Router reliability

[bitbucket]

I can report that I have Trip's configuration up and running. There were no problems, though I owe that to the product reviews and advice on this thread. The web interface for the ECB-350, though, does take some getting used to as others have suggested. The strangest bit, coming from more consumer-oriented all-in-one routers, was the idea that your changes don't get applied until you do the "save and reload" step after tweaking everything the way you want it.
I actually like this method better, because you don't have to wait for each change to be applied individually, but the interface is not very intuitive.
So far, everything is stable and fast. I'll make an update at six months and one year.

 

[Trip]

Yeah, the ECB GUI does leave a fair amount to be desired, but I find general operation to be largely rock-solid. I trust you'll find the same!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

All depends on your skill level and budget.

If your an average-Joe who wants all-in-once convenience in a choice that "just works" right out of the box, either the Archer C9, R7000 or AC8U. The best reviews on stability straight from the factory seem to go to the C9, ironically enough.

If you're skill level is higher, you could mess with 3rd-party firmware if any of the above don't behave (AdvancedTomato is my preference for stability, though not available for the C9). Otherwise, I'd just separate routing from wireless altogether. Better performance and control on all fronts. On the router choice, for something supported, either Peplink or a UTM device would be good bets. For value but no support (and I mean NO support), Ubiquiti or MikroTik. One setup I tend to do is a $50 EdgeRouter X combined with a $75 EnGenius ECB-350. Slaughters most consumer stuff often in performance and every time in reliability -- year+ uptimes usually. The way this stuff should function, IMHO.

Good answer....common, retail, "out of the box" residential grade stuff...all fairly equal. Some...barely better than others...but can generally lump them all together. That said...I run an old Cisco e3000 at home with Tomato firmware..rock solid.

I'll disagree about "NO support" for Ubiquiti though...depends where you get it from. They sell through VAR channels, so your first stop for support should be where you got it from. If you purchased from some unmarked white van in a dark back alley on Amazon..well...there's one of the many drawbacks from supporting huge online vendors like that. And for direct support..they do have very active forums with very helpful people. They aim their products at SMB...not residential. So yeah there are no "hand holding guides" and easy peezy install wizards. It's all pretty straightforward though.

But..an EdgeRouter would be my vote for a reliable router that can runs for years without reboot...especially considering it's less money than a typical residential budget. In our experience in dealing with pretty much all the routers out there....hard to beat the little Edge Routers for "bang for the buck"...fast little guys for the price. And an uptime of...longer than you'll care about...like in ...years.

To the OP...one way to increase stability and life expectancy of routers (and other network equipment)....put them on a battery backup unit. Power gets "groomed". Cheaper network hardware...little surges and dips in power, little brown outs...stuff you don't normally notice, puts a big damper on the life expectancy of less expensive network equipment (or any electronic equipment for that matter). I just notice that routers and switches put on little battery backup units...don't have nearly the problems that ones not on APC units have. Just a little 45 dollar 350 or 550 sized unit is all you need.

 

[Trip]

@YeOldeStonecat - Funny enough, I run a WNR3500Lv2 on AdvancedTomato (wifi off) for my soho box. Rock solid as well.

Re- your points about UBNT, I was probably a bit harsh. There's *some* support. And for any SMB buyer, the best scenario is a relationship with a great VAR, but on behalf of the average Joe, I think it needs to be impressed upon them what they're signing up for when they choose to bypass that VAR and go via whatever eTailer they prefer. You and I already know that, but unfortunately they often do not.

I definitely agree on the ER series overall. I've found their performance to be rock-solid, apart from some flash failures on the ERL's and PoE5's (that's why the little X seems promising -- as it has on-board flash like the -8 and -Pro, so likely no corruption issues).

Re- current and electrical, I've noticed how certain cheap adapters bundled with many of these electronics either come flaky as-new, or get that way without a whole lot of current disturbance, and sometimes will replace them with more solid ones I've bought as spares if I know the location is especially prone to power fluxes/outages. UPCs help even more in those scenarios, too.

 

[Cloud200]

Regarding support for home routers . . . other than "hold the reset pin in the back for 15 seconds" and "I'm sorry but you forgot to register your device within 30 days of purchase so your warranty is only 90 days" when was the last time you actually called up support for something other than a DOA router?

