router : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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router

A box that goes between your cable modem (or ADSL modem) and your LAN. It usually also acts as a hub. Make sure you find a picture of the rear of the router to make sure it has enough connectors for all the workstations on your LAN. Some routers have only one LAN connector — designed to plug into a hub. Popular brands include NetGear, LinkSys and SMC. Routers offers some firewall protection. They may be configured to monitor browsing end emails and to prepare email reports. NAT Network Address Translation keeps hackers from discovering the internal IP addresses of your computers. To the outside world, the router makes your entire LAN looks like one computer doing all the web accesses. DHCP support in the router means you don’t manually have to manually assign IP numbers to each of your workstations. VPN is an advanced feature home users would not need. Configuring a router is quite easy. You use your browser to http://192.168.2.1:88 the internal IP of the router itself which acts as the gateway to all the computers on your LAN. You then talk to a tiny webserver living in the router. Amazingly the router is able to pass through high speed Internet connections with only about a 40 Mhz processor internally.

Most routers have autosensing ports, so it does not matter if you use pass-through or cross-over Ethernet cables. However, it makes the electronics more sensitive. Don’t connect or disconnect router cables with any power on at either end.

Brands

Unfortunately none of the brands offer throughput specifications.

D-LINK: have a configurator on their website to help you select the correct model. I own a 4-port DLINK DI-604 rev E3 which works much better than my old SMC. It gets much better throughput. I would have bought the 8-port model had I known I would be using machines with two Ethernet cards, or temporarily tying in guest machines.
Cisco/Linksys are widely available. PC Magazine rated it excellent. OpenWrt open source software is available to improve the firmware of some models.
Netgear is very easy to configure.
I owned a SMC Barricade router 7004ABR, part 750.5756. SMC documentation is more technical. The SMC manual gave the wrong url to address the router software. You need 192.168.0.1:88 It took a 40 minute wait for technical support to iron out the problem. The firmware upgrade left out the step of unzipping. Further the SMC router slows downloads to about 1/10th the speed without it. Further, even when I configured the router to pass through packets on a custom port for Zaep, it refused to do so though it claimed to. It tended to freeze up frequently, and also it often lost its ability to provide DNS. I since got rid of it.

You can now get routers that combine in one box: a DSL modem, a router, a firewall, and a wireless router. Make sure you get a newer G model wireless router. It can handle both the new high speed G devices and the older slower B devices. There are even higher speed I and N models which are not yet standard. Make sure they also support B and G as a fallback.

Ethernet
firewall
hub
NAT
NAT cracker: autoconfigure a NAT student project
switch
wireless LAN

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