Deploy Juniper products where you can. Commit confirmed alone will help keep you sane.
As for learning how this stuff all glues together and works, that really depends on how you learn. I learn by trying things, and reading the manual, not from a classroom. YMMV, but I have never seen a class that did anything short of an awful job of explaining how networking works. I rely heavily on my peers and Google for ironing out issues that I cannot solve in my lab. Consider attending talks on subjects relevant to your needs, and anything that sounds even remotely interesting. Find someone more skilled than you who can explain shit in your native tongue and attempt to osmosis some talent bit by bit. Oh, and get yourself an O'Reilly Safari subscription, a nook/kindle/whatever, and start, as my friend Jeff says, consuming massive quantities of text.
And seriously, consider running, you are in for a long, dark road of evil.
Motorola's Canopy line was originally developed as a cellular technology (that never took off), and shares more in common with GSM and CDMA than it does 802.11. Not all wireless internet is 802.11, or even close.
And it isn't outdoor use that makes 802.11 crappy, its the long range, blind neighbor problems (as you mentioned), and the ability of any one client to basically monopolize 90% of the capacity of an AP. Oh, and the crappy subset of the 2.4 ghz spectrum is no picnic either.
I do this for a living, 802.11 wisps do not work. I don't care how many tweaks you apply to it, they always hit a critical mass of customers.
The guy who posted this is on the WISPA mailing list was scrambling to deal with a slashdotting a day before this made the front page. Its hosted off his network, and he keeps paying that host more and more for bandwidth and whatnot, because most WISPS have a DS3 or two as upstream, were all just that small.
You don't want service from an 802.11 WISP, 802.11 signaling is great for carrying your laptop around your house, absolutely SUCKS wind when deployed for point to multi point last mile applications.
The Cadillac gear for wisps is Canopy or Alvarion. Both can deliver cable modem, and better speeds, for hundreds of subbies per access point, without degrading performance for all your neighbors. 802.11 wisps tend to be the ultra cheap shops, with the owners doing everything to make a quick buck.
No, please don't do this. Don't set yourself up a crappy 802.11 2.4ghz noise factory and call yourself a wisp just to get free internet in the boonies. It is a lot harder than you think, it is a full time job, and if you aren't going to do it full time, all you are really achieving is creating even more noise in the part-15 spectrum.
Not all WISPS are members of WISPA either, they may not even be aware of this map. It just appeared on the mailing list a few days ago. WISPA is awesome, great bunch of people, WISPS from Texas helping guys in Michigan out, we exchange ideas on mailing lists, send each other emergency parts when lightning kicks our asses inside out.
I should dig up my, "I work for a WISP, and please, don't give ANY ISPs money" rant. The stimulus package is fucking stupid. The DSL and Cable providers want money, have received money in the past, and have never done anything to extend coverage with it. All us little WISPS are screaming for spectrum, which we believe will be our great equalizer. We don't want money, let our quality service decide how much money we have, its called capitalism.
The big providers do not see a market in rural America. Giving them a ton of money isn't going to change that. I, and my fellow wisps, see great potential, and we are not asking for a dime to help us achieve it. Just give us some spectrum so we can get out of this part-15 roach motel we are forced to operate in right now.
Part-15, look it up. Basically, the crappiest part of the airwaves that no one with tons of money wanted for anything, set aside for public use.
Upgrading existing phone lines is the quickest-and-easiest way to provide broadband to virtually everybody.
See? This is why people who have no clue how something works, shouldn't be allowed to generate policy. You don't even understand how DSL works. But you just KNOW the answer, don't you?
You can't just magically "upgrade the lines" for DSL, the limiting factor of DSL availability is distance from the central office(CO). If you are too far away, sometimes called "being beyond the DSL line", you can attach the line to a DSLAM at the CO, and slap an ADSL modem at the customer's house, and watch it never work all you want. No government mandate is going to fix that. Fringe customers are basically anyone past ~16,000 feet. AT&T has rolled out a 512k/64k service in the area for customers approaching 20,000 feet. Yeah, how do you reach longer with DSL? Make it suck more.
