Initial impressions of the Netgear WNDR3700

I recently upgraded my home network with a new router.  I have Linksys WRT54GS router, running a custom firmware called DD-WRT.  DD-WRT provides a lot of extra functionality that wasn’t available with the stock firmware.  It’s the closest thing to a free lunch that you can get, computer-wise.

I’ve had the WRT54GS for a couple of years and it was starting to show it’s age.  I needed to reboot it about once a week or so, or I would lose network connections.  It also predated the 802.11n protocol, and my iPad and one of my laptops support N.  I also wanted a router that supported gigabit speed LAN ports.  So I’ve been in the market for a while now.

Last year, Netgear released a few new N ready routers.  The WNR3700L was designed to be used with custom firmwares.  Netgear even created a website, MyOpenRouter, to support the enthusiasts.  It has a fast processor (480mfz), gigabit ports, and supported G & N on the 2.4ghz band.  I came this close to buying one.

Then I read up on the next size up router from Netgear, the WNDR3700.  This is a dual band router.  You can configure B/G/N on the 2.4ghz band, and A/N on the 5 ghz band. You can keep the N devices at the less crowded 5ghz, and leave the G devices at 2.4ghz,  It also has a faster (680mhz) processor.  This router was listed as a powerful router on the DD-WRT site.  So I spent the extra money and bought that one instead.

The first thing I learned was that I bought a WNDR3700v2, the 2nd generation model.  DD-WRT was not supported for this model.  It turns out that Netgear based their firmware on the OpenWRT project, so out of the box it came with nearly every feature that I wanted.  It had support for updating my DynDNS account, static IP addresses, IPv6, guest networks, a shared USB drive, DLNA, etc.

It doesn’t have everything that DD-WRT has.  It doesn’t have a VPN server.  With DD-WRT, you can run PPTP and OpenVPN servers.  I use PPTP for a few reasons.  The main one was to be able to get a secure connection to my home network so that I could open a remote desktop session to my home PC.  I could also use the VPN connection to access sites that would be normally blocked by the network that I was connected to.  The WiFi network at my local car dealer blocks all of the social networking sites.  When I’m waiting for my car, I would open a VPN connection so that I could check Facebook and Youtube.

Using a VPN also provides a level of security when you are on an unsecured WiFi network.  By encrypting your traffic, your are less likely to have someone capture your data.  The pptp protocol is not completely secure, OpenVPN has better security.  Apple, in it’s infinite wisdom, does not provide OpenVPN support on iOS.  I could open a PPTP VPN connection from my iPad, but there’s no way to get OpenVPN to work. Well, there is a 3rd party OpenVPN client for jailbroken devices, but I’m not going down that route.  At any rate, PPTP is still more secure than unencrypted traffic.

So the WNDR3700 was pretty close to being good enough with the OEM firmware.  Since the WRT54GS was running a PPTP server just fine, I decided to keep it around and use it just as an access point.  That’s part of the joy of DD-WRT, it’s vary easy to customize a router for special needs.  On the DD-WRT site, there are pretty clear instructions for turning a router into wireless access point.  This is all I needed to do:

1. Change the IP address of the old router.  Since the WRT54GS would be wired to the WNDR3700, they couldn’t have the same IP address.  I changed the WRT54GS from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.2.
2. Configured the DHCP server on WNDR3700 to use the range 192.168.1.5 to 192.168.1.254 for handing out IP addresses.  This would make sure that nothing else would get the 192.168.1.2 address.
3. On the WRT54GS, set the WAN type to disabled and disabled the DHCP and DNSmasq services.
4. Set the WAN port on the WRT54GS to be a LAN port.
5. Configured the WNDR3700 to forward the PPTP port, 1723, to the IP address now reserved to the WRT54GS.  Any request for a PPTP connection from the outside would now get redirected from the WNDR3700 to the WRT54GS.

After making those changes, I wired the routers together,  I opened a VPN connection to my office PC and RDP’ed into it.  From my office PC, I opened a VPN connection to my home network to verify that the PPTP server was accessible,  It worked the first time.  That’s rare for me, but I’ll take that for a dollar.

I’ve been using this router for a week and it has been rock solid.  There are a few quirks, the UPnP had some issues with Windows Home Server, but that was easy to work around. The wireless range is much better than what I had with the Linksys.  I probably would have been good with the single band WNR3700L, but I am happy with it’s dual band big brother.

Using uberOptions to extend the functionality of Logitech devices

A few weeks ago, I picked up some Logitech mice that were on sale as “dented box” items on the Logitech site.  They were new mice, but their boxes had some minor damage and they were half off.  I grabbed a VX Revolution and a MX Revolution.  The VX was for the family computer that the kids use, and the MX was for my home development machine.  The VX is a notebook model and it’s smaller size fits the kids hands quite nicely.

