Sometimes it’s the router
My Netgear FVS318 router has been with me for a heck of a long time. I believe I bought it just before we moved here to Santa Fe. And that’s six years ago.
In all those six years the router was running almost 24/7. I never had any real issues with it. In 2004 Netgear stopped supporting the device, because they switched over to a newer, faster design. Ending the support also means no more firmware upgrades.
In essence, my router stopped evolving in 2004. That’s not a bad thing if the device is rock solid and the world around you also stops evolving.
With the recent switch to CNSP, it became obvious that something was not working correctly. While still connected to Qwest’s DSL everything seemed to be fine. With the upgraded speed on the new line, I think the router’s age started to show. I saw weird traffic patterns from one Unix system and some odd behavior from one of my development systems. My VPN connection to work would also show strange slowdowns, with the following in the syslog (that’s the VPN concentrator in San Jose trying to talk to my VPN client):
Jun 19 13:32:47 netgear FVS318 Hacker Log[100982]:PROTO_TCP, SIP:192.150.13.xxx: 33599,
DIP:208.3.81.xxx: 52597, Establish TCP Abnormally
Jun 19 13:32:52 netgear FVS318 Hacker Log[100984]:PROTO_TCP, SIP:192.150.13.xxx: 46298,
DIP:208.3.81.xxx: 49226, Establish TCP Abnormally
Jun 19 13:32:58 netgear FVS318 Hacker Log[100986]:PROTO_TCP, SIP:192.150.13.xxx: 33758,
DIP:208.3.81.xxx: 26960, Establish TCP Abnormally
Jun 19 13:33:03 netgear FVS318 Hacker Log[100988]:PROTO_TCP, SIP:192.150.13.xxx: 50945,
DIP:208.3.81.xxx: 42286, Establish TCP Abnormally
One evening I did a quick experiment: I shutdown the FVS318 and replaced it by a dumb switch. No firewall, no packet inspection, no protection. Only one computer was connected to the home-network, because I did not want to expose all devices to the power of a raw stream of data. When I ran my tests again in the sans-FVS318 configuration I did not see anything weird going on and I saw much better throughput as well.
That was the nail in the router’s coffin. The same evening I ordered a replacement unit, again from Netgear. The new one (FVS338) arrived two days ago. Setup did not take longer than 5 mins and everything that failed before seems to be working now. Overall I’m more than happy with the purchase.
I know cable-guys, FIOS users, ADSL2 addicts will laugh about this, but do keep in mind that until recently I was stuck with a 1.2Mbps/700kbps DSL line, so this is a huge improvement for me (using Speakeasy’s Speed Test):
