Category Archives: Tech

Belkin Pre-N Router Review – Part 2

Well, I have to admit at least I’m getting replies from Belkin, but I’m not really getting anywhere.

As a précis, it seems that the router cannot support full sized Ethernet MTUs (1500) in 802.11b mode. 802.11n seems to work fine with standard MTU sizes – I haven’t yet tried the 802.11g mode.

If anyone can decipher the latest reply, a small prize will be yours – or rather, if you can tell me that they’re not talking absolute rubbish:

Alex, the MTU is nothing but the Maximum Transmission unit which is used for the rate of data transfer. Usually most of the ISP’s or the programs use the MTU as 1400 by default. If a particular pc has issue in transferring files or connecting to some websites, this might be the issue with the MTU settings on the router/computer, since there is no proper data transfer.

In your issue, the Pre N card works fine even without changing the MTU size (before changing the MTU). So the issue is only with the non-Belkin wireless cards which are running at 11 mbps speed. May be this wireless card is not able to transfer the files when MTU is set to 1500 but at the same time the pre N card works at 1500. So the MTU depends upon the computer. Some computers work at 1400 and the other at 1500 and third may be at 1100.

Apparently, they’re passing it onto their research team to investigate, but I don’t hold out much hope (although I said that about getting any sort of reply). You will, of course, be the first to know when I do.

Belkin Pre-N Router Review – Part 1b

A swift update to this problem of any form of uploading from wireless clients of the Belkin Pre-N router / wireless access point.

In summary:

  • Uploading via any protocol – HTTP, SMB, FTP etc. with a content or file size greater than 1kB hangs.
  • This is to any host, whether that be directly connected to the WAN/LAN side of the router or elsewhere on the internet.
  • Using IPSEC or PPTP VPNs do not help.

I have reported this issue to Belkin, but as yet have had no reply.  A swift Google reveals others with similar issues.

The strange behaviour with file sizes >1kB lead me to think it might be an MTU problem. Anyway, on my two problematic laptops, I used the Dr. TCP program to set the MTU to 1100 for the wireless NICs and that’s sorted it.

Well, it’s a workaround – I don’t consider the issue resolved fully until Belkin publish some working firmware that’s able to cope with the proper MTU of 1500. After all, that’s the ethernet standard.

For now, avoid Belkin router and wireless products until this issue is sorted.

Windows Vista – world’s most rediculous OS name

Windows Longhorn has been in development for, well, a while. Things are now starting to progress, but only at the expense of dropping all the good bits out of it like WinFS.

On top of that, they’ve decided to reveal its launch name today – Windows Vista.

Dreadful. It’s supposed to convery "clarity". I think I’ll just call it "WinVi" or something. And here’s the logo look:
windowsvista.png

The release schedule has also been published, but I wouldn’t pin my hopes on in too much:

  • Beta 1: 7/27/05 (including a limited public beta August 3rd)
  • Beta 2: 11/16/05
  • Release Candidate 0: 3/17/06
  • Release to Manufacturing: 6/28/06
  • Futuristic Taps

    tempsensitiveledfixtures.jpg

    As well as having a crazy chute style system instead of your normal tap tube, these taps from Hansa glow somewhere between red and blue depending on the temperature. No more burnt handies then…

    Belkin Pre-N Router Review – Part 1

    belkin-pre-n-ap.png

    This is the first part of my review of the Belkin Pre-N Wireless Router.

    It’s not going to go into too much detail – there are plenty of indepth technical reviews of this product floating around, this is going to be more of a real world example.

    First up, getting it up and running was very straightforward. Being an über geek, I dispensed with the automatic setup software and just decided to plug my laptop in and connect to the router’s web interface. As all I needed it to do was be a wireless access point (or bridge), I simply chose the option "access point only" and the Belkin disabled all the routing/NAT/firewall features automatically. I assigned it an IP address for the LAN address on my fixed network, then plugged it into my switch. Now it was just a matter of setting the SSID, WEP keys and MAC address filtering and I was away. Probably 10 minutes at most.

    One of my laptops refused point blank to see the network, but it’s been a bit dodgy of late anyway. Amazingly I told Windows XP to "repair" the wireless connection and it sprang into life! My Netgear MP101 music player was also a bit funny – in the end I did a factory reset on it and it too started working.

    The reason I dispensed with my old Buffalo APs was their shoddy range. The Belkin is absolutely awesome in this regard. Before, I would get no signal in my bedroom (furthest point away from the AP), or worse still, some signal that would drop out every minute. Now, I get at least 3 out of 5 bars’ strength and the full 11Mbps on my 802.11b wireless card. After I installed a Belkin Pre-N PC Card into my laptop, I got the full speed of 108Mbps and full strength in there – absolutely amazing!

    So, from the point of view of easy-of-setup and range it scores pretty highly. However, today (48 hours after installation) I’ve discovered a problem: when attempting to use the 802.11b cards you cannot upload any files via FTP or SMB. With the Belkin PC card in place, it works a charm. Having tried a plethora of different settings and laptops and firmwares, it seems to be an issue with the AP itself. I’ve contacted Belkin technical support in Europe, so fingers crossed they can tell me what the problem is.

    Hopefully good news for part 2 of the review then!

     

    Adsense

    Maybe or maybe you haven’t noticed the Google ads appearing on the right hand side and at the top of individual archive pages.

    It’s just an incentive for me to try and keep this thing updated, and perhaps make the odd cent or two. Go, click if you like. Or not.

    Sharepoint URLs

    Carrying on with the tech theme this week, a small salutary lesson on sharepoint URLs. I am currently the Sharepoint 2003 administrator for my work – it’s a small pilot project for around 200 people at present, but it could get bigger.

    Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff "they" don’t tell you when you’re setting it all up; one of those things involves the URLs of subareas that you create. A small example:

    •  Top level page
      • Sub area 1
      • Sub area 2
      • etc.

    Sharepoint will kindly create friendly URLs based upon these, so these will appear as:

    • http://sharepoint.mysite.com 
      • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea1
      • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea2
      • etc.

    Not so long ago, Sharepoint started putting ugly URLs like http://sharepoint.mysite.com/C1/subarea20 etc. in. It turns there’s a reason that Sharepoint adds in C1, C2, C3… to the URL after a certain amount of time.

    Each site can only have a certain number of WSS sites (each subarea is fundamentally one of these, only with fancy wrapping). To get around this, Sharepoint uses so called "bucket sites" – each of the C1, C2 parts is a bucket.

    After you create 20 sub areas (doesn’t matter in what hierarchy though), Sharepoint will then move onto the next bucket, C1 and so on.

    If you want to preserve your friendly URLs without the bucket site addition (for example, a top level hierarchy in a company), create an admin only accessible area with 20 (less any that you’re using) subareas to reserve the top level URLs. When you need to use them, delete one of the place holder area in your admin area and then immediately create your new "top level" area. Sharepoint will happily reuse any free URLs from the lowest available bucket.

    My lesson here – do this before you open Sharepoint to the world, there’s no going back!