The MX Revolution was to replace my MX 700 mouse that I’ve had a few years. The 700 was one of the best mice I have ever used, but I had some issues with it.  First off, Logitech did not provide Vista drivers for it. While it worked just fine with Vista, it was only as a standard mouse and the extra buttons could not be used.  The other problem was that the rechargeable batteries had worn out to the point there they would only last for a few minutes.  I could easily find replacement batteries, but I missed the extra functionality of the 700.  Plus I wanted a mouse where the mouse wheel with the “tilt” support for left/right scrolling.

From time to time, Logitech runs “dented box” sales on various products.  If you have right coupon code, you can get a new product with a full warranty.  If you use the site techbargains.com, type “dented logitech” into the search box on the main page, you’ll get a list of the current dented box specials on the Logitech site, plus coupon codes for additional savings.

Both the VX and MX Revolution mice have a little button located just south of the scroll wheel.  By default, it’s mapped to a search function.  Select a word, press the button, and a new browser instance is launched with the selected word passed the search engine.  For some people that may be a cool feature, but I found it just maddening.  With the Logitech SetPoint software that comes with each mouse, you can reassign the mouse button functionality to other behavior.  On the VX, I was able to set the search button to be a middle click button.  I like being able to middle click a link on a web site and get that link opened in a new tab, leaving the existing web page right it I was reading it.

You would think that you could do the same thing with the MX Revolution as you could with the VX Revolution. Oddly enough, while you could assign the middle click function to many of the buttons on the MX, it was not an option for the search button.  I don’t know if that was by design or by error, but it was irritating.  Since the SetPoint configuration software is bundled with all of the current Logitech input devices, the button definitions are not hard coded into the application, but must be read from some set of configuration files.  If I could find where they are located, I should be able to copy the missing MX definitions from the VX settings.

I went on to Logitech’s support forums in search of tips for locating and editing the SetPoint files.  After doing some searching, I found references to something called uberOptions. Rich Owens put together a package called uberOptions, a new set of SetPoint configuration files that greatly expand the options that you can assign to the buttons.  He has modified the files for a large list of keyboards, mice, and trackballs.  The current list of devices plus the installer for uberOptions can be found at http://uberoptions.net/.  It installed and worked just fine with WIndows 7 64 bit.  After I installed it, his default setting for mouse had mapped the search button to the middle click function.  Well played Rich, well played indeed.

[Edited on 8/31/2009]
If Rich Owens’ main site is down, he has a mirror site.

[Edited on 9/8/2009]
Richard Owens sent in an updated link to his site, http://uberoptions.net/, this replaces http://www.mstarmetro.net/users/rlowens/.

Old School modeming

The always entertaining DadHacker has a great post on how he used to write code in the old days at 300 baud.   When he was in school, he had to submit course source code by punch card.  That’s a death by a thousand paper cuts.  To avoid having to use punch cards, he would dial in over the ancestor to the Internet and edit the code at 300 baud.   You should read his post to see all the steps he had to do.  It would have made Rube Goldberg proud.

He gets extra bonus points for using a terminal emulator that he wrote himself.  Double extra bonus points for writing it on a machine that didn’t have a UART chip.  UART chips are used to hand communications over a serial port.  The UART handles the timing and buffer requirement of sending bits over the wire.  Not having one, means you have to handle all of the ugly details yourself.  That means you can’t just write code that says “send this sequence of bits over there, at 300 baud”.  You had to write the code to control the timing of 300 baud and sends the bits at that rate and handle all of the flags and registers being set by the serial hardware.

I remember 300 baud.  At that speed (or lack of speed), you could watch the characters come in and fill the screen.  I had a Commodore 64 and my first modem was the Commodore 1650.  300 baud and pulse dialing, that was life online in 1985.  Over the years, I kept getting faster and faster modems.  I went from 300 baud to 1200 baud on the Commodore 64.  Stayed at 1200 on my Commodore 128.  I jumped to 2400 baud when I got my first Amiga.  I went from 2400 to 19,200 when I moved to the PC platform.  Then it moved to 33,600 and finally 56,200 before I jumped to broadband. 