 

[sfx2000]

Regarding support for home routers . . . other than "hold the reset pin in the back for 15 seconds" and "I'm sorry but you forgot to register your device within 30 days of purchase so your warranty is only 90 days" when was the last time you actually called up support for something other than a DOA router?

Well - that's one of those cases where quality counts - HW/SW/Vendor relationship...

(nudge/wink - my Airport AC's are running just fine, 18-24 months on...)

 

[coxhaus]

I wish I could make 18 -24 months without the power being down again. The last couple of years we have had several major power outages. I guess my town is growing and we are seeing the results. I have an APC 1400 rack mount UPS which gives me about 1.5 hours of run time and it has been down at least twice maybe more, hard to remember. I do remember when I first put this UPS in. It ran for over 3 years and it was never down. Ended up replacing the batteries without the UPS ever being down. The batteries are around a $100 to replace. I hope to get back to the UPS never being down and just replacing batteries as they go bad.

sfx2000 I am envious of your good power fortune.

 

[Cloud200]

Well - that's one of those cases where quality counts - HW/SW/Vendor relationship...

(nudge/wink - my Airport AC's are running just fine, 18-24 months on...)

Lol, I'm serious though. What would you realistically call apple up for on those units and expect something other than the following scenarios:
A. hold down the reset button.
B. Unplug and plug it back in.
C. Update to the latest firmware.
D. Update your computer to the latest drivers.
E. Reset your modem.
F. The unit is faulty and;
Fa. The unit is under warranty and you will get an RMA.
Fb. The unit is under warranty and you can ship it to us, in 5-7 business days after we get it a refurbished unit will be shipped back.
Fc. The unit is no longer under warranty, can we sell you a new one?

 

[sfx2000]

Lol, I'm serious though. What would you realistically call apple up for on those units and expect something other than the following scenarios:
A. hold down the reset button.
B. Unplug and plug it back in.
C. Update to the latest firmware.
D. Update your computer to the latest drivers.
E. Reset your modem.
F. The unit is faulty and;
Fa. The unit is under warranty and you will get an RMA.
Fb. The unit is under warranty and you can ship it to us, in 5-7 business days after we get it a refurbished unit will be shipped back.
Fc. The unit is no longer under warranty, can we sell you a new one?

Airports just basically work... I respect your opinion, but many of the points you mention just basically are not valid..

Airport workflow..

1) Plug it in
2) Configure
3) Don't worry, just works...

We won't go down the ASUS path, as that argument won't look very good for clients or Router/AP's...

Just saying...

 

[sfx2000]

I suppose the minor nit with Airports would be IPv6 support - if provider doesn't directly support it and having to tunnel, it's been hit/miss there if the IPv4 address changes on the end-point...

I've tossed a lot of 11ac clients at the Airports - single AP and multiple AP's, and things just basically "just work" - and that's not just Apple clients - Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD/Android across multiple vendors - I know a lot of folks have issues with "Apple" but their AP's are pretty decent for most folks...

And I'm a systems engineer -- deep insight into 802.11/802.16 (Wimax) along with 2G/3G/4G-LTE - I don't worry much about my Airports

 

[Cloud200]

Even if you were correct that apple has a 100% success rate and they have never manufactured a single defective Airport AC ever thus never requiring any of the troubleshooting steps I stated . . .
I was not directly disparaging apple or any other manufacturer.
What my original point was is that where some argue that live phone support is a critical factor in buying a router/access point I highly disagree. The only time in the past 10 years I have needed support on a home unit was to get an RMA. All the troubleshooting steps I listed were what I can recant from years of being on the phone with support saying "yes I did that, that, that and that roughly an hour ago before I was put into the queue by the IVR system".

Imagine for a minute you have an Airport express that refuses to mount a printer. The response apple will give you is that you you can follow this KB https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203159 and if it still does not work you have an unsupported printer. That's from a support call we had with a client network. I'm not saying that the support was wrong in giving that response, rather there really isn't much they can do past the basics.

Edit;
I myself am HP ASE and CCIE certified, have installed multiple licensed P2P and P2Multipoint under contract for MANs and generally like Apple products for home . . . just not at work

 

[sfx2000]

Fair enough...

Getting back to the original thread - I think all OEM's could do a better job on the HW side... when we see devices failing a year into use, this is unacceptable, and SW stability is another concern - shouldn't have to get the firmware of the week just to keep it functional...

