HoTWiReZ's DoMaiN

[HoTWiReZ]

I just ordered one of these, as my linksys BEFSR41 has frozen up for the LAST TIME!!! I will be receiving it probably in the next 4 days, so hopefully it will make it here by Friday. If it does, I'll be posting my own review of the router. First, some of the new features that it includes is an automatic QoS feature that is able to look at the type of packet, port, packet size, and the (I'm assuming) number of packets per second to determine the quality of service that the packet in question deserves, and then provides that quality accordingly. This being said, there are other routers that provide QoS, but I know of none that have this provided automatically. Supposedly, it has a processor fast enough to handle several thousand connections at once and I haven't been able to see anyone complaining that it freezes or drops packets, so it should work well for my situation. Thanks guys.

[kabes1980]

well it looks cool

[HoTWiReZ]

Thanks, man. I think that is a plus to a hopefully already great device.. Just to put it out there, it's 125.00 at newegg.com, and has a 25.00 mail in rebate through March 2nd (making it less expensive than the wired version). Unfortunately, I won't have mine before then, so this review won't help you any if you're wanting to save 25 bucks in the short run.

[HoTWiReZ]

Well, the good news is that it doesn't seem to freeze at all. The bad news is that it will drop packets and/or connections if you have an assload of connections trying to happen at once. For example, I tried to have 1500 connections through the router at once on the internet, and it immediately dropped xfire. (1400 with emule, and 20 with xfire, along with various other internet traffic.)

The router actually shows you how many connections are active through it, and what the ports/ip's are that are using it. This is great, as I don't have to use netstat to figure out what my computer is doing at any given time. Also, the router has a feature that allows you to log everything that it does, and to then send the log via email to any email address of your choice when the log is full or on a set schedule. (Time is updated over the internet automatically) It allows you to prioritize traffic, and break up large packets into smaller ones to improve the latency of the smaller packets (latency meaning responsiveness, roughly).

The one feature that I didn't like about this router was the mediocre implementation of a DHCP server. The linksys I was coming from had entries where you could place a WINS server address as well as 3 DNS entries. The D-Link only allows 2 DNS entries, and doesn't have the option for specifying a WINS server, so I had to move my DHCP services over to the server, instead of leaving it on the router like I usually do.

However, just the fact that this router has not crashed at all since I have started using it leads me to believe that my purchase was worthwhile. (The cable modem actually loses sync instead of the router freezing now)