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Bill Freeman | 1 Jul 2008 15:17

Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

> ... I've not really been
> interested in Linksys gear because I've had terrible experience with the
> hardware just crapping out, and I've had good experience with Netgear, so I
> was glad to see this.

On the other hand, I've had the only Netgear that I owned crap out too.  To be
fair, it provided years of service first.

Any product under the margin pressure that home routers see probably isn't using,
for example, pre-burned in chips or MIL spec boards and soldering techniques.

But, yes, it's great to see Linux compatibility in someone's marketing plan.

Bill
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Alex Hewitt | 1 Jul 2008 15:29
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Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 09:17 -0400, Bill Freeman wrote:
> > ... I've not really been
> > interested in Linksys gear because I've had terrible experience with the
> > hardware just crapping out, and I've had good experience with Netgear, so I
> > was glad to see this.
> 
> On the other hand, I've had the only Netgear that I owned crap out too.  To be
> fair, it provided years of service first.
> 

Bill beat me to the punch on this. I've had plenty of bad
hardware/firmware from both Netgear and LinkSys. D-Link will also find
detractors for pretty much the same reasons. The issue for me with these
brands is the relatively poor support. But then as Bill pointed out, the
margin pressure on these products precludes the kind of support you will
see from Cisco, Juniper or other high margin vendors. I still use both
Netgear and LinkSys when reliability is not a primary concern. You can
buy a lot of $50 appliances for the cost of one Cisco et al router.

-Alex

> Any product under the margin pressure that home routers see probably isn't using,
> for example, pre-burned in chips or MIL spec boards and soldering techniques.
> 
> But, yes, it's great to see Linux compatibility in someone's marketing plan.
> 
> Bill
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
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Chip Marshall | 1 Jul 2008 16:38
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Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

On July 01, 2008, Alex Hewitt sent me the following:
> Bill beat me to the punch on this. I've had plenty of bad
> hardware/firmware from both Netgear and LinkSys. D-Link will also find
> detractors for pretty much the same reasons. The issue for me with
> these brands is the relatively poor support. But then as Bill pointed
> out, the margin pressure on these products precludes the kind of
> support you will see from Cisco, Juniper or other high margin vendors.
> I still use both Netgear and LinkSys when reliability is not a primary
> concern. You can buy a lot of $50 appliances for the cost of one Cisco
> et al router.

Personally, I've never had any problems with my two WRT54G units, both
flashed to the dd-wrt firmware. I've had Netgear routers in past, one
would randomly decide the wireless wasn't going to work, and would
require a power cycle to fix (MR315, iirc.) Another would crash,
presumably due to a state table overflow, when trying to run BitTorrent
through it.

It's good to see more places utilizing open source, which at the very
least should lead toward getting faster fixes for issues like the state
table overflow.

Personally, I'd love to have a Juniper SSG 5 or so for a home router,
but the $700 price tag puts it a little out of my range.

I wonder if any of the commercial boxes are using OpenBSD w/ pf...

--

-- 
Chip Marshall <chip@...>
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E
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Ben Scott | 1 Jul 2008 17:18
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Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Arc Riley <arcriley@...> wrote:
> If it was really designed for hacking it'd include more flash, ram, and
> pinouts for expanding/hacking the hardware.

  "Designed for hacking" is relative.  When LinkSys, NetGear, et. al.,
say that, what they mean is:

A1. It has enough computrons to run a reasonable Linux install.
A2. They didn't go out of their way to prevent third-party firmware
from running on it.

  They're not talking about hardware hacking.

  It may be interesting to speculate as to why.  Here's my reasoning:

  Current versions of the LinkSys WRT54G-without-the-L series no
longer have enough storage to run a reasonable Linux kit.  (They can
boot Linux, but only a severely feature-constrained variant.)  LinkSys
switched to the smaller-footprint VxWorks to let them ship the
WRT54G-without-the-L with less RAM and less flash ROM.  That let them
knock a few bucks off the BOM cost.  For the product space they're
working in, that's huge.  BOM cost is the overriding concern for all
design decisions.  Everything else is secondary.  *Everything*.  Until
you've talked to engineers working in this product space, it's hard to
appreciate the cost pressure they work under.  They'll gladly redesign
a whole PCB to shave off the cost of a 50 cent part and the total
manufacturing cost it adds.