I remember buying a serial port card for my 486sx just to get a 16550 UART to use instead of the cheesy 8250 UART that was on the motherboard.  The 8250 had a one byte buffer and you would start dropping characters at speeds higher than 9600 baud.  The 16550 had a 16 byte buffer. That doesn’t sound large, but it was enough to let you handle much higher baud rates.  The Commodore 64 didn’t even have a UART, it emulated one and the CPU had to do all of the processing.  That was good to only 2400 baud before it would fall apart,

Getting a faster modem was one of those devices where you saw a clear and immediate improvement.  I still have the last modem I bought back in the early 90’s.  It was a US Robotics V.Everything Courier modem, an external one.  A giant black slab, squatting on top my PC.  It had firmware that could be “flashed” to a new version.  I think I did it it about three or four times.  Each it got faster and more reliable.  I real man’s mode,  It ate through line noise and spat out clean bits.  Even though I have no need of it, I refuse to get rid of it.  It’s the oldest bit of functional computer equipment that I own.  My current home PC doesn’t even have a serial port, I would have to get some odd USB to Serial dohickey if I even wanted to use it.

Brian Peeks new book is already listed on Amazon

Brian Peek (probably the most well known member of our TVUG user group) has a book coming out, "10 Coding4Fun Projects with .NET for Programmers, Hobbyists, and Game Developers", and it's listed on Amazon for pre-orders.  Brian is probably best known for his managed code API for working with the Nintendo Wiimote.  You can get the current version of the code from it's CodePlex page.  His blog is worth reading if you want to control hardware devices with .NET.

Not too long ago Brian demonstrated his code at a TVUG meeting.  He used the Wiimote to control a radio controlled car.  It was pretty cool watching the car turn when he rotated the Wiimote.  You can download the code from his presentation from his blog at this page.  Other people have used his library to do some interesting things.  It sounds like this book would be a cool Christmas gift.

Time to get a new PC

My home PC died last Friday and I'm waiting for it's replacement to show up. I've had the machine for years and it's been running 24/7, something was bound to fail. The fan on the video card was starting to lock up and I'm pretty sure that the main hard drive is toast. It was a decent machine back in 2002, an Athlon XP 2000 with fast memory and drives.

The new box will be dual cores with lots of memory and RAID 5. I've lost 4 drives in the last year, I wont use another desktop without RAID. I looked at getting Dell, but I really didn't want to spend a lot of money. You can get cheap boxes from Dell, but not with what I wanted.

I like spec'ing out the components, you never know exactly what you will be getting from Dell. I've had good luck with custom boxes built by MWave. I basically picked out the components that I wanted and they assembled it and burned it in for me for a small fee. It's already been shipped, I should have it early next week

This is what I ordered:

• Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe: A decent motherboard with everything I need on it, including RAID. The onboard sound board isn't the best one, but it will do for my needs. I'll probably salvage the Audigy card out of the dead machine if I need a better sound card.
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Brisbane): Two cores and energy efficient. I never get the fastest CPU, I always bring down a few notches. The difference in speed will not be perceptable and I can spend the extra money on more memory, which will make the machine faster.
• 2 GB Ram: With Vista, 2 GB is the bare minimum. I'll probably bump it up later
• GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256D GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card: It's fast, it's cheap, and it's got a big honking heat pipe to cool the card without a fan. Not having a fan means a quieter PC and one less moving part to break.
• Maxtor 250GB SATA-300 drives: MWave had these drives fro $60, so I bought three of them for the RAID 5 array. With Maxtor's purchase by Seagate. it looks like these products were being discontinued.
• Lite-On LH-18A1P 18X DVD RW drive: I've had good luck with Lite-On drives before and it was a good price. It's not their fastest writer, but it will be fast enough for the media that I'll be using for it
• No floppy. The only time I have used a floppy in the last box was to flash the BIOS of the motherboard. If I can the new one to boot from a flash drive, I wont need the floppy. I may end up installing one as it's the typical way of installing RAID drivers when you do a Windows install. I could grab the floppy drive from thedead PC or get one that also has a memory card reader
• Antec Sonta II case: I'v always liked Antec cases and power supplies and the Sonata is the right case for me. It's big enough to make working in the case easy, and it's very quiet. The main fan is 120mm, instead of 80mm. It can run slower (less noise) and push out more air than the 80mm fans. Another nice feature is that the fans and the hard drives are mounted on rubber, that really cuts down on the vibration noise.
• Vista Home Premimum: I have mixed feelings about this one. I need more Vista hands on experience, but the horror stories are starting already. I could always install XP, if this OS is truly that awful, but I would prefer to work with Vista. This will also be my first experience with a "Home" labelled OS. I've been using XP Pro at home, but I rarely use the Pro functionality. I'm staying with the 32-bit version, even though the processor will support the 64-bit OS

Fortunately, the important files have been backed up. I put together a FreeNAS box a couple of months ago and I've been backing up source code and documents to it. The next time you buy a new PC, take the old one and toss FreeNAS on it. It just works.

