WRT54GS / Best Consumer-level Wireless Router For Large Rambler?
May 7, 2011
I'm setting up a large rambler house with a large footprint, and the only broadband connections are at opposing points of the house. Right now, I'm using two Linksys WRT54GS routers running Tomato in a WDS setup. A router, positioned in the middle point of the house, acts as a wireless access point so that the computer on the far end of the house can pickup the wireless signal. (One WRT54GS on its own doesn't have the power to go all the way across the house.)
I would like simplify things with a single, hi-power, hi-speed router at one end of the house. I know I can get better speeds with Draft N routers, but I need more signal strength as well. Are there any products currently available that can perform much better than my WRT54GS routers right now?
I need to go about 125 feet, through a number of walls.
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Jan 18, 2011
I think it was three or so years ago that I first went shopping for a top-notch gigabit wireless router/switch for home. I wanted VPN tunneling or at least pass-through, gigabit switching on the 4 ports, wireless n (preferably dual band) and the works. I wanted it to be fast (using a high speed business- class connection at home serving content back to my office at work) and I wanted it to be reliable.
So, I got what seemed to be the cream of the crop at the time, a Linksys WRVS4400N. If you know anything about this model, you know what a disaster it turned out to be - garbage firmware, constant reboots, terrible support, none of the features worked.
I fiddled with it for over a year, including one warranty replacement, before giving up, throwing it in the trash (literally) and thinking, maybe I'll try a "gamer" unit... so I got a Dlink 4500 with the crappy OLED display. It was faster. Most of the advertised features work. But, it wasn't reliable - lots of software bugs, each new firmware would break something new, terrible support, and almost daily power cycling because it would freeze.
That's because the Netgear WNDR3700 had shown up and was going to be the cat's meow. It was fast, seemed to run cool versus the previous two, had a reasonably fast UI and was bonafide dual band. Looked great. But as before... I made the mistake of putting it on autopilot with firmware updates, and the factory firmware was replaced by a series of increasingly unstable builds. Now, several of the features I bought it for don't work, the 5GHz band is dying, support is terrible, recent FW seems to have broken VPN passthrough and yet again I go online and see a five star router now turning into a 2.5 star clunker.
Are gigabit consumer routers uniformly junk? They all launch with great expectations, then fall flat on their face within 12 months, their fall from grace bracketed by atrocious support on one side and terrible firmware developers on the other. I've tried three top models from three of the largest manufacturers over the last four years and have had the same experience each time. Meanwhile, I go back to my $40 WRT54G and it just works.
My question: if I'm looking for something fast, reliable and not prone to getting in my way, do I need to simply call it a day and go up a few rungs on the ladder? Maybe a Sonicwall TZ2xx unit? (I've installed these in field offices for years, they work great.) Or a used Cisco Aironet plus a switch? Photo printers occasionally aside, I've never had so many problems with "premium" consumer electronics products as I do with gigabit wireless routers....
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Jan 28, 2013
I need to front-end my ISP's router with another, giving me a DMZ. I have bought an EA2700 for this but I can't find how to configure it.
I plan to have the DMZ network as 10.1.2.0/24, with the ISP's router at 10.1.2.254 and the EA2700's "upstream" connection as 10.1.2.1. The internal network (where most of the clients reside) will then be 10.1.1.0/24, with the EA2700 itself at 10.1.1.254 and a DHCP range 10.1.1.100 upwards.
On the basic setup screen I've set the Internet connection type to fixed IP, 10.1.2.1; I've set its default gateway and DNS1 as the ISP's router at 10.1.2.254. Then further down in network setup I've entered the *internal* address 10.1.1.254 and set the DHCP range and netmask appropriately. I'm getting the error message "The IPv4 address and gateway are not in the same subnet mask". But the only gateway I've entered is the one by which the *EA2700* knows how to route upstream traffic, viz the ISP's router at 10.1.2.254. Or am I misunderstanding?
More fundamentally, can the EA2700 be configured in this way?
