By Crom, I hate technology sometimes.
We've been having a recurring problem here at the Marcone compound for well over a year now. Or should I say, two problems, kinda related.
It all started when popular pressure on the streets had mounted so much against my administration that I was forced to make concessions, and one of them was to build Carrie her own computer. Which I did, happily. Vox populi, vox dei, after all. The first issue came when it was time for her to get connected to teh intarweb (and that's not a typo, it's her preferred spelling as of late). It was time to build a small home network, and share the digital manna coming out of Comcast's heavenly pipe. At the time the simplest solution was to just run the appropiate length of Cat5, and get an el cheapo switch/router to get the sharing going.
That router turned out to be a Linksys BEFSR41. Router with 4-port switch. Peachy. It worked well for a while. Our network had no problems. However, as the router was compliant with the ISO Cheapass standard, it began to fail whenever it had to deal with a significant number of concurrent connections.
And by 'concurrent connections' I mean Bittorrent. Every time I fired a .torrent for my important and legal business stuff, the router crapped out. Quit. Gone and down for the count. I was forced to unplug the cable modem itself, let it chill, and plug it again. Not even resetting the router would bring it back. No sir. The whole connection had to be killed. This went on for a long time, and it got to be so bad that I was pretty much forced to find an alternate way of acquiring my important and very legal files.
At any rate, at some point after months of dealing with this, I got a new router. A D-Link DI-604, which apparently was marginally more respectable and didn't have many problems with Bittorrent. Or should I say, didn't have many problems with concurrent connections, because it still crapped out in the same way, except it didn't like UPnP. I tried everything with this one.
Limited concurrent connections to something ridiculously low, like 20 or so: Still crapped out
Disabled DHT in uTorrent to eliminate overhead: Still crapped out
Enabled packet encryption in case the ISP was doing packet shaping: Still crapped out
Disabled UPnP both in the client and in the router: Still crapped out
Le sigh. I think at this point I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and build up a cheap $100-$150 Linux box with two NICs just to act as a router. But I don't want to do that, damn it. Last thing I want is yet another box lying around, turned on all day.
Oh, I almost forgot the second problem. Our cable modem seems to be about to kick the bucket as well. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of loose connection or jack somewhere inside, because if you move it, or even if you pick it up to move it, all sync with the rest of the world goes to hell. Been telling the light of my life to call Comcast and see about having them check the cabling, or just giving us a new unit, but we're still here after two months of requests. We'll see. But that adds to the problem.
So, yeah. Bad. My only comfort is that at least all this is wired. I can't imagine the headaches I'd be having if I had to deal with all this plus all the common wireless issues people have. But that's grain from another sack.
