet through a slow uplink. So they never have a bottleneck across the WiFi link and don't get a packet backlog in the Sveasoft software. But try to talk to a local server using TCP. A CVS checkout from our local server over a pair of Linksys routers using the latest, licensed, paid-for Sveasoft software hangs. Every time, within ten seconds. (Works fine with a wired Ethernet connection.)
Attempts to get this fixed have dragged on for months. It's been reported to Sveasoft, of course.
So we definitely recommend against buying Sveasoft firmwere.
John Nagle
I remember the last router that I had from D-Link. I actually had to return it because of gaming. The thing's DMZ and port forwarding didn't work reliably for some odd reason (I've heard others with the same problem), and the router died/restarted when I tried doing much P2P. Even worse, the router died when using Xbox Live, despite being "Xbox Live Compatible". Tech support was useless, yadda yadda typical hardware problem story, I returned it and bought a nice Linksys that works perfectly.
Syntax error:
10: "Over-exaggerate"
You can't "over-exaggerate" something. "Exaggerating" is synonymous with "over-stating". And "over-over-stating" makes no sense.
"Over-exaggerate" implies there's an acceptable level of exaggeration and you've crossed it.
I may be the grammar police, but otherwise we'd have "words" like "ain't" and "cuz" in the dictionary.
this a demo to this router config
c _W izard.html
http://support.dlink.com/Emulators/dgl3420/Basi
What about ADSL?
While that is the most common "non cable" connection I've come across, there are lots of others. I personally have a linksys ADSL one that dies fairly frequently (about twice a month), but my peer to peer activities managed to destroy a beklin router. Totally. Even after I reflashed the firmware it wouldn't give me more than 2 kbs down.
Still, for that price, why can't you buy a decent Cisco router and manually configure it?
Though I do like to see the inclusion of a gigabit switch. That alone is probably one reason why the price is so high, but....is it really needed? Reading from a CD is only about 600 megs/second, full gigabit is not really needed for anything but backbone, imo. Although, I daresay it will be used...
And I know somebody who, in all honesty, paid £150 more for a £2,500 5U rackmount case because it had blue monitoring LEDS.....
My UID is prime. Is yours?
QOS seems kind of useless to me in a home setup. Last time I checked you can't control what your provider is sending you.
Your router can obviously ensure that your precious northbound game bandwidth is being preserved, but how can it keep updating your status steadily if your wife is in the next room downloading all last weeks Days of our Lives episodes?
Has this changed and you can assume that providers will support some kind of QOS protocol now?
I have had this router for a few months. Honestly I think its great. Static DHCP, Game presets and gigabit, mac address filtering on both wired and wireless connections, and with the newest firmware WPA2. I also like the fact you can set it to automatically check for new firmware and send you an email when some is available. Plus the electrical tape i put over the lights (which are way to bright) exactly matches the case. >:)
Speaking of QoS... a few months ago I got a DLINK router for my AT&T CallVantage VoIP.
With the QoS turned on, the router would constantly limit my bandwidth even when I was not making or receiving phone calls. All day it would do this.
I turned off the QoS and everything works fine.
If you want your games to run smoothy, don't run P2P apps through your router (or max your upload speed with a FTP for instance) and you will be fine. These new QoS routers ara all gimmicks.
I've used various D-link and Linksys routers to work with VPN and has failed miserably. However, Netgear was solid and worked great even with heavy load. Strongly recommend Netgear for any low-end routers.
http://www.up0.com/
And for those of you who want to know what the advantages of this router are, here's the relevant part of the article from the link I provided:
Even more exciting is the router's GameFuel technology. Gimmicky as it may sound, GameFuel is the means whereby D-Link's DGL-4300 balances time-sensitive packets with the rest of your network traffic using dynamic fragmentation to divide larger packages into smaller streams and packet prioritization to classify the importance of packets according to a number of parameters.
And although the mechanics behind GameFuel are undoubtedly far more complicated, the only real concern is if the technology works. To test, I connected my workstation to one of the LAN ports and connected a wireless client to the same broadband connection; initiating two 500MB file transfers to the remote laptop at 54Mbps. Then, I fired up a P2P app on my workstation and began downloading several large DivX files. Imagine my surprise when, despite all of the concurrent network traffic, I was able to play Half-Life 2 Deathmatch without a hiccup.
