Mlcloud (guest) 16 Dec 2010 21:32
My school, Johns Hopkins University, has two RJ-45 plug/connection/outlets in each dorm room. This is fine, but I thought I could spice things up with a router, which is fine with the school.
I used to use a WRT54G-TM with tomato on it, and that was remarkably stable. It bothered me when people tried to do any sort of heavy downloading/bandwidth hogging (the JHU connection easily maxes out the wireless-G bandwidth), but otherwise it was fine for gaming and browsing and youtubing.
But I wanted to be able to utilize all of the bandwidth of our university connection without having to plug in a cat5 all the time, and I also had a USB printer that was annoying to use, so I bought the RT-N16 on black friday and promptly installed TomatoUSB on it.
Things were horrible straight from the beginning… Build 53 had me jumping through hoops to make it get the WAN ip, and then it kept saying in the logs that my school's website was trying to perform DNS rebind attacks! With enough googling and forum browsing, I was able to make it through most issues.
However, sometimes the internet just stops working. From seconds to minutes to almost hours at a time, no one on the wireless will be able to access the internet. Our school seems to block all pings, so I can't keep a constant ping on google, or run tracerts or anything like that.
The symptoms:
-LAN works fine. We can keep a game of in-house DotA (warcraft 3) up all day long.
-Internet pages do not load at all. Sometimes we can get the CSS loaded, sometimes we'll see the title of the website, but I think that's because the internet works intermittently for a few seconds and then promptly dies again.
-Whenever the RT-N16's internet stops working, I borrow someone else's ethernet cable to discover that the internet is working fine and that the problem is in my router.
-When the internet does work, the wireless maxes out the university's bandwidth (50mbps up, 40 down)
-There is no timing consistency (as in, every hour, every 5 minutes, etc no such pattern)
-Nothing particularly odd in telnet->top.
-Google.com works the most often for some reason, when all other sites fail. This isn't always true, as sometimes google doesn't work as well. But too often I'll be able to google it'll give me search results, but none of the links I click will work. (This makes me think it's some issue with the DNS, but I don't know how I can test this, and it makes me wonder why my old router worked fine, why a direct connection to the computer works fine, and why this shiny router can't do anything about it.)
Some history:
-The WRT54G-TM worked fine.
-Plugging into LAN ports (as opposed to wireless N) doesn't change anything.
-Setting mode to N-only doesn't do anything.
-There seems to be no apparent pattern in how the internet drops in relation to the number of people connected/who's connected.
-IRC, MSN, among other things seem to work just fine despite the internet connectivity — in other words, I can download a file at 1 MB/s on IRC but still can't access youtube.
Strange, strange behaviors…
Mlcloud (guest), 16 Dec 2010 21:32
