2006-05-03

Linksys WRT54GX2

After I returned WRE54G, I bought WRT54GX2.
I don't know if it really increases my range, but I noticed that all the deadspots in the house that I know of have disappeared. In the past, interactive session was not very pleasant as the connection frequently became laggy. It is not occurring that frequently anymore; there are still some occurrences, typically in the morning (06:00 or so).
The bad thing about WRT54GX2 was the wired ethernet port could not reliably auto-negotiate 100baseT protocol. Googling for it lead me to http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,14714795. The firmware on my device was 1.01.06. So, I downloaded the new firmware (1.01.14 as of now) and tried to upgrade the device.
But I was unable to update the firmware. None of the suggestions in that URL did the trick. Experimenting for one hour with various settings didn't yield anything either.
Just when I was close to giving up, I had this crazy notion of trying to do the upgrade using Internet Explorer. Behold! It worked.
I find it hard to believe that a device manufactured in 2005 by a company using GPL code would still require a particular browser. But believe I had to.
Anyway, don't bother to backup your configuration by Administration -> Config Management -> Backup. It's worthless as the configuration file is version-specific. Pen and paper would work better.

(originally from http://microjet.ath.cx/WebWiki/2006.05.03_Linksys_WRT54GX2.html)

2006-03-26

Linksys WRE54G version 2.0 (repeater/extender)

I finally did something to address weak signals from my wireless router, a 2-year old Netgear device. I went to CompUSA thinking of buying Linksys WRT54G router, but instead ended up buying the Linksys WRE54G version 2.0.

Toms Hardware reviewed this device sometimes ago. They were not really impressed by the product and the setup was painful. They were reviewing version 1.0.

True enough, things have changed in version 2.0. The device now includes a RJ-45 port for wired setup. This makes the setup easier somehow.

Setup was not difficult, except for the following:

The SSID must be the same as the router's SSID. This is an annoyance since that means I can't choose which device to connect to for comparison purposes.
The router has been setup to use 64bit WEP. But the expander's WEP implementation seems to not be compatible as it couldn't connect to the router. Fortunately, its WPA Personal implementation is compatible with the router's.

I put the expander in the middle of the signal edge and the router in contrary to putting it at the edge as written in the manual. Putting it at the edge does not really make much sense since at the expander would have difficulty communicating with the router. I bought the device to expand range but I do not want to sacrifice signal quality.

With the expander activated, I now can go beyond the previous range. However, interactive session sucked real bad. It seems the device is buffering data, which is bad for interactive session.
I returned it after several days because I work with interactive session most of the time.

(originally from http://microjet.ath.cx/WebWiki/2006.03.25_Linksys_WRE54G_v2.html)