Laughter is the best medicine, but in certain situations the Heimlich maneuver may be more appropriate.
Sorry, but wireless and games are not compatable in the same sentance unless you add "Internet Checkers" as the only playable game. They may have some incredable advance in transmission reliability, but from my experiances, games update too frequently to be played over wireless. I still prefer a switch + router for games.
I have a linksys switch as the core of my internal network. It has a feature that allows me to do crude traffic shaping.
I can specify if a particular MAC address gets low, normal, or high priority for various protocols.
Needless to say my machines are set up at high priority for all protocols. My daughter's machine is set up with low priority on transport protocols, and my wife has normal priority. I did this upon installing the network, so no one is the wiser (except me, of course).
This means my gaming sessions never lag out due to internal network/gateway traffic congestion (internet traffic issues can still cause problems though - nothing I can do about that since it is external to my network).
Everyone is happy.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
all the consumer-level routers seem to have the same problems... i've read the reviews.
but i ordered a linksys befsr81 for the lab i work in. totally unstable, couldn't download faster than 30k/s. the switch worked fine, the router sucked. it sucked bad.
sent it back. the new one they sent me: SAME EXACT problems.
the indian tech support was totally useless. totally.
apparently it's a hardware/manufacturing problem. that's my guess.
finally ordered a D-link 8-port-switch broadband router. worked right out of the box, fast, stable. so i say: DOn'T GET LINKSYS. and i had the problems AFTER cisco acquired the company.
though interestingly somebody on this board had the same problem with D-link that I had with the linksys.....
Reasons for buying? Gaming isn't one of them:
P.S.: Gizmodo posted about this piece of hardware no less than four months ago. Old news, editors. Old news.
Hack the thing yourself, check out here.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
(Disclaimer: I have the router described in the article at home in use)
I see all these posts from people saying:
"Oh this is nothing special, I can do everything this routers does with my Linux box and iptables and tc"
Hello people! This is a CONSUMER ROUTER. How many people who are just regular people are competent enough to:
1. Build their own computer (ok, they could buy it prebuilt)
2. Install Linux
3. Configure Linux
4. Understand TCP/IP
5. Learn how traffic shaping/traffic prioritization works
6. Implement #5 on their new Linux box.
Just because us Slashdot nerds can build our own routers doesn't mean this isn't a bad product.
Also, for the people who are saying:
"Oh the Linksys routers can do QoS with the Sevasoft firmware"
This still requires the average consumer to:
1. Know what the hell QoS
1a. Know how the hell TCP/IP works
2. Learn what ports different online games and p2p apps utilize
3. Know about alternative niche firmware for their consumer router
4. PURCHASE the firmware and install it (without borking their shiny new router)
To the people who have been going on about how previous older/current different models of D-Link's have had problems for them I say this:
The D-Link gaming router actually works as advertised. I haven't had it burst into flames. It's been perfectly happy handling World of Warcraft, IRC, IM, DC++, and Bittorrent all simultaneously over my cable connection. The router hasn't spontaneously reset due to extreme traffic flow. The router has simply Just Worked.
SMOOTHWALL!!!
You don't even need a heavy load. They have major firmware issues, they all have major heat issues... I've spent far too much money on their stuff too. I want a good, stable, reliable, working router - exactly the inverse of what they make.
I have a such "melted" D-Link, too (A router though). I've had major problems with the firmwares. Buggy, unstable, features that only half-work (that were released only to specific countries) like UPnP get removed from the next firmware as it's not working (which is what I had bought it for in the first place). Heat! This thing is like a fire hazard. Keeps crashing (software sucks, and also the heat). Firmware updates introduce more problems than they fix... Not buying D-Link anymore either.
And ain't has just as good a pedigree as any other n't contraction, why wouldn't you want it in the dictionary?
:)
No it doesn't. The "ai" portion of "ain't" is a concatenation of the first letters in "are" and "is." When written out, "ain't" means "are is not."
