Snow Leopard, Time Capsule and Network Issues

For a few weeks now I have been seeing weird network behavior, but only at home and only on my Macs. Both Macs connect to a WRT150N wireless router running DD-WRT VPN firmware. As described in an earlier post (its early and I am too lazy to link) I have set up a fake TimeCapsule on an Ubuntu box sitting on my home network for net-based backups. Everything was working fine until a few weeks ago...

Suddenly when attempting to move large amounts of data across the network, such as when backing up, my network connection would drop. My connection to the network remained, but throughput went to zero on the local network. Connectivity was completely lost. Many times I couldn't even reconnect to the wireless network to reestablish connectivity. However, if I used a hard-wired connection I didn't see the same problem. Ultimately this corrupted my TimeCapsule data twice in 2 weeks.

After some frantic Googling I found somewhere which indicated that the problem may have to do with auto channel switching in 802.11N networks. So last night I configured my wireless network to choose a specific channel (8, FWIW) instead of allowing it to automatically choose the best channel. My network problems appear to have now been resolved, no more loss of connectivity over night or this morning. I created a local backup on a USB disk overnight and I am now recreating my online backup to the Ubuntu TimeCapsule as I write.

This seems to be an unacknowledged bug in most recent versions of MacOS Snow Leopard. Apple, I hope you're listening.

Linksys Wireless Routers & DD-WRT

For a while now I have been planning to flash my routers (Linksys WRT54G and WRT150N) with either Sveasoft or DD-WRT. Last week one of the routers appeared to have finally died on me, a reset wouldn't work to coax it back to life and get Steph's computer back online. So I had nothing to lose by flashing the WRT54G.

The process itself was surprisingly simple and yields a wealth of options that are not in the original firmware on the router. I was so impressed, that I flashed with WRT150N today, as well. Now I am going to change my home network a bit. The N router will now serve up wireless on one SSID with WPA2 encryption, this is for all of my computers and any other devices in my house, like the Wii, which communicate wirelessly. I have also set up a second SSID on the same device for a public wireless network that friends and family can use if they are in range. On this public network I am hoping to use QoS to limit the bandwidth that any stranger can suck down. I'm also using QoS to hopefully improve the quality of my Vonage VOIP traffic when I am using the network heavily. I've got some more reading to do to ensure everything is set up correctly, but in theory it should work. I'm also planning to implement ipchains rules to prevent anyone on the public network from gaining access to the web based management console, but no luck on that one yet.

As for the other router, it will be moved downstairs and plugged into the TiVo. It will serve as a client, or possibly a bridge, in order to handle data from my DirecTV DVR, so I can get some of the on demand content that I am currently missing out on.

I don't get a lot of time to be a geek anymore, so this was a pretty fun project for a few hours. Not a bad experience to learn some more about wireless networking, as well... All in all, I'd recommend the upgrade to DD-WRT for anyone who owns a compatible router. I hope I can still say that in a few months time... but nothing can be worse the the Linksys default firmware...