Have a friend, bought a house in the trees, so I can't even help him with 900 mhz(about half my top speed, but can go through some obstruction, yes I work for a WISP. Loop length is 19,000 feet, he gets.... 384k/64k, and regular spikes in latency.
Oh, and building a CO out in the boonies with even a small switch, and its own DSLAM.... yeah, your big LECs won't lose money on that waste of time, they have a history of sidestepping government mandated policies in negative profit areas by selling their coverage to some ultra low budget phone company, who cuts costs by having zero customer support. Why does everyone think that giving them all a ton of money, and saying, "you have to give DSL to anyone who asks" will make them behave any differently? They will sell out of the market to a small bastard company who wasn't in the legislation, and isn't required to sell DSL. They have done this shit before, and they will continue to do this shit. Wow, I got way off track, this issue annoys the piss out of me.
DSL is a cheap hack of a technology, its time to look elsewhere for answers.
1) DSL is never as cheap as the sticker price, what does your monthly bill actually say after they nickel and dime you? After you factor in the required land line that almost no one wants/needs anymore? My service costs $49.95, and your bill will say that.
2) $14.95 DSL in this area gets you 768kdown/128k up. Whoopdy freaking doo. I use my wireless service at my own home, I'm getting 5mbit down, 1.5 mbit up according to speedtest.net(not hosted locally). Two local cable companies in the area, one can match our download speeds, neither can beat us on upload.
3) The radio itself costs us $250 bucks, and I don't ask the customer to buy it, we just ask that you stick around for at least a year so we can make a little money. Also have to recoup our bandwidth costs, cost of wiring, access points. Contrary to popular belief, being an ISP is not growing money on trees. I do this first because I love it, second because it pays the bills.
1500 installs in 5 years, have yet to remove even 100 of them from service. Most cancellations, the house is sold, and the new residents want the service.
Dear Politicians, I work for a small, but growing, ISP, so bear with me, as this subject annoys me to no end. Not every problem can be solved by simply throwing a bunch of money at it and hoping for the best. All the wrong people are going to end up with that money, either corrupt individuals, or large carriers who are more interested in squelching small competition so they can continue to shaft their customers left and right. They don't want to improve, improvements cost money, big cable wants to maintain the status quo. Either way, none of this money is going to be used to service undeserved areas. Keep the money, please, don't give anyone a single dime.
You say you want to see internet delivered to the undeserved? Have you looked around? Some of us are doing just that. We are using part-15 spectrum to deliver 5+ megabit service to residents with no cable or DSL service available. Do you know what part-15 of the spectrum is, in reality? It is the useless chunks of the airspace that no one else wanted, 900 mhz, 2.4 ghz, 5.8 ghz, and a few others. Despite the severe limitations imposed on us all by the FCC, we have delivered magic to customers and businesses in these so called undeserved areas. We have used the crap airwaves no one else wanted, served the customers that big telco called profitless, and we are financially solvent. Keep the money, we don't need it, and the big companies don't deserve it.
So, I hear this tremendously useful band of data is going to be free from use soon, and that its fate is largely undecided. I have already mentioned that we have taken some of the worst air space in existence, and delivered an amazing service to our customers. What do you suppose would happen if you let us use that band to deliver broadband? Interference free, crystal clear transmissions of a massive amount of data to every nearly home that wanted it, Keep the money, give us the spectrum.
So you want to see the entire nation lit up on the broadband map, who do you think is going to do that? Verizon? Comcast? AT&T? If they could have, they would have done it by now, lord knows, you have thrown enough cash at the big players already, and I still get phone calls from happy new customers, glad to have service, because no one else offered it. No, broadband is going to come from the small business, there are thousands of us out there, we call ourselves WISPs, and we are doing what the Bells have told you cannot be done: We brought broadband to rural America. We have delivered affordable, quality service with a smile, with the worst tools we had to use. Now, imagine what we could do if we had 700 mhz. I am not asking you to give it to just me, I am not asking you to hand it over to only small companies, no, let all internet service providers have a fair crack at 700 mhz, and watch us deliver. Let Capitalism rear its blind, careless head, and watch the strong survive, and the weak fall. I already know I can win my own spot in the national broadband market, because I have been beating the telecom giants at their own game for 5 years, and winning. Keep the money, give us 700 mhz!
