Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

We've been having problems with our DSL router ever since we upgraded to an ADSL2+ service.

First the router crashed hard at least once a day. While that was awkward, the timeswitch on the power supply worked well enough to get us back on line. Even so, not good. When we got home I upgraded the device's ROM to the latest version - and while we were on line without crashing, it was only letting in mail intermittently. Definitely not good, when you're trying to work with an editor or a PR.

The problem was quite clearly with our little router, which for the last couple of years had been the little router that could. But with three in the house now, and more, less-contended, bandwidth, it wasn't quite up to the task. It was time for the router to retire.

So while we were in town for a meeting yesterday we pottered on down Tottenham Court Road looking for a new DSL router.

We're a small business, really, so we thought it would be best to get something with a little more than the basics - a router with plenty of security, management and diagnostics, with a nice fast wireless connection seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. And that's what we found, in the shape of a Draytek Vigor 2820n. It's a sizeable device, with plenty of ports and the ability to fail over to a USB 3G modem if there's a line outage (or even to load balance with a second router or a cable modem).

So in it went. We did have a few teething troubles - mainly down to my making a handful of mistakes when configuring some of its functions. Hint: don't fill in DNS server details by hand, as that will stop DNS pass-through, and so your existing external DNS server forwarders will stop working. Still, we only learn by making mistakes...

Some of the Vigor's most useful features are its monitoring tools. I can see just which machine is using the most bandwidth, and when.



And it's pretty zippy.

So I think it's going to stay...

I took advantage of John Lewis' technology clearance shelves in their Peter Jones store yesterday, and spent £25 on a new DSL router for the house network.

While switch to DSL Max a while back had sped up our network connection a fair bit, I wasn't entirely sure that we were getting the best out of the available connection. To be honest, the fact that Linksys hadn't fixed the VPN bug in there firmware which meant that a PPTP connection wouldn't traverse the NAT mappings was also a problem. So when I saw a D-Link DSL-G624T for not very much at all, I decided it was worth trying a swap out. After all, this was a router that was designed for ADSL 2+ connections, instead of my old ADSL 2 hardware.

Setting up the new router wasn't quite as easy as my previous Zyxel and Linksys devices, but once I'd understood how it mapped NAT connections for my servers, I was able to get it up and running in fairly short order. While web pages seemed a little snappier, it wasn't until I decided to download a DVD image from the US that I saw things had really improved - I was getting sustained download speeds of over 750KB/s, rather than the (still respectable) 400-500KB/s I'd been getting before.

I think I managed to get a little bit of a bargain there.

Thanks to those nice people at Merula we're now on ADSL Max, and are getting an order of magnitude more speed than our old 512/256 DSL connection. I've also just replaced the main house switch with an unmanaged gigabit beastie from D-Link that works rather well, and gives me a few more free ports for future expansion.

So, things are currently looking a little like this:




It's rather nice being able to download a DVD image from a software company on the west coast of the US in under an hour. (Something I have had to do several times this week last, as we've been churning out lots of features and reviews about some pieces of software that came out this week...)

Next: Build a new house server with the VPro Core 2 Duo motherboard that arrives next week, and source a gigabit network card for the current server.

Anyone after an unmanaged 16-port 100 Mbit rackable switch, drop me a line, and we can negotiate. I seem to have one for sale...