The verb bases are both derived from the infinitive "to be," but the term defies the accepted conjugation conventions for that infinitive. It does not fill in any hole in the language, but serves rather to supplant the contractions of the present-tense conjugations of "to be" without also providing non-contracted versions of those same conjugated verbs. More than anything else I would guess that to be the reason that it has suffered a cold reception.
If "ain't" is a distinctly necessary word, so should the conjugation "I/you/we/he/she/it/they ai" be valid and distinct. It would certainly simplify the conjugation of "to be," but I doubt it's going to happen.
This is a quote of the complete contents of the site it points to. It's a lame sales site without any further information. I had to Google the product name to get a different site where there were any product specs. This post is nothing but an advertisement for an advertisement. Maybe the product is worthwhile; if it is the poster should have sent us to a site that had something to say.
I'm assuming that this thing does port forwarding and so forth. But does it do arbitrary port forwarding while allowing things like redirection to different numbered ports? For instance, can I have incoming WAN traffic on port 10010 forwarded to port 80 on one of the servers on my LAN?
This feature is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is bypassing my ISP's idiotic port blocking. (Yes, I know I can reconfigure the daemons on my box to listen on non-standard ports, but I would rather have all my internal LAN traffic talking on the standard ports and only have inbound WAN traffic listened for on non-standard ports.)
I'm still using an antiquated firewall/router appliance from Moreton Bay (which I believe got bought out by Snapgear) precisely because it does this sort of thing, and none of the other affordable consumer-grade firewall/router appliances seem to have this ability. (They only allow forwarding to same-numbered ports.)
Yeah, I remember posting a comment on Slashdot TWO YEARS AGO asking if a router such as this existed. My comment got a -1 rating. Thanks, slashdot community for answering my question in such a timely manner. ;P
(And I bet this post will get a -1, also!)
5% packet loss is nothing. If 1/20 of the packets are being dropped and the game is unplayable, the game has absolutely horrid networking code.
I'm most familiar with quakeworld, in which some people play with 10% packet loss and don't think much of it. Some play with 25-50% PL and are still very good (i.e. play for one of the top 3 teams in North America). And quakeworld netcode was basically the 1st generation of Internet code for FPS games.
If you know of a game that is maintained by salaried developers (unlike QW which is maintained by volunteers) and its network play fails with 5% PL you should complain to them. Point out that netcode from the late 90's maintained by hobbyists is significantly better than their work, and they should get in contact with Dave Kirsch.
I've had a D-Link DI-614+ for a year or two longer than my WRT54G and have had some inexcusable problems with it. The main problem is that firewall changes sometimes don't go into effect even though the router says they do. The router has to be unplugged when this happens.
The other big problem was that they never sent me my rebate, and when I tried to contact them about it the recording at the number listed on their Website was of such poor quality I couldn't tell which button I was supposed to press on my phone.
My Linksys WRT54G has been great. I can't think of any problems I've ever had with it or the stock firmware.
I thought of the Sveasoft firmware option also, and I'd like to point out that any self-respecting gamer should be able to perform the flash and set up QoS.
"mayself" ==> "myself".
Sorry.
(It looked OK in "Preview".)
I used to moderate down useless first post comments in an attempt to draw more attention to comments that would provoke more interesting discussion. One I remember was an article about KOffice and the first post was "Try Open Office, it's well good!" By the end of the week it was +5 Informative.
Eventually I stopped getting moderator points presumably because the meta-modderators decided I was being unfair on these fascinating first posts.
Apparently you and me are the only ones who find that first-post warriors ruin the quality of the discussion.
Whats so special about this? I have a u.s. robotics router, and i can do exactly the same thing thats described in the article. While on the subject, the article talks (stresses really) about the user interface and the commands via html connection to the router...and? Every router has that, you can designate how much a computer can take up bandwidth. like in my home, i obviously have my download pc to set to max bandwidth, but still give enough bandwidth for my gaming pc, so i wont see the difference. So I still don't see the big deal about this so called 'gaming' router.
-This box can do nothing for round-trip latency to/from the gaming site after traffic leaves the router for the ISP, which represents probably 90+ percent of overall delay.
-The order and prioritization of traffic coming to your door from your ISP happens in their network, not your router. If your ISP's network lets other traffic win during congestion, gaming traffic is at it's mercy. In networking, you only have traffic shaping control over the traffic patterns you send, not the ones you receive.
