AL needs some help please

[PaphosAL]

Understand what you're saying, Renny- and there's deffo no nasties on this system here, m8. Fact remains, I'm paying Vermin for a 10mbs BB service, but now only getting 5mbs. Compared to 7-8mbs before, with the old 256v2 modem, ffs...

Went into their site earlier, thinking about upgrading to the next level 30mbs BB service. Well, that was a no go, coz first it wanted £75 off my card for a Super Hub, without telling me what 30mbs would cost me, ffs!

So later on, I phoned India and explained that I already have a Super Hub, so how much extra each month to up it from 10 to 30, please? She replied- £3-50

Seemed an excellent deal to me, so I signed up. Get out clause confirmed, that I can revert to the original 10mbs deal if I want.

Existing 10mbs users on the little black 256v2 modem who fancy going for this sort of deal: please read this thread carefully throughout, coz first you have to skank 'em into issuing you a new Super Hub (not a 4 port Hub), for FREE and not for £75 on your next bill, LOL!

Cheers- AL

[renwich]

Al if you go to 192.168.100.1 and have a look at the connection section it will tell you your download speed.

don't forget the booze r us site may have a poor broadband connection so you might not get the speed your expecting

[PaphosAL]

AL's not quite out of the woods yet, Renny (and Mike)...

Service was upped to 30Mbps this morning, but I'm only getting a d/l speed of 5Mbps, and u/l speed of 2.92Mbps when connected via the ProSafe Router.

When I make a direct cat5 connection from the XP NIC to port 1 on the Super Hub and retest, I get these results:

Ping: 10ms | D/L: 30.30Mbps | U/L: 2.92Mbps - awesome!

Clearly, my router is acting as a bottleneck out to the WAN. Equally clearly, this is not a case of phoning VM tech support for help...

The ProSafe manual (which I attached in a post highe up) has this to say about the WAN connection:

Cable or DSL Modem requirement
=======================
The Cable Modem or DSL Modem must provide a standard 10Mbps
10BASE-T or a 100Mbps 100BASE-T Ethernet interface

Well, the Super Hub clearly has the 100Mbp port, else I wouldn't have achieved 30+Mbps on the direct connection test. I think I've found the culprit here...

When I look at the ProSafe web I/F > Router Status > Show Statistics - I see this little gem:

WAN: 10M/Half
LAN: 100M/Full

So that explains why the router is strangling WAN speed down to 5Mbps, doesn't it? Question is, how to configure the WAN port on the Router to 100M/Full? I see no settings for this anywhere. Have twice tried the router Setup Wizard to force it to find the Internet connection type, but it still resolutely insists it's only 10M/Half

ARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH

[mike557]

Well diagnosed AL

Has this problem always existed and just not known about due to you only having a 10Meg service?

Most 100Meg interfaces auto negotiate speed and half/full duplex, it looks like yours is failing.

Possible reason - cable?

Try plugging the prosafe wan into another device which also works at 100M using a different cable.
You could also try plugging the wan port into its own lan port - obviously this could cause looping but should help with fault diagnosis.

[PaphosAL]

Thanks Mike. I have this morning connected the WAN port on the router to the modem using the same cat5e patch cable as was used for the 30Mbps download speed test yesterday.

Then I did a hard reset on the router to return all settings to factory default. The Internet conection wizard started automatically, and it said it had detected the connection method correctly. But it still only detects the Super Hub as 10M/Half... Maybe this is why this s/h router only cost me £24 on fleaBay?

Anyway, I've submitted a help request to Netgear Tech Support, so we'll see what they have to say. But I'm becoming resigned to the fact that I have a flaky router. If this turns out to be the case, would it be worth my while trying your original idea:

1. Return the Super Hub to proper Router status, DHCP and Firewall both on, wireless off.

2. Connect the Super Hub to a spare LAN port on the router, so that the router becomes a Switch, DHCP off

Should this arrangement in theory give me full download speed, now that the suspected faulty WAN port is unused?

Cheers- AL

[mike557]

Yes AL - that should work.

All you are doing is using the prosafe as a switch instead of a router. I do this for my wifi, I have a wifi router in the loft but only use its switch and wifi, the wan port is not connected. The most important point is to disable dhcp on the router otherwise you will have problems. Also write down the IP address of this router so you know which address to use for config (if necessary later).

I assume you need the Prosafe because the Superhub does no have enough ports?

This config is a bit OTT and it may be better to get a cheap switch - cost about £7.50 which in the long term will probably use less power than the prosafe so work out cheaper and simpler.

[PaphosAL]

Cheers, Mike. I decided to experiment with this setup yesterday afternoon, rather than await Netgear's verdict.

Using DHCP on the Super Hub turned out to be a bad move. Just about every pc and box on my LAN was assigned a different IP to before. As I have a lot of daily automation in place, with the Ubuntu server dishing out orders to the boxes and so on, I had to change this and fast.

So I turned DHCP to off, and then tried to build a list of Reserved Addresses on the LAN for DHCP. The firmware is total crap, compared to doing the same job on the ProSafe. As you add a device, it wants a full reset, after which the network seems to go mad.

So all DHCP is now OFF, and all devices on the LAN are fixed static addresses. The first thing I wanted to test was the robustness of the Firewall. Although the test returned 100% True Stealth for all ports, the overall result was a FAIL, on account of the Super Hub accepting Pings, which is very naughty. But I found in the DMZ menu this item: 'Respond to Ping on WAN port' is enabled by default! VM should really know better...

After disabling Ping and running ShieldsUp! again, I now get the same result as I posted in post #10 - so as far as I'm concerned, there's nowt wrong with this Firewall. As for speed, I'm a really happy chappy:



I did run the latest TCPOptimizer utilty to optimize my XP TCP/IP settings for 32Mbps. Also tried it optimized for 50, but it degraded performance. Renny- try this optimizer on your setup, if you haven't already done so, m8.

Here's Netgear's response:

There are a few issues with using the FVS318 in your setup, the first of
which is that the FVS318 is only rated for a maximum LAN to WAN throughput of
11.5 Mbps. This means that you will only get 1/3 of your internet connection 
speed through this router.
 
Secondly, the FVS318 should connect at 100Mbps Full Duplex. I would advise
upgrading the firmware to the latest version and testing again. It is possible that
the reporting is not working properly and it is getting its full connection speed. 

Well, this means that the FVS318 now stays as a Switch forever, LOL! Although all 8 ports on the ProSafe are now used, as you say, I now have 3 easy-access spare ports available on the Super Hub.

And thanks once again for holding this old geezer's hand throughout his traumatic upgrade, LOL!

Cheers- AL