OT: What we want are things that work; what we get is technology

[feenberg-fCu/yNAGv6M at public.gmane.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Richard Pieri wrote:

> On Mar 8, 2010, at 2:19 PM, Rajiv Aaron Manglani wrote:
>>
>> try it first without the cron job. from my Asus WL-500gP v2 access 
>> point/router running tomato firmware, services five wireless and many 
>> more wired clients:
>>
>> 14:18:04 up 466 days, 15:32, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
>>
>> no troubles with it at all.
>
> Which really means that the combination of that particular hardware, 
> firmware, and your use habits make it suck less.  I'd bet a Hershey's 
> bar that if I put it on my network I'd have it wibbling in the corner 
> within a month.

I have run through half a dozen or more residential grade wifi routers in 
the past few years, and most fail in two ways:

   1) Stop handing out DHCP addresses, but otherwise work, and can be
      fixed temporarily with a reboot

   2) Radio receiver stops working and there is no fix.

I found that putting them on a timer that reboots once a day helps get 
past (1) till (2) happens. In a system with multiple access points the 
apparent reliability is much lower than it needs to be, if the clients 
would just search for an access point that could actually provide an IP 
address, rather than just settling on the strongest signal.

A friend guessed that the reason for (1) was that they never expired dhcp
addresses, so that eventually they would run out. I don't think this is 
so, becuause whenever I would look, the last address handed out was never 
near the top of the allowed address range.

Dan Feenberg


>
> --Rich P.
>
>
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