Router Issues & Bugs Blog

I had a comment from Bogman posted to me asking a whole lot of really good questions which I responded to but thought it would make for a good blog, so here it is.

I have tried the experimental tomatousb builds since Build 54 on an E3000 and miniDLNA is broken for streaming to the PS3. The rumor is that Teddy had a death in the family and fixes are probably not going to happen soon.
As far as the E4200 is concerned, is there a way to keep track of bandwidth usage short of flashing the considerably slower dd-wrt or tomatousb firmwares?

Yeah I had read about Teady Bear loosing his wife but no one has confirmed it yet. I really hope that it is just a bad rumor and nothing more. Poor guy, what a terrible thing to go through.

There is another off-shoot of tomato called Tomato RAF by Victek (tomato raf), it appears to be quite stable and well maintianed but uses the older broadcom driver and hence won’t support 5gHz band. You may want to confirm this yourself though. Here is the firmware tomato-E4200USB-NVRAM60K-1.28.9006MIPSR2_RAF-VPN-NOCAT.bin  Specific version for E4200, USB + Extended Sysinfo + VPN + Captive Portal. Updated June 13th. 2011.

As for a DLNA server, with many of the firmware distro’s, you have the option of installing optware and then installing a dlna server that is regularly maintained rather than the one packaged with the firmware.

Much like all distro’s, they will not be faster than the stock firmware that Cisco has put out due to the following reasons:

• Stock firmware uses fast-nat which is not compatible with some of the features in DD-WRT and many other distro’s.
• Stock firmware has proprietary code that allows the router to perform CTF (Cut Through Forwarding) which basically allows the router to interpret the IP header as it is coming in and once the Destination IP address is determined, begins to forward the bits straight away. This means that the router performs at almost line speed (CPU limiting of course), rather than maintaining a buffer which assembles the packet and is then interpreted for transmission.

The interesting thing is that the stock firmware has a broken twonky media server too, I am wondering if there is a broken common library that is stopping all media servers on 2.6 kernals.

As for your question on tracking bandwidth, yes there is a few approaches to take.

•  The router should support SNMP (both stock and distro’s), so you could get a tool that will connect to your router via SNMP to track bandwidth. The unfortunate part is that you will need a machine that is always on to keep counting the traffic usage. If you have a linux based file server, then that is the ideal choice as there are quite a few advanced/professional server and bandwidth monitoring applications available with web interfaces, MRTG is one well established application.
• Using distro’s like DD-WRT, you can setup optware and install applications that will do this, perhaps even MRTG.