Am I Pushing My Routers Too Hard?

[Tony]

I swear, I have been through more routers than anyone I know. No matter what, I always seem to kill them.

At first, I did what everyone does, start out with those cheap little pieces of crap that everyone hates, needs to be rebooted multiple times a day and you just want to toss it out the window. One day, I decided to get an Asus RTN66u and it did fantastic until the NV RAM went out on it (I still have it in a box hoping one day it will come back to life lol). Once the 66 died, I thought maybe I just need more with everything I have going on with the network. So I purchased the Asus AC3100.

There is another version of the one that I have that has 8 GB LAN ports, but BestBuy didn't have this one. So I got the one with only 4 GB LAN ports. And it did fantastic. WAY better than any other router that I have owned.

I purchased this router back in May 2016 and it is the best router that I have ever owned... Until last night...

I was getting ready to lay down after last nights live stream and the internet was janky as hell. So I went into my little network room and I rebooted it as I have done a million times. Well, I guess it didn't like it because when it powered back up, there were only two lights, power and WAN (internet).

So I started checking it out and the damn thing will NOT hard reset. It just won't do it. Yup, somethign is wrong. So I at least try to get into it and get all of my passwords and that is when I realize the middle two LAN ports don't work. Ugh.

So I had a little POS LInksys router that I just brought in from the studio because it lost DD-WRT and reverted back as it does when it power cycles so I connected that little pos up. Bad idea. This thing is horribly slow compared to my ASUS router.

Yup, today I get to head back to bestbuy and get yet another router. I have no idea what is killing them, they have plenty of air flow, they are not over heating and there have been no power surges. Before, I was getting surges through the WAN line since it runs under ground, but a simple Ethernet grounding block solved that issue. Maybe it's time for a cheap UPS to help smooth out power... Anyone have one?

 

[RandyDSok]

It seems that with routers... you are either buying in the SOHO market which as you've seen don't live too long... or the high end enterprise market where you need a degree to set them up properly... I've had relatively good luck with Netgear's higher end stuff... if you're looking for a different brand to try. I know I got fed up with Asus MB's years ago when I was seeing too high of a return rate with them.

If you get a used UPS... assume you'll need to buy a set of batteries since they are only good for a couple + years of service.

 

[Tony]

I had a Netgear router. It was the shortest lived router 3 times in a row lol. Yes, I had 3 of them. I think I finally went back to Asus after a month of owning the Netgears. But, it was at this time I realized the issue with my WAN. Lightning strike within a couple miles from the house and it would blow out the WAN port every time. The ground block seems to have stopped that issue though.

Do you have a UPS sitting in your office? Even with craptastic batteries?

 

[RandyDSok]

Do you have a UPS sitting in your office? Even with craptastic batteries?

All parts like UPS's, switches and/or routers here... are either in use are used as a spare if something goes down... but on other news re batteries...

ExpertPower found on Amazon is a reputable seller of good batteries... example of a commonly used size battery by them Amazon product .... In that example, those are about $19 each ( purchased in a 4 pack ) shipped

 

[Tony]

I definitely think I need one, that's for sure. But, it has to always run through the UPS and never have a bypass. I know some of the cheap ones when there is power from the wall, they will just use that, then when the power goes out, it will switch. Which defeats the purpose of UPS and is simply a battery backup.

So I decided to not go back with the Asus router. Instead, I (don't kill me) went with the Linksys WRT3200ACM router. The reason I went with this router is because it states right on the box that it is compatible with DD-WRT. The Asus had firmware, but you lost some functionality.

Initial setup on this Linksys was a pain in the ass. I hate those bloated looking screens they have on there now. But I thought I would give it a try. That is when I ran into my first issue. On my old router, I had my main 2.4, my main 5.8, but I also had 3 guests setup. I tried to do the same with this one, but that was a no go. When you sign onto a guest network with asus, you would just enter the password like normal. On the Linksys, it shows as an open connection with no security, but once you connected to it, it opened a web browser page like you were at a hotel to enter a password. That was fine, but I could only do ONE 2.4 network on that. And, I had bridges setup on the guest SSID's and they can't enter a password like that. So that was a no go.

I promptly installed DD-WRT from there, and the first few times it failed. But somehow, something happened (even after logging back into the Linksys stock firmware), it took. In there, I only had two options, 2.4 and 5.8, but you can setup virtual connections, and as far as I could tell, as many as you want. This allowed me to get everything connected back up without having to change any of the info on the bridges.

I love networking, but I hate networking lol. I just need to get a few 1000' boxes of cat5 and run everything hardwired through a managed switch... In theory, it would simplify things and it would definitely speed things up a lot on my network. But, need to get a switch that can handle all of this crap first lmao. I'm looking at somewhere around 30 ethernet connections If I count my cameras. Oh this is going to be fun....