Tech Tags: Antec New+PC AMD Geforce ASUS FreeNAS

Aero Glass on my ancient GX400

My latest video card arrived this morning and installing it was a much better experience than what I went through with the Diamond card. I have a Dell Optiplex GX400 that is about 5 years old. I installed Vista Ultimate on it so I could test apps under Aero Glass. That had ruled out VMWare. The GX400 has 5 empty PCI slots and an AGP4x slot. Since most new cards are PCI-Express or AGP8x, I tried a PCI based card. That experiment failed and I ordered a BFG GeForce 7600GS OC. It claimed to work with just about any AGP slot.

When it came in, I removed the old card and plugged in the BFG card. I turned on the PC and booted Vista up. Vista recognized the card and installed the GeForce 7600 drivers that apparently come with Vista and requested a reboot.

After the reboot, I was in 640x480 hell, but after a little twiddling I had a decent resulution and refresh rate. I did have to refresh the Windows Experience Index. It was at 1.0, hel back because of the video card. The graphics rating went from 1.0 to 5.9, and Vista enabled the Aero Glass theme automatically. The overall number was 2.7, but the CPU was the weak point, memory and HD access were 4.1 and 5.3. Good enough for what I need to do.

The BFG card was cheap in cost ($150+), but it came with a decent feature set. It will drive two monitors and I didn't have to install any drivers. It has 512MB of it's own memory and fully supports DX9. Not bad, not bad at all.

I'm not impressed with Diamond Multimedia support

I have a older PC that I just installed Vista. I want to make sure that our apps place well under that OS and I don't want Vista as my primary OS just yet. Usually I do that kind of testing under VMWare, but you don't get the full experience of the OS when it's virtualized.

This PC is older, a Dell Optiplex GX400 and has a NVIDIA TNT2 video card. It's a perfectly OK card, but Microsoft and NVidia are not doing a Vista driver for that card. So Vista is running it with the Standard VGA Graphics Adapter driver. The SVGA driver is better than I thought it would be, but it's slow and is running at 60 hz. I'm not terribly concerned over the speed, but the flickering is driving me nuts.

I got the OK to get a new card, and that's when the fun began. To get Vista's Aero Glass theme, you need a decent video card that has DX9 support. The GX400 has an AGP 4X port and a bank of PCI slots. No one is making AGP 4X cards anymore, it's AGP 8X or PCI-Express these days. I looked up the specs on a BFG card that claimed to be AGP 8X/4X, so I fired off an emaill to them to see if their card would work with my ancient PC.

While I was waiting for a reply, I saw an article on The Inquirer about companies releasing Vista ready PCI cards. Diamond had released a PCI card based in ATI's Radeon 1300 chipset and it sounded like it would do the job. After a few days of no response from BFG, we ordered the Diamond card. Immediately placing the order, a reply came from BFG that said their card would work.

The Diamond card came in today and I tried installing it. I removed the Nvidia card from the AGP slot and put the Diamond card in a PCI slot. There are 5 PCI slots, all of them were available. The machine wouldn't recognize the card. I tried a number of things (telling the BIOS not to expect an AGP card, moving the Diamond card to another slot, putting both cards in. With both cards in, the machine would not recognize either card.

Either it's something flaky with the Diamond card, or more likely, it's Dell building a PC that only works with AGP cards. Past experience with Dell has led me to the conclusion that the card slots on a Dell motherboard are purely decorative. I decided to call Diamond technical sipport to rule out their card.

Almost immediately, I was connected to technical support person. I forgot his name, let's refer to him as "Stan". Stan was not very helpful. It was clear that he was reading from some sort of script and deviations from that script were verboten. I explained that the PC would not make it past POST when the Diamond card was installed. He asked what OS was installed. I said "Vista, but that's not important right now". He asked what driver was installed. I told him that Vista did not support the current card and was using the SVGA driver that comes with Vista.

He asked me to uninstall the SVGA driver. I asked why and he said that having the wrong driver was a common cause of video card problems. I declined to do so for the following reasons:

• The problem occurs at boot time, video drivers are not loaded until the OS loads. My machine was nowhere near that point.
• It's the standard VGA driver that comes with Vista. It's the driver that gets loaded when you uninstall a vendor video driver.
• I doubt that Vista would let you uninstall it in the first place.
• The Diamond card had to work with SVGA driver or you would be unable to install Diamond's driver.

Since I declined to uninstall the driver, Stan's demeanor and he basically said there was nothing more he would do. I thanked him for his time and hung up.

This card is being sent back and I doubt that I would ever buy another Diamond Multimedia product. The BFG card is on order, hopefully that will be a better experience.

Tech Tags: BGF NVidia DiamondMM AGP PCI Vista Aero+Glass Poor+Support