  So, I presume that the WRT54GL line was introduced because:
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Ben Scott | 1 Jul 2008 17:35
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Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 10:38 AM, Chip Marshall <chip@...> wrote:
> Personally, I've never had any problems with my two WRT54G units ...

  I could tell war stories for any given brand.

  For pretty much everything in this product space (NetGear, LinkSys,
D-Link, Belkin, etc.), they're cheaply designed and cheaply
manufactured, using cheap parts, and they make tons of them.  The Law
of Really Large Numbers means that not only will you always be able to
find someone who has had trouble with any given brand, you'll always
be able to find someone who has had trouble with all of them.  They've
all had bad production runs.  They've all turned out unusually bad
designs.  There is usually little design team continuity, so past
performance is of little help, either.

  In short, don't expect great quality from a $50 router.  Personally,
I recommend buying the unit you find most aesthetically pleasing.
That's probably the most reliable thing to shop for.  ;-)

-- Ben
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Gerry Hull | 1 Jul 2008 20:28

Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router

Or, Buy a used Cisco router on Ebay for around the same price, and get much more
functionality (though much harder to configure).  I have a 1720 and it does everything I
want and more.
 
Gerry

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 10:38 AM, Chip Marshall <chip-ni9fzTQ5d8yFX2APIN6yfw@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Personally, I've never had any problems with my two WRT54G units ...

 I could tell war stories for any given brand.

 For pretty much everything in this product space (NetGear, LinkSys,
D-Link, Belkin, etc.), they're cheaply designed and cheaply
manufactured, using cheap parts, and they make tons of them.  The Law
of Really Large Numbers means that not only will you always be able to
find someone who has had trouble with any given brand, you'll always
be able to find someone who has had trouble with all of them.  They've
all had bad production runs.  They've all turned out unusually bad
designs.  There is usually little design team continuity, so past
performance is of little help, either.

 In short, don't expect great quality from a $50 router.  Personally,
I recommend buying the unit you find most aesthetically pleasing.
That's probably the most reliable thing to shop for.  ;-)

-- Ben
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John Abreau | 1 Jul 2008 20:33
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Re: Netgear now touting open source WRT-compatible wireless router


On Tue, July 1, 2008 2:28 pm, Gerry Hull said:
> Or, Buy a used Cisco router on Ebay for around the same price, and get
> much
> more
> functionality (though much harder to configure).  I have a 1720 and it
> does
> everything I
> want and more.

What Cisco equipment would you recommend for 802.11N?

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Marc Nozell | 1 Jul 2008 22:23
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Backups and Amazon S3 storage?


I used to keep a backup of my photos and other personal important
files on a large USB drive at my office so in case my house burned
down I'd at least have those.  Now as a teleworker my home *is* my
office and need to figure out off-site storage.  

There are a number of tools to mirror files to Amazon S3, but does
anyone have a specific recommendation?

Ideally it should be incremental, encrypted, simple to use, simple
file recovery, etc.  Bonus for allowing for multiple backups with
little additional storage (like rsnapshot)

The "Good tool for archiving to media?" discussion didn't seem to come
to a resolution.

-marc
--

-- 
Marc Nozell <marc@...>		http://www.nozell.com/blog
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Labitt, Bruce | 1 Jul 2008 23:19
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General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

I just got an ATI/AMD Radeon X1650 Pro video card to try to replace the
onboard video on a Dell Optiplex 745 running Scientific Linux 5.1.

