[TriLUG] Re: Linksys WRT54G

[Jon Carnes]

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 11:13, Marty Ferguson wrote:
> All...
> & Jon Carnes take note.
> 
> Robert Cringley exposes a useful but somewhat disruptive 
> application for this device.
> 
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040527.html
> 
> Ammend the closing paragraph with this.
> ...a school or a church *or a non-profit Linux User group*...
> 
> Marty
> 

Yep, we had a conversation off list last week about this.

I agree with most of what he's said - and indeed he's stumbled across
half our marketing plan.  However, his take on the expansion of these
Linksys units makes the assumption that the users in the net have
diverse connections to the Internet.  Unfortunately the reality is that
most aggregate areas pretty much use the same one or two providers. In
the case of the Raleigh area that would be Bell South (via DSL) or more
likely Time Warner Cable. 

Thus the service would NOT be more robust and the folks sharing the
connections of those with Internet access would actually bog down the
overloaded limited neighborhood systems - and - violate the users
agreements of those Internet providers.

Other than that, I like his analysis, and he's right about the packet
shaping ability of these little guys. We've already been putting packet
shaping routers (at $400 a pop) out at SoHo customers to help with their
VoIP. Unfortunately, that's only a partial solution. Another part is
having a VoIP gateway at the ISP used by the customer (in our area that
would be two gateways - one at TWTC and one at Bell). 

Both these measures help tremendously in delivering VoIP out to
broadband users, but those users are still at the mercy of their
neighbors random peak demands - which due to computer viral outbreaks
can come in simultaneous waves.  A recent virus did stress TWTC's
internal network (a few weeks ago) and it caused severe voice quality
issues with many of our SoHo customers. 

As a counter-point, our Direct Connect customers (those that get their
Internet access directly from us) had no voice problems at all - though
their data networks crawled to a slow snails pace till they rid
themselves of the viruses. Our managed network gives voice priority and
keeps the voice on its own private network which never touches the
Internet. So until the viruses learn to act like SIP packets, and can
ferret out the ip addresses of our Soft Switches, our voice traffic will
remain unimpaired by such problems.

It's unfortunate that they shipped the WRT54G with an obvious bug -
<tongue firmly in cheek> maybe next time they'll use OpenBSD as the os
instead of linux </tfic>. Should be a pretty easy fix though - just add
a firewall rule to only allow direct port 80 and 443 connections from
the LAN interface.

Take care - Jon Carnes