Lightning

[shmokes]

I watched lightning strike a telephone pole about 500 feet from my back door.  It startled the hell out of me.  I happened to be watching the lightning storm out my back door when it hit.  It also fried my modem and router 

Cable company replaced the modem, but now I need to replace the router.  Anybody have a recommendation for a stable wireless router with good range, DHCP (manually assignable by MAC address), good port forwarding, preferably MAC filtering for wireless, preferably domain filtering.  Gigabit eithernet is also important, but not a dealbreaker. 

Also, cheap.  Under $100 would be ideal.

On another note I watched my cat fall in a swimming pool for no reason at all a few days ago.  It was ---smurfing--- hilarious.  No wind.  Wasn't being chased (though he had just taken off to chase another cat).  Wasn't pushed.  He just fell in.  He thrashed around for a good ten or fifteen seconds before he finally managed to pull himself to safety and he ran away like the pool had attacked him and pulled him in.

[Jdurg]

 

That cat story had me in painful tears.   

Anyway, for a router I'm quite happy with the Linksys router I use.  It's a wireless (and wired if you want to) router that has so many options for set up that it can actually be a bit intimidating at times.  I forget the model number, but I got it through my work who requires a VERY secure router if you are working from home.  The range is fantastic and I have never had any problems with it.  So I'd look up Linksys and see what you can get from them.

[Ed_McCarron]

Linksys is nice and easy, but has (at least the stuff a few years old did) problems with port forwarding and talking to some other brands of wifi adapter.  My linksys is augmented by a dlink - the linksys won't talk to my axim's wifi, but the dlink will.  It also doesn't like serving passive FTP traffic.

YMMV.

[Coin_Op]

The cat has a small head which = a small brain.

I have 2 cats, and I will never figure out why they behave like they were born yesterday all the time!

[Cakemeister]

I have a Linksys WRT330N. Although I have the wireless part disabled, it works well. It has five gigabit switched connections to go with the wireless.

It's designed for gamers so it has the DMZ, port forwarding, and other features needed for gaming.

I don't recall the price, but usually you get what you pay for in this kind of device.

[AtomSmasher]

I really like my Buffalo WHR-G125 which has a strong wireless connection with my Wii at the opposite side of the house, is compatible with DD-WRT firmware, and was very inexpensive when I bought it a year or so ago.  I would highly recommend it, except that they are now very hard to find because Buffalo is no longer allowed to sell wireless G routers due to a lawsuit.

[TOK]

I have a Netgear, and while it's good for PC use and the range is good, I've discovered an issue with them... My PSP worked on the wireless network until I put the Wii on there. Now, even though the PSP is connected, it won't surf. Removing the Wii is the only way to get it to work. I though it was something odd that just I was experiencing, then my buddy had a problem with a Netgear router getting two XBox 360's to work simultaneously.

I haven't done anything about the issue yet, he bought a Linksys router and the problem was immediately fixed.

Regarding lightning... I worked in telecomm for years and saw the aftermath of many strikes. A couple were amazing. I saw two houses struck. One crumpled a stone chimney onto a new (at the time) Lexus GS400. I saw another one affect a car. Lightning hit a tree near a Volkswagen Passat and cooked the electrics in it. I got called out to that one right after the strike because the people said they were afraid of a house fire. The Passat was sitting in the driveway with the windshield wipers on even though they weren't switched on. The power door locks were locked and couldn't be opened. The car was being taken away on a rollback by the time I left.

The craziest one I saw was a metal fence strike, which affected a house and car. The lightning the fence somewhere in the side yard. There was tree was leaning against the fence, and the lightning followed the roots about 10 feet across the yard and under the driveway. It blew holes in the ground where it followed the roots and blew asphalt off the driveway where they crossed under. It flattened two of four tires on a car sitting in the driveway. What amazed me is that all of those things very resistant to conductivity (wood, earth, rubber) were still involved. The house was mostly undamaged, though they lost a lot of the sensitive electronics in the house like the microwave, TV's, DVD players and cordless phones.

They did a huge bonding upgrade a couple years ago which alleviated much of the damage associated with the strikes. There were areas where we were grounded to our own ground rods, and became the path of least resistance. Stuff would come to our equipment and blast the crap out of it.

[Jdurg]

There is so much voltage and energy involved in a lightning strike that everything will "conduct" it regardless of whether or not it's a classic conductor.  Even rubber will have electricity flow through it due to the intense energy involved in the strike.

[massive88]

Get a router that allows for DD-WRT and you are set.

All my Buffalo routers have been champs, though it appears Atom is correct, and you cant find em anymore.