Your analogy is rather lacking, and I encourage you to explore several real world non-802.11 wifi implementations that deploy this concept, all with much more success than your average 802.11 shithole.
802.11 clients can send and receive pretty much whenever they want to, the access point is expected to work it out, and clients are all expected to behave themselves. 802.11 also makes the assumption that all the clients can see each other, they frequently cannot, which is called the blind neighbor problem. Individual clients will badger the access point like mad, and if they cannot see each other, which is basically how they are supposed to know when to stop transmitting briefly, the AP becomes a single waiter in a huge restaurant, and everyone is ordering at the same time. Stuff gets dropped. The more clients you add, the worse it gets. As the load on an access point increases as a linear function, the performance for each individual station drops exponentially.
The solution is to give the access point all the control over who sends, who receives, and when. Take it one step further, sync all the access point clocks to the same timing system, most non 802.11 alternatives use the GPS timing pulse for this, and now you can reuse frequencies on access points in relatively close proximity.
One of these days, someone is going to realize that 802.11, common as it may be, and as universal as it may be, is not the way to go.
And the switch they all plug into is a shared resource. Its a network, everything comes down to a shared resource eventually. The questions are, how much is there to share, and how well is it being shared?
Spectrum can be doled out in a very fair and efficient manner for everyone, unfortunately 802.11 doesn't even try to accomplish this. 802.11 is a colossal failure from a design standpoint. The clients can overwhelm an AP not because spectrum is finite, it is, but that isn't the problem, but rather because the protocol is so bloody awful.
Look at some of the alternatives available, Canopy, Trango, Dragonwave.... Those are the three I have the most experience with, there are many more. They all deliver what they promise, and they all scale very, very well. You ever seen even a lightly loaded 802.11 access point actually deliver anywhere close to what the box claims it will do?
That is a factor I hadn't considered, my ISP does service a lot of older homes in the country that lack air conditioning.
I've personally never had much heat issues with anything I use, but I do like it very cold. I keep the thermostat at 65 in my house during the winter months. And all that money I save on natural gas during the winter I blow running the AC non-stop in the summer. Probably why I rarely think of it as an issue in my professional adventures.
Please do not put words in my mouth, it is very fucking rude. I never tried to use my station in life, or shouting out my qualifications as some kind of excuse. Just pointing out that, because of my line of work, I am exposed to a huge quantity of anecdotal situations, and regardless of the CPE, the worst router I have ever seen consistently is the WRT54G. Sure slopping DD-WRT on them does make them _much_ better, but that wasn't the point of my statements, and it is not a valid option for 99% of end users.
And my ISP deploys about 7 different kinds of CPEs, depending on the service type. WRT54Gs has been used on the customer end of all of them, and I have gotten nasty phone calls about all those situations. Anecdotal? Sure, but there is a fucking pile of it.
Also, just go read linksysinfo.org, read WHY the WRT54Gv5 through v7 are all fucking pieces of shit. It isn't anecdotal, there are some very solid reasons why so many people have these issues.
Sure, I am seeing this all from my network's point of view, but, I am the admin, all these customer complaint reports go across my desk, and I am asked to figure out why there are so many, all the same. So, I did research, I found answers.
Mine is, I have a Soekris net4501 running OpenBSD 4.2. Nice and quiet, low power, high reliability. And the smallest CF I could find was a 1gig, so I have the entire installation, sans X on that puppy. Full support for VLANS, OSPF, Pf, the works. All in a small, quiet, low power, albeit ugly green case.
I work as the Network Admin for a small ISP, so my anecdotal evidence comes in piles.
We get tons of complaints about Linksys routers, specifically later model WRT54G ones, as some of Linksys' other models are just fine. But the WRT54G is still the router the clowns at geek squad will recommend when asked, and people should listen, because those idiots clearly know more about networking than I do.
