Tag Archives: dgteam

Belkin N+ modem router

Posted by on April 8, 2009 2 comments

A little while back I had problems with my old Belkin N1 wireless router and was still amazed that despite a general lack of customer service in South Africa, Incredible Connection (of all places) managed to impress me.

Netgear provides in my opinion the only reasonable consumer networking products and I will stick with my Netgear DG834 (running DGTeam firmware) as it has never disappointed. A few months back I tried Linksys (being Cisco now), but their Soho routers are not even capable of providing a custom netmask. But there is one benefit no company currently can match with Belkin – a life-time replacement warranty on their products.

As a follow up on my pitching session about MTN, perhaps companies should look at Incredible Connection and Belkin for a number of reasons. As a first Belkin provides a life-time warranty on their products. Belkin’s products don’t perform exceptionally well (in comparison to Netgear or Cisco), but to prove the point:

I bought the Belkin N1 router some 14 months ago at R 2,500.00. This was a brilliant price, considering that it was the first N-draft, gigabit router on the market. The router died and the local Belkin representation (Gobic) was very quick in providing a credit note for a replacement. It takes guts for a company to provide life-time warranty, but it will certainly create brand-loyalty.

Incredible Connection comes into the picture as they handled the return (regardless of where you purchased the Belkin product, you can hand it into any Incredible-store, provided you have the till-slip). Once Gobic established that the router can not be repaired and was not damaged by lightning, I was able to pick up a replacement at the store.

There was no fuss, as the current N1 price was R 2,700.00 and the assistant even offered to give me the N1′s replacement the newer N+ modem router which goes for almost R 3,000.00. Although this was my first positive experience at Incredible Connection, it paints a clear picture, that some companies are becoming more customer centric than others.

The N+ is okay, and does everything the N1 did. I tried the ADSL mode, but it’s firmware can not compete with a well tuned open-source firmware running on the Netgear. The N+’s storage feature (plug in any USB device and it will mount it as a network share via Samba) is about the only advantage (but then again, I have 2Tb of storage on my NAS).



VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

DSL switching – improve your gaming

Posted by on March 14, 2009 1 comment

Network response and ping-time are the most important factors when it comes to gaming. In South Africa (and perhaps other countries) the so called “unshaped ADSL access” is extremely expensive (twice as much as normal, shaped access).

Axxess DSL has now introduced the 6-2-6 unshaped ADSL access which provides on a prepaid basis unshaped ADSL access on weekdays between 18:00 and 06:00 and full unshaped access over weekends.

Is unshaped access really worth it? Hell Yes! Pinging Google on Telkom Internet takes about 300-320ms. Doing the same on unshaped (only tested on Axxess) it is about 200ms, and 100ms makes a huge difference in gaming.

I haven now signed up for an Axxess prepaid account which gives me the luxury of traffic rolling over if I happen not to use it. The first irritation was to switch back and forth between accounts, as the Axxess 6-2-6 access does not give you any Internet access outside the above mentioned times.

My rudimentary Perl-scripting-knowledge (it can’t get anymore dangerous) came to the rescue and I have written the below script, which (once included as a crontab) will do the following:
- Allows the configuration of “shaped” and “unshaped” access times
- This can be configured per day
- The script will check the day of week and whether it should switch to “shaped” or “unshaped” access
- The script fully automates the reconfiguration of the Netgear DG834 (others with telnet access will also work) and the reconnection.

Requirements:
- A PC or NAS (such as my beautiful Synology DS107+)
- A DSL modem which allows Telnet-access (if you use the DG834xx, then get the DGTeam firmware to enable this and more)
- A shaped and unshaped account
- The script linked below (you need to make the necessary adjustments within the script)

History:
2009-03-14: Release 1.00 of script
2009-03-15: Release 1.01 – minor adjustments and bug-fix (Sunday was interpreted wrongly)
2009-03-16: Release 1.02 – minor bug, switch statement for shaped did not work


Download the DSL switch script
Note: I provide the script for free and if you screw up your DSL modem (which requires quite some ingenuity on your part), don’t come crying to me. Also if you find that I could have done things better please let me know (I am aware that my time-period checking in the script is horrendous, but since it only took 30 minutes to write, I forgive myself)

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 8.0/10 (1 vote cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)

The Jesus-firmware for your ADSL modem

Posted by on February 20, 2009 4 comments

Well, not quite, but close enough. If you happen to have a Netgear DG834XX ADSL modem router, I strongly suggest that you have a look at the DGTeam custom firmware:

All the features are listed after the break, but to wet your RSS-appetite, you should get excited about wake-on-LAN, TCP/IP tuning features, advanced ADSL tuning (including lockdown of SNR) and improved firewall modules. With the firmware comes native telnet-support, which has made my ADSL traffic statistics a lot more reliable.

The firmware can be flashed the same way you will flash any other Netgear firmware via the routers admin-console and after a few minutes you will have a more stable and feature rich firmware having features such as:
Continue reading “The Jesus-firmware for your ADSL modem” »

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: +2 (from 2 votes)