 

[RandyDSok]

I'm really not sure what to think of Linksys today... In 2003 Cisco purchased them to increase their home product line and I had hopes they'd make them more reliable after that... then in 2013, they were sold to Belkin which I've never considered a great brand so I've never took a chance with them again.

 

[ChopDrifter]

Our house is fairly old, so the wiring and light and power switches are also old. One of them tends to arc as you switch it on. Unfortunately that arc can be a PC power supply killer. Not sure how all these things work, but I know it killed my power supply in my PC. Having said that, everyone is carefull not to use that Power switch or make sure everything is turned off before using it.


As for linksys, I have the linksys wrt1900acs, I'm running the latest openwrt stable(Reboot)firmware. I run this machine 24/7 since it came out. Very reliable. Unfortunately I will be getting a network upgrade which would require VOIP so I might need to upgrade my network system soon.

 

[ChopDrifter]

PS. I use to run DD-WRT, but they seem to be going commercial, well the firmware to the wrt1900acs seems to be, hence I moved to Openwrt. It's not as user friendly as DD-WRT, so it took some time to get use to the graphical user interface.

 

[Tony]

I thought about trying openwrt, but I have been using ddwrt for years and really didn't want to learn a new system. They are both open source so they should both be able to do the same thing. Only time will tell if this one will work. I love Asus routers, I HATE Netgear, just too fragile, and like Randy, I have kept away from Linksys for the reasons he stated, but this one has a 1.8GHz dual core CPU which for what I do is overkill, and I think that is what I need. It has more ram than it needs and so on. So hopefully this one will not overheat and die. I do have some nice stains on my wall from the previous routers lmao.

 

[ChopDrifter]

Tony realistically they designed the DD-WRT interface to be more user friendly. Openwrt is more highly configurable, there's a forum and the people there are like the people here they tell you exactly what you need to do, they preety much hold your hand like here. You're not alone, if you catch my drift. I understand it can be a bit daunting, like parallel charging for the first time or PID's, Trying to understand how to do it properly. There's a lot to take in, but somehow we manage to grasp it through people's help and tutorials.

 

[Tony]

I don't have an issue learning a new OS, I just don't want to do it right now with everything that I have going on lol.

 

[ChopDrifter]

oh I see what you mean

 

[ChopDrifter]

Just watch one of the plugins that's included, i think it's the router speedtest? If enabled, you also enable telemetry which logs the router activities and i mean everything. I read the EULA some where, hence I moved away from dd-wrt. This is one of the ways, how DD-WRT makes it's money, sells information to third party

 

[Tony]

Because I don't want to do a bunch of searching, I'm going to ask you. Can you setup virtual ssid's with openwrt? I need a total of at least 5 ssid's, 4 of which are on the 2.4 band. If you can do this with openwrt, I may just try it in another router if I can get it to load and play around with it for a while. Once I know it, I will upload it to the new router.

As for the plugin, I have not seen, or don't remember a speedtest plugin. I know there was one on the linksys fw, but I couldn't use it since I won't install flash onto my computer lol.

 

[RandyDSok]

Can you setup virtual ssid's with openwrt? I need a total of at least 5 ssid's, 4 of which are on the 2.4 band.

Ideally... you want to limit the number of total SSID's within an area... especially if they are all on one router. The more of them in an area, the slower each of them can work.... the more on each router you have, especially on the 2.4Ghz bands, the more overhead they take.... I think a minimum of 1Mb per SSID of overhead on the lower data rates and more with the higher data rates... so you are effectively robbing performance to enable multiple SSID's in an area ( even if it's with several routers )

 

[ChopDrifter]

Tony with Openwrt it can do what ever dd-wrt can, and more. As for example i've been requesting from dd-wrt devs to have the option to disable wifi management, this option can be done in openwrt, a bit of work but can be done. It's just the interface it's very vanilla(plain). When you get the time one day, have a look at it.

Anyway i'll leave you guys to it. I need to workout. ugh

 

[Tony]

I plan on changing the network around, just not right now. I had it this way when we had family staying here that liked to kill my internet 24/7 so I setup a few extra ssid's just for them so that I could just flip a switch and turn them off. Like posted above, I want to run ethernet to every place in the house as well as the garages and just manage everything from a switch. Have the wireless just for mobile devices.

 

[ChopDrifter]

I use to run ethernet around the house aswell. I just use wireless now for everything, trying to cut down the rats nest. I even game or sim online on wifi, lag is not that bad. Though my wifi cards isnt cheap.

 

[Tony]

You must use wireless AC cards on everything.

 

[ChopDrifter]

Yeah most are 5G almost all of my devices, trying to slowly cut down on the 2.4G devices