Go look up what routers take DD-WRT and go from there imo.

[boykster]

I would get a Linksys WRT54GL

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124190

and put Tomato on it:

http://www.polarcloud.com/firmware

I used to run DD-WRT, but IMHO Tomato is better. 

[Ed_McCarron]

The craziest one I saw was a metal fence strike, which affected a house and car. The lightning the fence somewhere in the side yard.

Current code around here calls for bonding the fence to the facility's ground system.  I sub out the grounding and lightning protection stuff.  Its PFM.

A customer asked me why the $400 he spent in surge protection didn't protect his equipment.  Direct strike.  I pointed to the top of the telco pole it struck (or rather, where the top of the pole WAS the night before) and said:

"That lightning just travelled 5 miles from the clouds to reach the top of that pole.  Do you really think 6" across the surge protection will stop it?"

[shmokes]

I actually suspect that the surge came in over the coax cable.  The only things that were affected were the cable modem (completely fried) and the internet port on the router.  The router works as a switch still.  It's just the one port (unfortunately the most important one) that doesn't work anymore.  Lots of things were plugged into that surge protector, but only those two devices were effected.  Thus, I think the surge came in on the coax cable, killed the modem, and then traveled across the ethernet cable to kill that port on the router.  Thank god it didn't get my TV, which also has a coax cable running directly into the back of it.

[shmokes]

I would get a Linksys WRT54GL

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124190

and put Tomato on it:

http://www.polarcloud.com/firmware

I used to run DD-WRT, but IMHO Tomato is better. 

I'm running this setup.  I didn't try DD-WRT, but Tomato seems fantastic.  It does everything I want and the interface is great.  Thanks for the tip.

[ChadTower]

Hrm... I've been meaning to install DD-WRT for like a year.  Maybe I'll check out Tomato instead.

BTW, now that we know exactly what router and firmware shmokes is using, who wants to be first to change his desktop to a picture of their junk?   

[boykster]

Looks like I need to update to 1.21 (still on 1.19) of tomato.  I was a long-time user of DD-WRT and loved it, then serveral ppl suggested I try tomato - it's great. 

 

[ark_ader]

Get a Trendnet and you will be safe  until next year when the weather comes back for your new router. 

[protokatie]

Shorten Those Links!

Get one of these next time. Although the coax surge protector may become fried, and it may fry the modem (due to the extremely high current and voltage) just having one more thing for the spike to go through could have saved the router.

[protokatie]

"That lightning just travelled 5 miles from the clouds to reach the top of that pole.  Do you really think 6" across the surge protection will stop it?"

Umm... Don't like to call people out, but don't you mean "That lightning travelled 5 miles from the pole/ground and went up to the sky". Remember which way the electrons flow...

[ChadTower]

There are like 15 known types of lightning... the most common ones are discharging downwards. 

[MustardTent]

I would get a Linksys WRT54GL

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124190

and put Tomato on it:

http://www.polarcloud.com/firmware

I used to run DD-WRT, but IMHO Tomato is better. 

I've been meaning to switch to DD-WRT from the default linksys firmware, but never got around to it.  Choosing the correct binary was a little confusing, which also slowed the process down.  After seeing your post, I checked out the tomato site -- very nice.  Simple too.  I spent a few minutes upgrading the firmware (choosing the correct one is exceedingly easy) and configuring static DHCP, which is the main reason I've wanted to upgrade (well, that and the fact that my linksys hangs once a month).

We'll see how it goes in the future, but I'm happy with Tomato so far.  Clean interface, easy to use, and some great features.  Took no time at all.  I'd also like to point out that the firmware upgrade kept all my previous configuration from login password to wireless security settings.

[ChadTower]

I'd also like to point out that the firmware upgrade kept all my previous configuration from login password to wireless security settings.

Ooh that's nice.  One of the main reasons I never got around to installing DD-WRT was that I didn't have time to go in and audit the various network configs to make sure I could get them all set up again in a new firmware.

[shmokes]

Just a minor thing to keep in mind: if you still have the default username (i.e. username field left blank), Tomato will not keep that as Linux requires a username.

The static DHCP is one of the main features I wanted too, and it's usually only found in the higher-end routers.  Static DHCP has saved me so many headaches caused by setting static IP addresses on devices.  I'm excited to mess around with the QOS a little too.  Another feature I got going that I think may not be in the stock Linksys firmware was WDS, which let me mesh the wireless signals from my new router and another access point to increase my wireless range and allow users to move seamlessly between the two.  My wife loves me for that, as now she gets a great signal in the bedroom for her laptop.

