Router suggestions for me please..

tommmy1979

Sorry for double posting but this got lost in the other thread i think... or else ye just ignored me ..

Guys and Girls,

I need you to recommend me a router too..

I've a netopia eircom router at the moment and my download speed is only 1mb and thats not going to improve anytime in the near future.

1mb is part of the problem, my housemate is hogging all the bandwidth with his downloading habit so i want more control over whats coming and going.

1. I'd like to be able to password protect the interface/controls (you know the 192.168.1.254 thing) so that i can lock the settings.

2. I'd like to be able block certain websites.

3. I'd like to be able to cap download/upload speeds to different devices..i.e phones, laptops and ps3s etc etc.

I'd greatly appreciate any help.

Cheers

T

exaisle

Specifically which Netopia router do you have?

When you say housemate, do you mean tenant or are you sharing? If it's the latter, then unilateral action is probably a bad idea....


E

Some_Person

Get the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 and get DD-WRT v24 sp1 special which has bandwith control and can block websites etc.

dahak

tommmy1979 wrote: »

Sorry for double posting but this got lost in the other thread i think... or else ye just ignored me ..

Guys and Girls,

I need you to recommend me a router too..

I've a netopia eircom router at the moment and my download speed is only 1mb and thats not going to improve anytime in the near future.

1mb is part of the problem, my housemate is hogging all the bandwidth with his downloading habit so i want more control over whats coming and going.

1. I'd like to be able to password protect the interface/controls (you know the 192.168.1.254 thing) so that i can lock the settings.

2. I'd like to be able block certain websites.

3. I'd like to be able to cap download/upload speeds to different devices..i.e phones, laptops and ps3s etc etc.

I'd greatly appreciate any help.

Cheers

T

Some_Person wrote: »

Get the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 and get DD-WRT v24 sp1 special which has bandwith control and can block websites etc.

Just in case it's not clear what Some_Person is saying here:

What you want for this job is a wireless router which can be flashed or comes installed with one of the third party linux firmwares.

Two of the most popular of these firmwares are DD-WRT and Tomato. From what I've read the consensus seems to be that DD-WRT is more powerful (can be made to do everything but make your coffee in the morning) but Tomato is easier to use. I did a good bit of reading about both and in the end decided to install Tomato, so I've only got direct experience with Tomato.

Once I had decided on Tomato I went looking for hardware to run it on, Tomato will run on a good few different routers so your choice is fairly open. In the end the best deal that I found from a bricks and mortar was for a Buffalo WHR-G125 from Argos (The picture Argos have is the wrong one, the router looks like this). The WHR-G125 requires the Tomato ND firmware not the normal one. The Buffalo WHR-G125 seems to be the replacement for the router that Some_Person recommended, the WHR-HP-G54.

tommmy1979 wrote: »

1. I'd like to be able to password protect the interface/controls (you know the 192.168.1.254 thing) so that i can lock the settings.

Check, you can also set up Tomato so that the you can only access the http interface over https for even greater security.

tommmy1979 wrote: »

2. I'd like to be able block certain websites.

3. I'd like to be able to cap download/upload speeds to different devices..i.e phones, laptops and ps3s etc etc.

These two come together in Tomato by using QoS (Quality of Service), you can block certain sites, protocols etc. You can also use QoS to limit max up and download speeds overall for a particular mac address or to characterise traffic from a particular mac address or protocol as low priority so that higher priority transfers are preferred. There are a number of tutorials around the internet on how to do this with Tomato, here being a good starting point.

I haven't really used the QoS features of Tomato, but rest of the features including the real time SVG graphics etc have been very solid.

Hope this helps.

GreyAlien

I've tried both Tomato and DD-WRT on a Linksys WRT54GL.

DD-WRT has more features that are less commonly used. It also supports a greater number of routers.
DD-WRT v24 sp1 special edition also is not free, which you can use to limit bandwidth per user.


Tomato supports less routers but in my opinion has far superior QoS and nice bandwidth monitoring graphs.
The normal version of tomato doesn't come with a way to limit bandwidth per user apart from using scripting, but there are mods out there that have implemented a simple gui. It's also free.
Mod I am currently using that has IP/MAC Bandwidth Limiting is Victek's mod.


Both DD-WRT and Tomato should allow you to block certain websites and password protect the router. You can also disable access to the router config via wireless while allowing wired to change the settings only.