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Oct 4, 2012
Is there an easy way to detect NAT devices - specifically home wireless routers like those from NetGear or D-Link or Linksys - on my network? I've shut down the ones that are easy to find by looking at the hostnames on the DHCP server, walking around with my phone and capturing the MAC address of the AP then finding a matching MAC address one number higher or lower. But there are still more out there evading me and I need to shut them down.I've read about a method using SFlow/Netflow, but my old Cisco 3750 and 2950 switches don't support that. I've read about a plugin for a Linux based firewall, but I use a Cisco ASA.
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Dec 24, 2011
So, using a standard off the shelf UNMANAGED gigabit switch (just a cheapie), I have a scenario that I need to know about before I go and buy a whole lot of equipment.Ok so let's start off and say it's a perfect world and the workstations connect at a full 100 Mb/s and the server connects at 1000 Mb/s.So I'm looking at having say, four or five workstations connected to the gigabit switch (at 100Mb/s) and also a gigabit connection from the switch to the server. In this scenario, taking into account everything I've said above, would each of the workstations get a full 100 Mb/s to the server, or would everything be limited to 100 Mb/s total? I could see potential for the server to only talk to one of the workstations at a time and only at 100 Mb/s, but hopefully all four could communicate to the server simultaneously.
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May 8, 2011
E3000 can see only 1TB Maximum. I have a 3TB WD storage and E3000. I have upgraded also to latest E3000 firmware version.
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Aug 9, 2012
I got a refurbished EA4500 (directly from Cisco) last week. I have been having a few issues, which I have found (not too great) workarounds for. However, the latest issue has me stumped, and is unacceptable.Whenever I am transferring files between 2 computers, I get kind of OK speed (5 MB/s). However, while this transfer happens, no other device can connect to the net. Actually, even trying to go to router home page (192.168.1.1) times out.The clients still say they are connected to the router, but I just can't get anywhere.As soon as the file transfer finishes, everything goes back to normal.EA4500 replaced a WRT54G. Never had any problems with that router. It was such a workhorse. Just needed to upgrade to a n-router.I am on the latest non-cloud firmware.I have reduced the MTU size to 1200. Not sure that matters.
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Mar 28, 2012
My WRT610N media server is not serving up large, MKV files (>1GB). I have a 500 GB Maxtor connected with external power.The media server serves smaller files just fine (although they are not MKV files). The disk is formatted as NTFS. I can access the large, MKV files via mapping network drive, so I know they are present on the disk and they are intact; but they media server does not show them.
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Nov 20, 2012
we are currently using a modem router LINKSYS WAG120N Wireless-N ADSL Router but are not satisfied. lots of dead zones and I think that there are too many users for this AP. last count gave around 20 users. so I'm looking for a solution to be able to handle 20+ concurrent connections and with large coverage - 600 m² .
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Sep 18, 2011
On the main floor I have a Linksys E3000, hooked up to my ADSL modem along with laptop #1 which has all my video and photos on Picasa. Laptop is on 5ghz, running speed at 300. I'm running the E3000 in dual mode (running 2.4ghz and 5ghz at the same time.) I have 2 different network names mjames5gz and mjames24gz.
In my basement, I have a laptop running on 5ghz and an IP camera running 2.4 ghz. the signal in the basement is on the low side for both. Under Wireless network connection, I am getting around 100 on Speed vs.300 on the laptop.... The basement is fully finished so I can't run cables to the basement easily. What could I buy so I can stream videos from laptop to laptop on 5ghz. Would also be nice to have the 2.4ghz signal boosted as well
When I go upstairs, both laptop read 300 ghz and I can stream between them just fine.
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Apr 29, 2012
We are deploying ACS 5.2 to replace our ACS 4.2 in production. I have two wireless networks setup as WPA2-Enterprise. One points at the ACS 4.2 and the other at the ACS 5.2. Both use the same SSL certificate with the same CN. Both authenticate Windows 7 clients. However, Windows 8 CP will only authenticate to the ACS 4.2 and not to ACS 5.2. The error it gives is:
11051 Radius packet contains invalid state attribute
It also shows no authentication method (most of the time).
Occasionally, I get a request that actually shows an authentication method of PEAP (EAP-MSCHAPv2) which is what it should be. On those requests, I get error:
24444 Active Directory operation has failed because of an unspecified error in the ACS.
Both ACs 4.2 and ACS 5.2 are pointed at the same Windows AD source.
