connections losses experienced with befsr41, traffic is the cause?

[nightowlpeter]

Up to a week ago for years my family was accessing internet over an old 120 MHz PC without a HD but with a Freesco floppy (a linux type gateway, emulating a Cisco router) in it and everything was okay, except for the noise the PC made and the space it took up in my room so I wanted to replace it with a better, nicer solution, I thought... and i bought a beautifull blue Linksys Router for 60 euro... Gosh!! I wish i hadn't!

Here is what happened: two weeks ago I got the linksys befsr41 ver 2.0 and installed the new firmware version 1.45.6. of June 24, 2003. From the moment i installed the Linksys router i am experiencing connection losses: e.g. ICQ , Internet explorer, MSN Messenger, Warcraft, Emule and Kazaa, they all suffer and everywhere in my home network.

I am using cable modem Terajon type TJ720 for the WAN connection, with an approx. 360 KBytes/s download and 48 KByte/s upload speed. This is what is called a multi-user Plus Subscription. (The cable company is Chello and offers also other subscriptions: Regular is 3 times slower and Basic even slower)

In the Linksys I get my IP adress automtically from the ISP at the WAN side and inside i have ranges of 10 times 100 ports (above port address 20.000) forwarded, 100 to each pc with a fixed IP (DHCP is set up for visitors only and is limited to the highest 50 numbers, 192.168.4.201 .. 192.168.4.250 in the network .. The whole port forwarding table is filled up. The host page of the linksys is changed to 192.168.4.1 and the pc's in the network are all having fixed ip's in the range 192.168.4.11 .. 192.168.4.21, fixed: needed, because of the port forwarding.

I am using only one port of the linksys: i point-replaced the freesco router first to just see what happens, later on i had plans to rewire the utp cables in my house... Connected to the linksys router there are two cascaded ethernet switches (8 ports), one on the first and one on the second floor of my house. On the third floor one of my sons uses a hub, there are two pc's connected there, working almost permenantly (24/7), he is at the very end of the switch/hub chain and he too is the largest user of the internet connection, but we are all suffering connection losses on all levels and at different times. Applications show a loss at different moments it seems (not synchronuous), but that is diffucult to say: messengertype applications tend to react individually different on connection losses. I am having 6 to 10 users spreaded over my network at the same time of who a few are using e-mule and kazaa downloaders regularly but with self inflicted up and download limits.

I am now wondering why did i ever bought this linksys!!
We noticed that when using emule and kazaa software more intense, the connection losses seem to occure much more frequently: in peaks it happens once every few minutes, all over the network, but without using the heavy traffic downloaders, losses were there maybe once in an hour.

This raises the question: does the amount of traffic makes sense to someone and what is wrong in this router? Is there a limit inside the router to the amount of internet sockets or connections it can handle? Nothing is noticed in the specs, well, except that the linksys should be capable of handling 254 users... i am having only 6 persons here and a maybe with visitors included i will reach 10 and i am not getting a fluently working network anymore! I am getting mad here!!

Plz Help me! We are getting more and more frustrated by this linksys router!!

 

[bcastner]

Return the router. Your requirements cannot be me with this router. It was never built to forward 1,000 ports, and 6-10 internet gamers and P2P filesharers under eMule and Kazaa through a single routed port will easily overwhelm the store and forward table RAM storage of the router, particularly as your upload bandwidth is so small.

I do not no of a consumer or SOHO class router that you could purchase that is capable of this traffic. It would ease things considerably if your cable plant would follow Fast Ethernet rules and not have 5 hops.

 

[EdPorts]

Well...

That's a good point on the storage capability of the router.

I would think, however, that a netgear 8 port router would work just fine (as they're a little bit more robust).

Regardless of all of that... I'd make sure that the connection problem is from the router first, and not all of the uplinked hubs.

As a cable installer... I have seen offices with 50 employees using a linksys router, uplinked into a couple of 24 port switches... and the provisioning for their modem was only 1.5 down, and 128k up.

Granted, switches provide much better performance... which leads me back to my point

 

[bcastner]

I have seen single users saturate 256 kbs upload bandwidth with a single instance of eDonkey/eMule.

Part is the sheer volume of traffic, part is the number of connections that are supported. It is not unusual to see an eDonkey/eMule user with over 1000 active connections. The final part is that many P2P apps rely heavily on UDP traffic and in a single instance can generate for the router 8 or more packets per second. The default for eMule is 40 packets per five seconds.