I get almost no complaints about D-Link hardware issues, the only issue we do have, is most newer D-Link routers refuse to talk to the DHCP Server in a Motorola Canopy Subscriber Module. So those customers have to be walked through a setup. Which is a breeze, type in any D-Link router into google, with the word, "emulator" in the search.
Its both, read my post again, I specifically mentioned the one with an "L" in the name. The WRT54GL is the re-release of the WRT54G version 4, which was the last good one Linksys made. The L series, and the version four have a faster proc, about twice as much memory, and more flash space than a version 5, 6 or 7. The L series also discards VXworks in favor of the older Linux firmware, which versions 1-4 also ran.
On the new ones, it is the crap hardware and it is also the crap software. You can put DD-WRT on a WRT54gv7.... it will make it far more stable, but you are likely to run into memory issues if you use too many of the features at once.
One of the big problems with MS is the tendency to want to squeeze the same type of desktop into any environment whether or not it makes sense.
Case and point: Windows 2008 Core System, advertised as a command line only system. To remotely administer it, you login via remote desktop proto, and are presented with an entire screen so you can use the command line in a window.
Leave it to microsoft to make something as simple as a command line so completely devoid of simplicity.
Also, the Linksys WRT54G up to version 4 was a fine router, plenty of memory, ran Linux, was very stable. Then Linksys decided that quality wasn't nearly as important as driving me batshit insane, and we started getting tons of complaints about users needing to reboot Linksys routers, which came _highly_ recommended from the geek squad over at worst buy.
The modern WRT54G, and anything past version 4, that doesn't have an 'L' in the name is an utter piece of crap, firmware revisions to the VXworks OS they now run have helped, but they are still lockup city.
Slashdot Mirror
And then, in all seriousness.
Deploy Juniper products where you can. Commit confirmed alone will help keep you sane.
As for learning how this stuff all glues together and works, that really depends on how you learn. I learn by trying things, and reading the manual, not from a classroom. YMMV, but I have never seen a class that did anything short of an awful job of explaining how networking works. I rely heavily on my peers and Google for ironing out issues that I cannot solve in my lab. Consider attending talks on subjects relevant to your needs, and anything that sounds even remotely interesting. Find someone more skilled than you who can explain shit in your native tongue and attempt to osmosis some talent bit by bit. Oh, and get yourself an O'Reilly Safari subscription, a nook/kindle/whatever, and start, as my friend Jeff says, consuming massive quantities of text.
And seriously, consider running, you are in for a long, dark road of evil.
Run, run as fast as you can, and don't look back.
Motorola's Canopy line was originally developed as a cellular technology (that never took off), and shares more in common with GSM and CDMA than it does 802.11. Not all wireless internet is 802.11, or even close.
And it isn't outdoor use that makes 802.11 crappy, its the long range, blind neighbor problems (as you mentioned), and the ability of any one client to basically monopolize 90% of the capacity of an AP. Oh, and the crappy subset of the 2.4 ghz spectrum is no picnic either.
I do this for a living, 802.11 wisps do not work. I don't care how many tweaks you apply to it, they always hit a critical mass of customers.
The guy who posted this is on the WISPA mailing list was scrambling to deal with a slashdotting a day before this made the front page. Its hosted off his network, and he keeps paying that host more and more for bandwidth and whatnot, because most WISPS have a DS3 or two as upstream, were all just that small.
You don't want service from an 802.11 WISP, 802.11 signaling is great for carrying your laptop around your house, absolutely SUCKS wind when deployed for point to multi point last mile applications.
The Cadillac gear for wisps is Canopy or Alvarion. Both can deliver cable modem, and better speeds, for hundreds of subbies per access point, without degrading performance for all your neighbors. 802.11 wisps tend to be the ultra cheap shops, with the owners doing everything to make a quick buck.
No, please don't do this. Don't set yourself up a crappy 802.11 2.4ghz noise factory and call yourself a wisp just to get free internet in the boonies. It is a lot harder than you think, it is a full time job, and if you aren't going to do it full time, all you are really achieving is creating even more noise in the part-15 spectrum.
