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Thursday, 27 November 2003

More shiny stuff [spiny]

'Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, the missus bought me a router & I like it like that'. Erm, or something.
With the iminent arrival of ADSL to Spiny Estates, I spent this evening setting up my LAN with a Netgear DG834G 54G ADSL Router, a Netgear WGE10154G bridge, my PC and XBox.
What's the verdict then? Well, pretty good actually, data rates vary from 687KBps when the bridge & router are sat next to each other down to 234KBps when the bridge is taken downstairs to my lounge. Seems plenty to stream video, even if it takes around a second per track for XBMP to get an ID3 tag.
The setups for the router & bridge are quite nice webby interfaces with all the usual options for authorising access by SSID, MAC addresses & WEP. I really only have a basic grasp of networking & didn't bump into any showstopper problems.
The router includes a DHCP server (which, IMHO, is pretty useless on a small home LAN where not every device can get to a WINS server). The firewall seems pretty comprehensive too with options to set up port ranges as 'services' to be port forwarded, then add these into the block/allow list on the firewall. This sort of thing is a necessary feature for running game servers & apps like bittorrent.
Oh yeah, and it's shiny and silver :)

3 comments:

  1. I'm kinda puzzled why you think having a DHCP server is a bad idea. It's an excellent idea. The router gets the DNS servers off your ISP and then communicates those to the machines on your LAN. Of course it also hands out IPs too.
    So you can leave the NIC on your laptop to 'auto' and just shovel it back and forth from work without having to plug in manual IPs all the time. I'm buggered if I know what having a WINS server has to do with it?
    On topic though, Netgear stuff is good. Now I've shuffled back to cable, I bought a Netgear FR114 firewall/router. It's the old-style blue metal box (oh why oh why did they dump that) and the web interface is rock solid, as is the firewall stuff. Can't fault it.

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  2. I ran DHCP on my lan for a while and then ditched it. It was nice being able to drag my laptop back and forth from the office without re-configuring it (is there a way in XP Pro to set up multiple profiles for a network device that you can flick between?), but it was a royal pain when machines decided spontaneously that they didn't want to resolve machine names on the network properly. Far easier just remembering the IP addresses I need...
    I'm sure there's a cunning way to fix this (SMB browsing is also shitfully slow, which may be part of the same problem) but I'm buggered if I can think what it is. Besides, Ben names his machines such fucking hideous names that really, the IP is easier :)

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  3. Nothing to stop you from doing both. My desktop and Wench are static with all other machines on the lan DHCP. Crap SMB browsing is a symptom of running old Windows versions or multiple workgroups and shit like that - but also it just decides to happen sometimes for no reason too, of course.

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