DD-WRT & Netgear WNDR3700
A few weeks ago I finally upgraded my router. I’ve had the same wireless router for over 5 years now, and can strongly recommend it (D-Link Wireless G router). It rarely overheated, rarely dropped a line, and almost never never gave me any trouble.
Then the other day I moved something around, and when I replugged the wireless router in, I accidentally plugged the wrong power source into the router, and burnt it out.
So, needed a replacement. Did a little research, and finally settled on a Netgear WNDR3700. Its a dual band router, etc. You can find all the specs on AMZN here – Netgear WNDR3700. I don’t need to repeat them here.
I am not your average consumer. My network includes several networked devices in a combination of wireless and wired setups. I also run a couple of switches, and a couple of airport express’ and finally, two Network Attached Storage devices – so, I rely on my gateway router quite a bit – and I have specific requirements from it. Also I run 4 different OS’s inside the network.
First I’ll provide the consumer review, and if you just want to read your email from further away from your router, watch netflix, and hulu, this is a great router.
Setup is easy. The router interface can be reached at 192.168.1.1 and if you aren’t comfortable with that it comes with a CD to assist in the network setup. Once setup, its easy to connect to. It doesn’t drop connection easily – it provides great range, and it’ll do what you need it to do.
Feel free to stop reading now, if you don’t care what IPv6 vs IPv4 means.
When I upgraded routers, I also upgraded all my machines from various versions of Windows to Windows 7. This I was hoping was going to be a seamless upgrade, but it was not. It was painful, and in many many ways. However this isn’t a review of that particular story.
I do run several VM’s on a couple of machines. Previously I just used Bridge networking to get them access to the network. However after the upgrade to Windows 7, this became impossible. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to cause this – but it quickly became abundantly clear when I dug into the difference between “Home Network” and “Work Network” on Windows 7. I’ll leave that for another post as well. However to make a long story short – if you want it to work, depending on your VM’s OS – you either have to disable IPv6 on the Host, or move to “Work Network” which uses IPv4.
Anyways – to get back to the point. Netgear’s default firmware couldn’t give me the IP addresses for the machines connected to it most of the time. Also a lot of things that I could do with the DLink were not available in the default configuration. Network Address Translation – more specifically port translation isn’t available (not even in DD-WRT btw) which I used heavily to be able to access sshd on all my servers and ftp on them as well.
The firmware also had some trouble with my switches that were downstream from the router. They are both gigabit switches, and all the downstream computers have gigabit ethernet adapters however for some reason, the router would give the connection to the switch a megabit connection speed. I have no idea why, and after days of troubleshooting, I couldn’t figure it out.
After a month of trying to work with the default firmware, I loaded DD-WRT. It works beautifully. No connections dropped, all computers on the network visible, remote management of the router, no dropped packets, and stable nat. Still no port translation, but I moved my sshd servers to different ports for now.
The router doesn’t run hot. The 5Ghz channel which dropped connections frequently with the default firmware is now completely stable. The range is better (about 10% further). The signal is stronger (about 12 to 15% better signal to noise ratio) when compared to default firmware.
Finally – wireless-n. Since I cannot get the Airport Express devices to work with AES security, and I couldn’t get the 802.11n to work without it, I was basically screwed earlier. (Well technically I should not have been, but the 5Ghz basically sucked.) DD-WRT solved that for me.
Overall, the router works great for me now. One last feature I haven’t talked about, but has proved invaluable is the ability in DD-WRT to create virtual interfaces to two physical interfaces provided. I use this frequently, especially because I have certain devices that only connect to specific security protocols (WPA2 Enterprise only etc.)