Router/AP's are appliances - they should be setup/configured, and basically left alone after that.. shouldn't have to reboot it once a week just to make it work.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

@YeOldeStonecat - Funny enough, I run a WNR3500Lv2 on AdvancedTomato (wifi off) for my soho box. Rock solid as well.

Re- your points about UBNT, I was probably a bit harsh. There's *some* support. And for any SMB buyer, the best scenario is a relationship with a great VAR, but on behalf of the average Joe, I think it needs to be impressed upon them what they're signing up for when they choose to bypass that VAR and go via whatever eTailer they prefer. You and I already know that, but unfortunately they often do not. .

Yup.
I think Ubiquiti has found, without intention, that they're being picked up occasionally for the residential market...because of their unusually low price point. They are in the "affordable" price point for residential setups...versus the price points of their competition in the SMB/Enterprise arena....where single APs cane run above 300 bucks each! And of course edge devices (routers for example)...are well above that.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Regarding support for home routers . . . other than "hold the reset pin in the back for 15 seconds" and "I'm sorry but you forgot to register your device within 30 days of purchase so your warranty is only 90 days" when was the last time you actually called up support for something other than a DOA router?

I think those of us that work in the industry every day for a living...know that you get calls for tons of things. Especially from the residential market. Tons of little things.

Members of this forum would not be a typical slice of residential users, people that join and participate in this forum tend to have a little more "network knowledge" than the typical residential consumer. So calls to Stinksys or Nutgear or DStink support probably aren't the norm around here. But get a broad sample of the "average residential" computer user...and you'd see.

 

[System Error Message]

this thread still going on. I remember the older days when establishments would use windows or linux servers as routers and firewalls as they were not only faster, power hungry and configurable but also because they dont freeze up and had ECC ram and RAID disks. If you want reliable, some inexpensive low profile computers/servers can be obtained that support ECC ram and will run for 24/7 but they do require quite a lot of skill to set up compared to your everyday consumer router. At least when such a server fails it is always the user's fault, not the manufacturer's.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

. At least when such a server fails it is always the user's fault, not the manufacturer's.

Never saw a server blow a power supply, motherboard, or RAID controller huh? Even with redundant hot swap power supplies...seen the backplane blow. Just this summer had a 1U server that ran a linux firewall blow a motherboard at a clients.

I prefer *nix firewalls...full UTMs...which is what most of our clients have. But it is hardware, it can fail.

...and I don't miss the days of Microsoft Proxy server..and its later iteration...ISA server. ISA was a beast!

 

[Cloud200]

Why would it be the user's fault that such a router would fail?
sure, you could go nuts . . .
Dual RAID controllers using RAID 1 for 4 SLC SSDs for primary and secondary OS in case of failover.
ECC RAM using mirroring.
Single CPU, no hyper-threading. A second CPU would just decrease reliability. (higher chance of 1 out of 2 cpus failing vs 1 alone)
Redundant NICs on 2 different daughter boards.

Just for the heck of it . . . duplicate the entire system in a load-balancing/redundancy configuration with VRRP.

I have a client with all that configured . . . and it still managed to fail when a dying NIC started sending garbage out on the WAN side of the network.

 

[System Error Message]

user's fault such as misconfiguring the server, using really bad hardware components like bad ram, etc. I mean even for x86 the hardware can fail such as if hit by lightning which has happened for ethernet ports. A lot of embedded routers now fail because of either a bad psu or bad firmware so with x86 you have the option of using a different OS, using a much better PSU and even good ram which is obviously more expensive than embedded but it eliminates some possible failures .

 

[Cloud200]

user's fault such as misconfiguring the server, using really bad hardware components like bad ram, etc. I mean even for x86 the hardware can fail such as if hit by lightning which has happened for ethernet ports. A lot of embedded routers now fail because of either a bad psu or bad firmware so with x86 you have the option of using a different OS, using a much better PSU and even good ram which is obviously more expensive than embedded but it eliminates some possible failures .

Yeah but you are also comparing $3-7000 worth of new hardware plus configuration to . . . what? A $20 best buy special? Even your beloved mikrotik CCR line with a specialist paid to configure it is less than the $3000 or so needed for all true server grade parts with fully redundant hardware.

 

[bitbucket]

Hello all.
I am here to report that, at six months, the EdgeRouter X plus EnGenius ECB-350 combo recommended by Trip has been rock solid. The only two reboots we've had have been due to power outages. Wireless is rock solid. Routing is fast. Range is adequate for single-story four-bedroom ranch house.