I know it’s not working. Oh dear lord, how I know that. BugMeNot will be back in commission soon, I swear. I’ll release all the details with the changes within this next week. Stay tuned, I’ll keep you posted. Pinky swear.
Happy New Year, by the way.
…and you use an alternative firmware, say, DD-WRT, and you tend to have to reset your modem and router a lot, then I have a possible fix for you. If you don’t know what the hell it is I’m talking about, then let me explain.
If you have the router in question:
…and the version number of it is 1-4, then you can upgrade the firmware in it to a 3rd-party one, which will allow you to configure a bunch of things that you were previously not able to. This is a cool thing, because you can fine-tune your setup, and add in other features like static DHCP leases. That means, for example, that you can always assign the same IP address to one of your laptops so you can keep your port forwarding options on it the same, but if you take your laptop down the road to Joe’s Wi_Fi spot, it will automatically grab it without you having to re-configure anything. It’s handy.
So, once you do it, because of the new options and wonderful toys, your once-stable connection might be dropping in and out a bit more than you would like. Some of the default settings on DD-WRT were not getting along with my modem at all. So much, in fact, that it made me question the modem’s general health, so I replaced it with a newer one. Same problems! So after scouring the internet for other people suffering from my connection’s problems, here’s a cluster of things I changed which resulted in a very solid configuration, and I have had zero dropped connections since, where they used to be one per every few hours.
µTorrent has a tip to help:
Special note for users with Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers, there are severe problems with them when running any P2P app (read for fix)
The default firmware for Linksys (and all replacement firmwares except for one) have a severe problem where they track old connections for FIVE days, which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.
Linksys has yet to address this issue, but there is a fix. If you use alternative firmware, you can put in a start-up script to fix this problem. DD-WRT and HyperWRT support custom start-up scripts. I am not responsible if you screw up your router, so you do this at your own risk. This page has instructions on recovering a bricked router.
nvram set rc_startup=" echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_ignore_bogus_error_responses echo '600 1800 120 60 120 120 10 60 30 120' > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_tcp_timeouts "
Then you’ll be back to the ~ # prompt. Type in
nvram commit reboot
Then the system will tell you The system is going down NOW !! Sending SIGTERM to all processes.That’s fine. Once it reboots, you can close putty and go to your web management console.
Go to your Management tab, and scroll down to IP Filter Settings. Change the Maximum Ports value to 4096 and the TCP and UDP to 300 each. Save settings.
Go to the Setup tab, and under Basic Setup, note the STP setting. If you have Comcast cable, disable this.
Under optional settings, the MTU size is set to auto. Change it to manual and enter 1392.
Go to the Wireless tab, and then select the subheader Adavnced Settings. Change the Xmit Power to 200 80.
Again, these are my settings and they work well for me. I will not take responsibility if you accidentally destroy your router trying to update it. Those that feel comfortable doing some thing like this, I urge you to try it out, it’s a noticeable increase in performance.