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Aug 27, 2011
I've rolled back my E4200 router to the old firmware 1.0.0.1, then set up a media server.It generally works (e.g. it streams pre-existing media files to other devices). I can copy to this external drive small (say, < 1 MB) files. The drive has enough free space. However, I cannot copy to this external drive large (e.g. 700 MB) files.
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May 3, 2011
My setup is as follows:
Linksys E2500 as DHCP client, all default network settings (MTU auto configured to 1500), connected to:
ZTE 831 II ADSL2+ modem in bridged mode
The issue is that whenever any large file is downloaded over HTTP, the download stops after about 4 minutes and never resumes. This results in:
1) HTTP downloads of anything > ~80 MB failing; tried using several browsers and CURL, all with the same results
2) iOS downloads in iTunes timing out
3) YouTube videos stalling every few minutes
Interestingly, Netflix streaming works OK. Perhaps that's because the protocol for Netflix is not a single large download but a bunch of smaller ones, but that's conjecture.
This all occurs over both wireless and wired connections to the E2500.
If I connect my Mac directly to the ZTE modem, I don't have the problem.
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Apr 7, 2012
I recently upgraded my internet speed service from my ISP (Brighthouse). They installed a gateway to replace their old modem, but I have had it bridged so it should act as a modem. Speedtest.net shows downloads on the order of 40-50 Mbps and uploads around 5 Mbps. If I try doing something interactively that pushes the speed and size of files (like flying over Google earth using my mouse to guide the direction and speed) my connection seems to hang. I have to reset the router (unpower and repower it) to get my internet connection to work. This has also happened when I quickly downloaded a series of large images - I click to get the next page fairly soon after the current page has finished downloaded. My router is a WRT350N.
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Aug 29, 2011
I borrowed a netbook from a friend to take on vacation . It is a Dell Inspiron Mini 1011 running XP SP3 My router is a WRT54GS. I can connect to the router with my Vista laptop with no problems. I can connect to the router with a cat cable using the netbook. The netbook sees a strong signal from my router all the time, but will not connect. Occasionally it will connect for a moment, but then disconnects.
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Sep 6, 2011
I lost my installation CD and now I moved to a new place. I have linksys wireless-G router model-wrt54gs. how can i setup a new wireless now?
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Mar 12, 2012
I have a Wireless-G broadband router WRT54GS and have figured out how to enable logging.This gives me the IP addresses, but I would like to be able to easily see the FQDN so I can see what my kids are looking at on the web.Is there a way to get that information via the built in logging feature?If not is there a way to take the log file and run this through sometype of program that will generate the FQDN's?
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Apr 21, 2012
Sometimes the PC does not acquire the dns etc from the router and I have to manually enter in each PC to restore internet. - only W7.
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Sep 29, 2008
how do i uninstall my linksys WRT54GS router? i just bought a netgear and i want to uninstall my wrt54gs router
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Apr 16, 2013
I have a 2wire modem connected to the Internet port of my WRT54GS which is connected to a D link DSS 16+ Fast Ethernet switch. Without the switch, I can connect wired and wirelessly to my WRT54GS. However, when I put connect my any port of my D link switch to ports 1 - 5 of WRT54GS, I loose internet all together either wired/wireless to the router or wired to the D-link switch.I wonder why the IP Address will change as I understand that the switch is just a pass through switch.
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Dec 21, 2011
I'm having a very difficult time getting my WRT54GS to work with my Westell 6100 modem. I've been bouncing around gathering info, and what I've learned is that the goofy way CenturyLink tech support told me to hook up my old wired router (modem line into outgoing (LAN) router port) is because the Westell 6100 is a "smart modem/router". Therefore, when I run the Linksys setup CD, it sees the modem as a router, and won't properly configure. I've also learned that the Westell modem can be "dumbed down" into simply a modem by putting it into "bridge mode", which is where I'm at right now - trying to get it reset to factory defaults and resetting the connection type from PPPoE to Bridge. In the meantime, I also reset the WRT54GS to factory defaults, and now I've got another problem: the router will not allow me to set up encryption. The default setting is "Disabled", and when I click the down arrow and try to make any selection at all (preferred selection is WPA2 Personal), it reverts to Disabled. I've also tried to change the router's IP address to 192.168.2.1 (and alternately to 192.168.1.253), so it won't conflict with the modem's IP, and it freezes up every time I try.