IMHO, this is marketing hype because it can at best address about 10% of overall round-trip network delay. The only way it could provide more is if the end-user has some other honking traffic going outbound, in which case they should be smart enough to turn down that traffic when gaming (A cheaper way to save some bucks and improve perfomance...).
Seems to be about the only thing a router could do to improve a gamer's experience
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
hmmm....I'm gonna take a wild guess here...V3, right? (1 light per connection)
I'll be god damned if I can figure out how that piece of shit EVER got out of testing. Sent 2 back before I hit google and demanded a replacement V2. Cost me about $15 and a month that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
My V2, however, works wonderfully.
It may come as a surprise to some people, but it is more accurate to think of Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc as marketing and customer support companies than as engineering firms. Go to the Careers page of the Linksys web site. They have lots of openings for Industrial Designers, Product Managers, and Buyers, but none for Programmers. Even the job of 'Product Engineer' focuses on working with partners and fluency in Mandarin. The truth is that these OEMs all shop for their technology in Taiwan. They buy the boards and software from a handful of companies, and then customize the UI and industrial design to their specifications. The quality of a Linksys or D-Link product comes from who they bought the software and hardware from, and the testing they did before release. Different OEMs may be willing to pay for higher end parts, or more stable software. When you buy a particular product based on the brand name, you are placing your faith not in that OEM's engineers, but in the marketers and project managers that wrote the spec for the product. I have worked in marketing for wireless products for several years. I have seen firsthand the companies that write the code for these products. The engineers sit in cubicles with 20 square feet of space and ride Chinese-made scooters to work. They work damned hard, but don't necessarily use the best quality controls. I used a 120 MHz PC as my router for years, and learned a lot by configuring the drivers and adding extra features to it. This box never needed rebooting, but the fan noise was driving me crazy. Finally I broke down and bought a cheap Linksys unit. It needed to be power-cycled several times a week. I gave it away, and bought the DGL from D-Link a couple months ago to move my network to gigE. It has run rock-solid ever since. It does piss me off that I need to reboot it to change most parameters, though. Out of curiousity, I cracked the case, and saw that it uses a different processor than the Linksys. I believe this is why it cannot load Linux. IMHO Linux is great if you need lots of flexibility. However, if you need something to 'just work', you may be better off with a high quality commercial product. A custom build of Linux for a router can do many things that a standard product cannot. However, these features are still based on standard HW-SW interactions between the OS and the underlying hardware. To really do special things, you need some type of hardware acceleration that has hooks to software control. A commodity MIPS or ARM core does not provide this. I play Quake 3 and UT 2004 both wired and wirelessly. Even with my Linux router, I had to turn off file sharing on my other PC in order to play online. With the GameFuel feature turned on, I can play with no problems. The surprising thing is that the QoS makes such a significant difference, even though the bandwidth of the games are so low compared to my uplink. I measured only about 10 kbps being sent by both games. Unfortunately most FTP transfers will try to use all available bandwidth. This kills the game any time the transfers start. With QoS on, I get 100ms pings on wireless no matter how much I load the network. I did try the QoS rules on the router. However, I really didn't see much of an improvement above the default automatic provisioning. Maybe someone has some tips on how to optimize it. The takeaway is that it is best to evaluate networking products on an individual basis, rather than basing it on brands. If you need tons of flexibility, you can't beat a custom Linux router, but for something that works really well out of the box, I am happy with a good quality off -the-shelf product.
You are right on #2. However, the largest contribution to ping times is not the Tx buffer at the ISP, but the Tx buffer on your modem! As you all know, most broadband connections have much less uplink than downlink data rates. Most of the bb connections have like 128 kbps of uplink. If you try to send data faster than that, it is buffered inside the modem. It doesn't matter how you prioritize things at that point, because it all gets backed up in the modem. That is why QoS routers have some form of uplink rate matching. That means that you prioritize packets, and only send them at the rate the modem can forward them on. If you choose just the right uplink rate at the router, then you are prioritizing right before the packet gets sent to the ISP. Only if you do all of this right will the ISP's buffering play a major role. Of course, this situation becomes a little more complicated if you have a shared pipe leading to the cable head-end unit.