Not all WISPS are members of WISPA either, they may not even be aware of this map. It just appeared on the mailing list a few days ago. WISPA is awesome, great bunch of people, WISPS from Texas helping guys in Michigan out, we exchange ideas on mailing lists, send each other emergency parts when lightning kicks our asses inside out.
I should dig up my, "I work for a WISP, and please, don't give ANY ISPs money" rant. The stimulus package is fucking stupid. The DSL and Cable providers want money, have received money in the past, and have never done anything to extend coverage with it. All us little WISPS are screaming for spectrum, which we believe will be our great equalizer. We don't want money, let our quality service decide how much money we have, its called capitalism.
The big providers do not see a market in rural America. Giving them a ton of money isn't going to change that. I, and my fellow wisps, see great potential, and we are not asking for a dime to help us achieve it. Just give us some spectrum so we can get out of this part-15 roach motel we are forced to operate in right now.
Part-15, look it up. Basically, the crappiest part of the airwaves that no one with tons of money wanted for anything, set aside for public use.
Upgrading existing phone lines is the quickest-and-easiest way to provide broadband to virtually everybody.
See? This is why people who have no clue how something works, shouldn't be allowed to generate policy. You don't even understand how DSL works. But you just KNOW the answer, don't you?
You can't just magically "upgrade the lines" for DSL, the limiting factor of DSL availability is distance from the central office(CO). If you are too far away, sometimes called "being beyond the DSL line", you can attach the line to a DSLAM at the CO, and slap an ADSL modem at the customer's house, and watch it never work all you want. No government mandate is going to fix that. Fringe customers are basically anyone past ~16,000 feet. AT&T has rolled out a 512k/64k service in the area for customers approaching 20,000 feet. Yeah, how do you reach longer with DSL? Make it suck more.
Have a friend, bought a house in the trees, so I can't even help him with 900 mhz(about half my top speed, but can go through some obstruction, yes I work for a WISP. Loop length is 19,000 feet, he gets.... 384k/64k, and regular spikes in latency.
Oh, and building a CO out in the boonies with even a small switch, and its own DSLAM.... yeah, your big LECs won't lose money on that waste of time, they have a history of sidestepping government mandated policies in negative profit areas by selling their coverage to some ultra low budget phone company, who cuts costs by having zero customer support. Why does everyone think that giving them all a ton of money, and saying, "you have to give DSL to anyone who asks" will make them behave any differently? They will sell out of the market to a small bastard company who wasn't in the legislation, and isn't required to sell DSL. They have done this shit before, and they will continue to do this shit. Wow, I got way off track, this issue annoys the piss out of me.
DSL is a cheap hack of a technology, its time to look elsewhere for answers.
1) DSL is never as cheap as the sticker price, what does your monthly bill actually say after they nickel and dime you? After you factor in the required land line that almost no one wants/needs anymore? My service costs $49.95, and your bill will say that.
2) $14.95 DSL in this area gets you 768kdown/128k up. Whoopdy freaking doo. I use my wireless service at my own home, I'm getting 5mbit down, 1.5 mbit up according to speedtest.net(not hosted locally). Two local cable companies in the area, one can match our download speeds, neither can beat us on upload.
3) The radio itself costs us $250 bucks, and I don't ask the customer to buy it, we just ask that you stick around for at least a year so we can make a little money. Also have to recoup our bandwidth costs, cost of wiring, access points. Contrary to popular belief, being an ISP is not growing money on trees. I do this first because I love it, second because it pays the bills.
1500 installs in 5 years, have yet to remove even 100 of them from service. Most cancellations, the house is sold, and the new residents want the service.
I'd prefer not to say, makes me feel like I am trying to use this to advertise. Not too hard to figure out though.
sure, whatever, i was half awake when i typed this blathering nonsense
Dear Politicians,
I work for a small, but growing, ISP, so bear with me, as this subject annoys me to no end. Not every problem can be solved by simply throwing a bunch of money at it and hoping for the best. All the wrong people are going to end up with that money, either corrupt individuals, or large carriers who are more interested in squelching small competition so they can continue to shaft their customers left and right. They don't want to improve, improvements cost money, big cable wants to maintain the status quo. Either way, none of this money is going to be used to service undeserved areas. Keep the money, please, don't give anyone a single dime.