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Jan 17, 2012
I have a WRT54GS which works fine with Linux both from both wired and wireless computers using Linux. But I reinstalled Win XP and now I can't reestablish a connection following the EasyLink advisor. I did have a connection under Win XP before.
The last instruction on the Easylink advisor tells me to look for something marked "local" I don't find that word on the screen.
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Aug 14, 2011
There is a way to block access to a website by password protecting it through my linksys router, which is one of thoe wrt54gs. I know I can completely block access of a website and can restrict the viewing hours of facebook at certain times through the router admin IP site but was wondering if it was possible to make it so you have to use a password to view said certain site. If there isn't is there any way maybe through a program or do I have to go through my ISP to see if they can do what I am asking for.
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Feb 4, 2012
i have been using a WRT54GS LINKSYS ROUTER for 2.5 years problem free until now. All of a sudden i cant connect to the internet through it at all. when i diconnect it and hook my desktop directly to the modem it works but i need the wireless to use my laptop. I have tried everything to get it working again, no dice. when using w7 diag tool it reports back local area connection doesnt have a valid ip config.
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Oct 20, 2011
I have a WRT54GS v. 7.0 w/ the latest firmware. Im looking for ways to optimize the router for best performance.There are 4-5 iphones/ipads that will connect to it. 3-5 laptopsand one xboxNo wired connections.Im using COX internet on the west coast which provides good internet service. Im not an expert with networks or routers but i follow instructions real well. What can i do to my stock/default router to take 100% advantage of its capabilities?
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Mar 25, 2007
I would like to upgrade the firmware for my WRT54GS V2.1 router however, I only see versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, etc.. There is no 2.1 listed, so does this mean I can use the v2.0 firmware?
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Dec 22, 2011
Factory default settings of my WRT54GS encryption are Disabled. When I try to enable WPA Personal encryption (>Wireless, Wireless Security), it reverts back to Disabled as soon as I make the selection. >Administration, >Wireless, >Encryption Function is Disabled.When I had this router set up at another location with another ISP, this was never an issue. How do I get the encryption function to be enabled?
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Dec 25, 2012
I successfully cascaded a WRT54gs V6 router to a LinksKey wired router LAN to LAN. My concern is I get a warning on my one computer saying it is an unsecured connection. I have not seen a way to go in and make any kind of security settings. Most of the files on my main computer which is connected via the wired router are labeled as private files.
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Oct 28, 2011
I've been having internet connection problems for the last few days and i usually do just unplugging the router and modem and turning it them back on but that hasnt been doing the job this time, its still connecting but it just says no internet access but it will connect when i connect my laptop to the modem. My router is linksys wrt54gs version 6.
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Sep 12, 2011
Currently I have Verizon DSL and which supplied me with a Westell 7500 modem/wireless router. I am also connecting a Linksys WRT54GS (firmware Version: 7.2.08) to the Westell 7500.
When I connect via cable or wireless to Linksys WRT54GS I am not able to establish VPN connection. I get the error “Error 619: A connection to the remote computer could not be established. So the port used for this connection was closed”.
However, when I connect via cable or wireless to Westell 7500 I am able to connect to VPN.
I tried resetting the Linksys WRT54GS to factory settings and reconfigured but no success to VPN.
At work we have a Windows 2003 setup with VPN Role on it and on my laptop I am using the built in VPN connection within Windows 7.
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Jul 11, 2011
So the power light on my WRT54GS router is off but my LAN lights 1-4 and the WLAN light stay on when power is attached but no cables are in the ports.
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Jul 2, 2007
I need to reinstall my WRT54GS but can't find the original disk. Is there someplace I can d/l the install software? I can find the firmware updates but I think I need more than that to install the router.
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Aug 12, 2011
I just got a new modem and was also hoping to boost the speed of my router without buying a new one. Are there any ways to increase the speed of the modem i already have?
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