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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."
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.
"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 |
What makes this router so special is that it is actually a gigabit router. I own one of these routers and it works great, imagine transfering 7GB in about 7-8 minutes over your network vs 30 minutes on a 10/100 connection. The wireless antenna is also stronger than that of my linksys wrt54g and i get a better connection everywhere in my house and no longer have dead spots.
http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/ Here is one link - read the emails toward the bottom of the page.
I must acknowledge that your definition of 'violence' may differ from mine. Regardless, this is just one link, there are others.
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.
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 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.
So it has QoS? While I agree this is a great feature and unique among routers marketed to home users, it's nothing new. QoS is essential for any network accessing the internet with more than about 10 users on it. There's always going to be some joker running BitTorrent and sucking up all the upstream, so just knock BT/Kazaa to the lowest priority and suddenly everyone else can use the internet again.
:)
/dev/null .)
Also this generally only works with outgoing traffic, if your downstream is saturated you still get shitty pings, unless the router on the other end does QoS routing as well. Basically, your router can only prioritize its outgoing queue, the incoming queue is held on the access providers router and you get no control over that. Unless you own the equipment at both ends, in which case you're probably not using one of these routers.
Oh yeah, and Linux has done QoS routing for probably 4 or 5 years. I don't know, I've been using it for at least 2. Granted the Linux QoS implementation is a bit cumbersome, but it's pretty flexible and allows a lot more invasive packet routing (i.e. you can parse packets for god damn kazaa headers and route them into
I usually use a more agressive strategy.
I tell them I have tried with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux (2 flavors) and a Mac. I also tell them I tested (when web based) with at least 5 different browsers (add a text-based browser, like Lynx, for extra flavor), and the problem is always the same.
If that doesn't get me to tier 2 support, I start quoting protocol numbers and RFC numbers.
But that is rarely needed. Usually only mentioning some IP numbers is enough to get throught.
I remember I used to have the cable's provider NOC phone number, which usually doubles are "tier 3 or 4 support level". The support people finally understood it was cheaper for them to just put me directly in contact with the network guys. Also, 90% of the time I detected problems before they did. Heck, they should be paying me for that.
morcego
There is a reason why many tech support people don't just take you at your word when you claim to know what the problem is. And that is because 99% of the time the person who says this just flat out does not.
I get plenty of calls from MCSE's telling me that our DHCP server is down, our internet connection is down because they can't ping outside of the gateway, etc. etc....and they didn't take 5 seconds to read the card in their room, or realize what having a 169 ip address means...
It may not be true everywhere, but where i work at, we don't read off a damn screen, and we deal with the exact same problems everyday. You could be the head IT guy at Cisco, yet still not realize that our 10/Mbit Nortel switches have issues with Dell computers that have an outdated drivers for their 3com 3c920 cards. However I just took 15 calls with the same issue...I don't need you to explain how you think our routers work, I need you to go to the front desk and update your godamn driver ;)
once you go slack, you never go back