You say you want to see internet delivered to the undeserved? Have you looked around? Some of us are doing just that. We are using part-15 spectrum to deliver 5+ megabit service to residents with no cable or DSL service available. Do you know what part-15 of the spectrum is, in reality? It is the useless chunks of the airspace that no one else wanted, 900 mhz, 2.4 ghz, 5.8 ghz, and a few others. Despite the severe limitations imposed on us all by the FCC, we have delivered magic to customers and businesses in these so called undeserved areas. We have used the crap airwaves no one else wanted, served the customers that big telco called profitless, and we are financially solvent. Keep the money, we don't need it, and the big companies don't deserve it.
So, I hear this tremendously useful band of data is going to be free from use soon, and that its fate is largely undecided. I have already mentioned that we have taken some of the worst air space in existence, and delivered an amazing service to our customers. What do you suppose would happen if you let us use that band to deliver broadband? Interference free, crystal clear transmissions of a massive amount of data to every nearly home that wanted it, Keep the money, give us the spectrum.
So you want to see the entire nation lit up on the broadband map, who do you think is going to do that? Verizon? Comcast? AT&T? If they could have, they would have done it by now, lord knows, you have thrown enough cash at the big players already, and I still get phone calls from happy new customers, glad to have service, because no one else offered it. No, broadband is going to come from the small business, there are thousands of us out there, we call ourselves WISPs, and we are doing what the Bells have told you cannot be done: We brought broadband to rural America. We have delivered affordable, quality service with a smile, with the worst tools we had to use. Now, imagine what we could do if we had 700 mhz. I am not asking you to give it to just me, I am not asking you to hand it over to only small companies, no, let all internet service providers have a fair crack at 700 mhz, and watch us deliver. Let Capitalism rear its blind, careless head, and watch the strong survive, and the weak fall. I already know I can win my own spot in the national broadband market, because I have been beating the telecom giants at their own game for 5 years, and winning. Keep the money, give us 700 mhz!
Your analogy is rather lacking, and I encourage you to explore several real world non-802.11 wifi implementations that deploy this concept, all with much more success than your average 802.11 shithole.
Suggested reading: dragonwave, canopy, trango
802.11 clients can send and receive pretty much whenever they want to, the access point is expected to work it out, and clients are all expected to behave themselves. 802.11 also makes the assumption that all the clients can see each other, they frequently cannot, which is called the blind neighbor problem. Individual clients will badger the access point like mad, and if they cannot see each other, which is basically how they are supposed to know when to stop transmitting briefly, the AP becomes a single waiter in a huge restaurant, and everyone is ordering at the same time. Stuff gets dropped. The more clients you add, the worse it gets. As the load on an access point increases as a linear function, the performance for each individual station drops exponentially.
The solution is to give the access point all the control over who sends, who receives, and when. Take it one step further, sync all the access point clocks to the same timing system, most non 802.11 alternatives use the GPS timing pulse for this, and now you can reuse frequencies on access points in relatively close proximity.
One of these days, someone is going to realize that 802.11, common as it may be, and as universal as it may be, is not the way to go.
And the switch they all plug into is a shared resource. Its a network, everything comes down to a shared resource eventually. The questions are, how much is there to share, and how well is it being shared?
Spectrum can be doled out in a very fair and efficient manner for everyone, unfortunately 802.11 doesn't even try to accomplish this. 802.11 is a colossal failure from a design standpoint. The clients can overwhelm an AP not because spectrum is finite, it is, but that isn't the problem, but rather because the protocol is so bloody awful.
Look at some of the alternatives available, Canopy, Trango, Dragonwave.... Those are the three I have the most experience with, there are many more. They all deliver what they promise, and they all scale very, very well. You ever seen even a lightly loaded 802.11 access point actually deliver anywhere close to what the box claims it will do?
That is a factor I hadn't considered, my ISP does service a lot of older homes in the country that lack air conditioning.
