Adventures in Code: Upgrading my Home Network

For 2013, I've set out a goal for myself to upgrade several key components of my home network. I have a household with PCs, Macs, iPads, Kindles, and smartphones (which makes me feel like a mini IT admin). Making sure those devices operate optimally and efficiently is my goal. Also with newer technology being designed to use less energy I think this effort can lower my overall power consumption. My three initial items are:

Update wireless network
Update file server and backup strategy
Update home theater PC.

Once I get those items done I can reevaluate the next steps.

First up is my wireless network. I currently use an ASUS (RT-N16) running DD-WRT as my main router connected to a cable modem. While speeds on the wired connections with the gigabit switch have been great the wireless performance has just been ok. As I started researching this more I found out that just having G devices on the same network as N devices forces the router to lower speeds. First I tried to figure out which devices were using which protocols on the network but this proved to be surprisingly difficult. Basically the best I could find from googling was tools to scan the network for wireless devices (dd-wrt already has this list) and then go to each device and check its adapter and connection speed. Instead I set my router to N only and found out which devices could no longer connect. This helped me isolate the G devices to the Kindles and some older iPods (nothing that was critical).

I looked at upgrading to this beast the ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Router (what SmallNetBuilder calls the Dark Knight) but at close to $200 it was an expensive option. My plan if I got that was to put the N devices on 5GHz band and the G devices on the 2.4GHz. I seem to remember reading that this was possible but might lower the N a little bit. I don't have any AC devices yet but a little future proofing doesn't hurt.

Instead I decided to buy an old router off of eBay and just dedicate that for the G devices. I wanted something compatible with Tomato firmware as I've been interested in trying that out as an alternative to DD-WRT. There are number of newer builds of Tomato (eg Shibby or Toastman) but the original polarcloud one had the best documentation to get me started.

I was able to find a Linksys WRT54G for $20 shipped and quickly went to work getting it setup. I plugged my desktop directly into the router and was able to connect on 192.168.1.1 with the default username/password. Uploading the firmware went smoothly and soon I was running Tomato. Played around some of the settings and went to configure the router.

I made my only mistake when I configured both the router's IP address and its WAN address to be 192.168.1.2 (since the ASUS was still going to be the main router at 192.168.1.1). Connecting the Linksys WAN port to a port on the ASUS router didn't allow me to see the router. After a quick reset I set just the router's IP address to 192.168.1.2, skipped the WAN port and just connected it to one of the switched ports and all seemed good. I then configured the wireless on the Linksys with it's own SSID. I set each router to only serve a specific protocol and put them on channels far apart.

So far everything seems good and connection speeds are higher on the N devices. Fairly inexpensive fix to speed up things. The next project is not going to be as cheap.

These articles were a great in helping me figure out what I needed: