Shami's Blog

I guess you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted anything for a while now. Well, I’ve been a little busy lately, one of the things I was working on is installing a wireless network at home. That project took too much time to complete because of some issues I had. And I’d like to share my story.At first, I went and bought a D-Link DSL-G624T. Good wireless range, nice external finish, built in DSL modem, it sure does remove a lot of the hassle of building a network. But after experimenting with it for 2 days, I was unable to forward SSH to my PC, the router is Linux based, and the firewall kept sending the SSH connections to itself, instead of forwarding them to the internal LAN.

So I go ahead and replace that with the Gigabyte GN-BR01. Very ugly if you ask me, but does the port forwarding thing correctly after doing a firmware upgrade. Too bad the wireless signal strength dropped to half as soon as I went out the door, even though I still had eye-of-sight with the router, after going on for 3 days trying to figure out if placing it differently or re-orienting the antenna did anything, I went on the look for a high-gain replacement antenna, only to find that the Telecom Regulations Comity banned those things, don’t ask me why. Anyways, I decided to return that thing and look for something else.

I read that the Linksys routers are not very good these days, and the only other option the store had was either the router, or a regular access point. So I decided since the modem I have already has a router, why not get the access point (which to my surprise, is more expensive). So I go ahead and take it, the wireless range is good since it has a diversity antenna, but I had to keep the modem and the switch, which added to the wire clutter.

I saw a Belkin DSL router with a built in modem at a friend’s house, those are nice, they save a lot of space. But when I tried it with his laptop which had a Belkin PCMCIA wireless card, but the signal strength was very low, even though we were right the next room.

My recommendation is, get a D-Link router if you don’t care about forwarding SSH. Otherwise, go ahead with a Linksys or a D-Link access point. Personally I might replace the Linksys access point I currently have with a D-Link and see what happens.

Shami