 One thing that irritates me a little is that this router, regardless of firmwares, seems to lock me into using 192.168.1.xxx, when I prefer 192.168.0.xxx.  It's a pain in the ass and made for a bunch of extra hassle.  Why not just let me choose?  My D-Link DL-605 that got fried let me choose whatever internal addresses I wanted.

[Samstag]

One thing that irritates me a little is that this router, regardless of firmwares, seems to lock me into using 192.168.1.xxx, when I prefer 192.168.0.xxx.  It's a pain in the ass and made for a bunch of extra hassle.  Why not just let me choose?  My D-Link DL-605 that got fried let me choose whatever internal addresses I wanted.

I thought you got a WRT54GL?  I have one that I can change just fine, although I didn't try using zero.  That's under dd-wrt, but I can't remember which version right now.  It was current as of 3-4 months ago.

[ChadTower]

I'm pretty sure that router basically works with static DHCP even in the default firmware.  I run one of the WRT5x routers and it has no problems with the Tivos, Wii, Xbox, or Gamecube (all hard wired).  I can reboot them all I want and it always gives them back the same IP.  I notice that my laptop also always gets the same IP and I only pop that onto the network occasionally.  You have to set your IP range high enough that you'll never run out of IPs, though.  If you set it low enough that it has to recycle one it will.

[shmokes]

I'm pretty sure that router basically works with static DHCP even in the default firmware. 

But are you specifying a static IP address on the device, i.e., in Xbox Media Center manually entering in a specific IP address which it then requests from the DHCP server every time you turn it on?  Because that's different, and not nearly so useful as static DHCP on the router.

Also, I figured out where to change it from 192.168.1.xxx to 192.168.0.xxx    Though, now I may just leave it at 1 since I've already gone through the pain in the ass of changing everything that it would now be a pain in the ass to change it back.   

[ChadTower]

But are you specifying a static IP address on the device, i.e., in Xbox Media Center manually entering in a specific IP address which it then requests from the DHCP server every time you turn it on?  Because that's different, and not nearly so useful as static DHCP on the router.

I've never set an IP for any of the nonPCs so if they are static they were implemented that way... which would be pretty foolish.  Especially the Wii since it's such an appliance.

[shmokes]

In that case, your DHCP server will hand out, for example, your Xbox's ip address to a new device on the network if the Xbox hasn't connected in a while and its DHCP lease has expired if a new device tries to connect.  Generally speaking the DHCP will hand out the same address to the same device over and over again so long as nothing else has not taken the address, but even this is not always the case.  All DHCP servers work this way, but static DHCP eliminates headaches and makes for far easier setup and much nicer management.  You should give it a shot.

[ChadTower]

Oh I get that... just saying that if you set your IP pool large enough the default firmware seems to do that anyway.  It does for a small amount of clients (<10), anyway.

[boykster]

Static DHCP can be pretty useful for devices that don't allow for setting a static IP, but for some reason "work better" with one.  For example, I have a Sonos music system, and the handhelds are essentially small handheld PC's that go into low power mode and go to sleep.  When they wake up, they don't always do a full network re-initialization, and if their DHCP lease has gone stale, they can freeze up, requiring a reboot.  Setting a static lease for those devices solves the problem.

Glad to hear of others having success with Tomato firmware.  I was at first skeptical, since I had such a good experience with DD-WRT, but I'll be damned it Tomato isn't head and shoulders better.  The UI is cleaner, more intuitive, and the feature that sold me was the real-time and historical bandwidth usage logging/graphing.  GREAT stuff!   

[Cakemeister]

If you want to run a server that the outside world can get to, static IP is very useful. You have to forward the ports for the server to that static IP address.

[shmokes]

My very favorite thing about static DHCP are devices that require an unchanging IP address (network printers, Network Attached Storage devices, etc.), but can only be changed through a web interface.  These devices can be a nightmare to get going on a new network if you forgot to change their static IP addresses before pulling them off the old network.  You're left with a catch-22, because you can't use the device on the new network, because the device is on a different subnet, but the only way to change the device's IP address is by getting into the web interface, which you can't get to because the device is sitting on a different subnet.  You end up having to create a temporary mini network just to plug the device into to change its IP settings.  And if you don't know what the device's IP settings are, you're in even more trouble.

But if you use static DHCP, you get every single benefit of a static IP address, but when you move the device to a new network, it simply picks up a new IP address on its own.  This is also great for when, like me, you have to change your network to a new subnet and static DHCP kept me from having to move from device to device, setting up new IP addresses on them.  Everything just picked up new static addresses on their own and immediately worked on the new network.