I've personally never had much heat issues with anything I use, but I do like it very cold. I keep the thermostat at 65 in my house during the winter months. And all that money I save on natural gas during the winter I blow running the AC non-stop in the summer. Probably why I rarely think of it as an issue in my professional adventures.
Please do not put words in my mouth, it is very fucking rude. I never tried to use my station in life, or shouting out my qualifications as some kind of excuse. Just pointing out that, because of my line of work, I am exposed to a huge quantity of anecdotal situations, and regardless of the CPE, the worst router I have ever seen consistently is the WRT54G. Sure slopping DD-WRT on them does make them _much_ better, but that wasn't the point of my statements, and it is not a valid option for 99% of end users.
And my ISP deploys about 7 different kinds of CPEs, depending on the service type. WRT54Gs has been used on the customer end of all of them, and I have gotten nasty phone calls about all those situations. Anecdotal? Sure, but there is a fucking pile of it.
Also, just go read linksysinfo.org, read WHY the WRT54Gv5 through v7 are all fucking pieces of shit. It isn't anecdotal, there are some very solid reasons why so many people have these issues.
Sure, I am seeing this all from my network's point of view, but, I am the admin, all these customer complaint reports go across my desk, and I am asked to figure out why there are so many, all the same. So, I did research, I found answers.
Right about the time Cisco bought Linksys, and decided that they didn't want Linksys cheapos cutting into the SOHO market.
Least, that has always been my theory.
Heh! I have doubleclick in mine, good idea on the intellitxt, also:
zone "myspace.com" {
type master;
file "master/shit.zone";
};
zone "facebook.com" {
type master;
file "master/shit.zone";
};
My home network is untainted!
Mine is, I have a Soekris net4501 running OpenBSD 4.2. Nice and quiet, low power, high reliability. And the smallest CF I could find was a 1gig, so I have the entire installation, sans X on that puppy. Full support for VLANS, OSPF, Pf, the works. All in a small, quiet, low power, albeit ugly green case.
I work as the Network Admin for a small ISP, so my anecdotal evidence comes in piles.
We get tons of complaints about Linksys routers, specifically later model WRT54G ones, as some of Linksys' other models are just fine. But the WRT54G is still the router the clowns at geek squad will recommend when asked, and people should listen, because those idiots clearly know more about networking than I do.
I get almost no complaints about D-Link hardware issues, the only issue we do have, is most newer D-Link routers refuse to talk to the DHCP Server in a Motorola Canopy Subscriber Module. So those customers have to be walked through a setup. Which is a breeze, type in any D-Link router into google, with the word, "emulator" in the search.
Its both, read my post again, I specifically mentioned the one with an "L" in the name. The WRT54GL is the re-release of the WRT54G version 4, which was the last good one Linksys made. The L series, and the version four have a faster proc, about twice as much memory, and more flash space than a version 5, 6 or 7. The L series also discards VXworks in favor of the older Linux firmware, which versions 1-4 also ran.
On the new ones, it is the crap hardware and it is also the crap software. You can put DD-WRT on a WRT54gv7.... it will make it far more stable, but you are likely to run into memory issues if you use too many of the features at once.
One of the big problems with MS is the tendency to want to squeeze the same type of desktop into any environment whether or not it makes sense.
Case and point: Windows 2008 Core System, advertised as a command line only system. To remotely administer it, you login via remote desktop proto, and are presented with an entire screen so you can use the command line in a window.
Leave it to microsoft to make something as simple as a command line so completely devoid of simplicity.
mod parent up, as I came here to say that.
Also, the Linksys WRT54G up to version 4 was a fine router, plenty of memory, ran Linux, was very stable. Then Linksys decided that quality wasn't nearly as important as driving me batshit insane, and we started getting tons of complaints about users needing to reboot Linksys routers, which came _highly_ recommended from the geek squad over at worst buy.
The modern WRT54G, and anything past version 4, that doesn't have an 'L' in the name is an utter piece of crap, firmware revisions to the VXworks OS they now run have helped, but they are still lockup city.