Purely Whimsical

So, I have a small rant against Cisco today. I have one of their SOHO (home office) routers here at home. We use them at work, I have one here at home for testing purposes. Until this week, I’ve really liked it, as it’s the first router I’ve owned here at home that didn’t crap out after 6 months.

I’m not sure if I have really bad power (probably), or just put a higher load on the router than it’s designed for (most likely), or if I broadcast brain waves that eventually drive routers crazy (my personal favorite). For whatever reason, no router I own works more than 6 months. I guess I should clarify that - possibly the routers still work, but the wireless doesn’t. That’s what I care about.

The SOHO box has been much more robust, as it should be since it costs at least six times as much as the wireless access points you can buy at the store. It has worked wonderfully for me until I tried using my linux box with it.

Downloads were blazing along at 8KB/s speeds. To put that into perspective, dialup is 56KB/s… so I had approximately 1/4th of the speed I would experience through dialup! As much as I use the internet, you can imagine the consternation that it caused.

I did a fair amount of troubleshooting, and it finally became clear that the only box that experienced this was the linux box. Even more anger… HWSNBN left the room. After I calmed down, I did some troubleshooting. Connecting to the wired ports of the Cisco - still worse than dialup. So I connected bare to the internet (generally a bad thing).

Blazing fast speeds.

Cisco hates linux. I’m not entirely sure what the issue is, but it just doesn’t work. I finally ended up connecting up a cheapo Linksys - that worked GREAT! (What I find ironic here is that Cisco now owns Linksys.)

stupid cisco.