So I just plugged the Radeon in and started the computer.  Um, during
boot it said - "Oh no, you don't want to do that... You've got too many
video sources for your monitor... Unplug one and start over."  So I did.
Everything was fine until the OS tried to start X.  Then everything
died.  I got a couple of options to look at.  An error message came up
and said it could not find a video card.  Of course, I don't know how I
could have read anything on the screen, if it did not find the card, but
I digress.  It said I could fix things if I were root, so I dutifully
complied.  As soon as I became root it tried and failed to start x.  It
then said, "hey, I'm brilliant, why don't I probe stuff and generate a
new x.conf file?"  The screen turned pretty colors for a while and
eventually froze.  After a while, (many minutes) I reset the computer.

So I currently have xorg-x11-server 1.1-48.41.el5-2.1

What do I need to do to 1) get X to even start. 2) run 2D 3) run 3D.
The computer is back to running on the intel chipset for now.

Do I need to update the above file?  There does not appear to be an
update in the repository.  I don't mind compiling stuff, having compiled
octave, lapack, blas, and a few other packages.  However, having not
done this adventure before (os video) I don't know what the order of
steps should be.  

There was nothing on the SL site on video upgrades, although they did
have proprietary drivers with no instructions on how to install.

I'd like to go with OS / DRI if at all possible.

Without belaboring this further, a couple of steps, or a general
procedure would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Bruce
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Arc Riley | 1 Jul 2008 23:49
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Re: General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

Thats an r500 based card, so older Xorg versions don't support even 2d on it.  Keep in mind r500/r600 support (even 2D) is new as of only a few months ago, since AMD released the specs, so you'll need to upgrade quite a few packages including xorg server, xlib, and Mesa.

I can't advise on how to go about upgrading since I'm completely unfamiliar with "Scientific Linux" but based on your xorg server version I'm willing to bet the rest of your packages are extremely out of date.  You may want to consider (yea I realize it's a pain) migrating to a different distro, it may be more work to manually compile/install the upgraded Xorg than it'd be to install a whole new system.

After that, you'll want to install the "radeonhd" driver being developed by AMD and Novell.  It's free software and has decent support for the r500 series.  Instructions and more details:

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

The standard "radeon" driver in more recent Xorg/dri versions supports 2D on r500/r600 so once you get that updated you'll at least be able to use a GUI to go through the above steps.


On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Labitt, Bruce <labittb1-2wxnnt+NM6i9TMao6EloiEEOCMrvLtNR@public.gmane.org> wrote:
I just got an ATI/AMD Radeon X1650 Pro video card to try to replace the
onboard video on a Dell Optiplex 745 running Scientific Linux 5.1.

So I just plugged the Radeon in and started the computer.  Um, during
boot it said - "Oh no, you don't want to do that... You've got too many
video sources for your monitor... Unplug one and start over."  So I did.
Everything was fine until the OS tried to start X.  Then everything
died.  I got a couple of options to look at.  An error message came up
and said it could not find a video card.  Of course, I don't know how I
could have read anything on the screen, if it did not find the card, but
I digress.  It said I could fix things if I were root, so I dutifully
complied.  As soon as I became root it tried and failed to start x.  It
then said, "hey, I'm brilliant, why don't I probe stuff and generate a
new x.conf file?"  The screen turned pretty colors for a while and
eventually froze.  After a while, (many minutes) I reset the computer.

So I currently have xorg-x11-server 1.1-48.41.el5-2.1

What do I need to do to 1) get X to even start. 2) run 2D 3) run 3D.
The computer is back to running on the intel chipset for now.

Do I need to update the above file?  There does not appear to be an
update in the repository.  I don't mind compiling stuff, having compiled
octave, lapack, blas, and a few other packages.  However, having not
done this adventure before (os video) I don't know what the order of
steps should be.

There was nothing on the SL site on video upgrades, although they did
have proprietary drivers with no instructions on how to install.

I'd like to go with OS / DRI if at all possible.

Without belaboring this further, a couple of steps, or a general
procedure would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Bruce

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gnhlug-discuss-Z8c80N6yweDq5qozqU1N3A@public.gmane.org
http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/

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