Tong Family

I’ve been meaning to put a real router into the house for a while. You really want something that can handle 2M packets/second (why, I don’t know) but more importantly something that is reliable. Previously I had used the Linksys WRT-54G (which dates me!) and I found that under heavy load it would crash and hang. Even with DD-WRT installed.
For a long time i’ve been recommending Airport Extremes because they just seem to work, but now that Apple is out of the business, it seems like a good time to reconsider. There are two big features:

1. Reliability. Making sure there is enough memory in the thing to keep it from crashing
2. Failover. Having two internet connection particularly in an office is a good idea. So I have both the Edgerouter Lite and also the Linksys small business version.

Here’s a list of what I found:

1. Make sure to plug the computer into the ETH0 port as that is the configuration one. The other ones will not respond to 192.168.1.1.
2. Edgerouter is more of an enterprise thing but the Quickstart is pretty clear, so first thing I discovered it that it came with version 1.2, so none of the guide are correct at the Ubiquiti site. I see that 1.9 is the current version
3. There is no place in the UI for the router to update the firmware that’s obvious but looking at it, you actually click on a tab at the *bottom* of the screen called system (what a strange place to put this) and then scroll all the way to the bottom and then you can upload a file. go to the ubiquiti site first and get the latest tar. it looks like it needs ssh commands to do this. Which is actually easier to understand. It does need a connection to the outside world to do this though, so kind of hard to configure. Once nice thing is they let you have two firmware versions, so if an update fails, you can recover.
4. Now I tried the load balancing wizard and the router seemed to just hang. You have to switch to ETH2 as the LAN port, but fortunately reset is easy. On the next try, I got the connection for a little bit and DHCP seemed to work but then I got the message could not load router configuration. The main issue seems to be that you have to wait a while for the configuration to take effect. You can’t just refresh the browser.
5. When this is finally setup, then there is a new error, the router works, but I get “cannot read router configuration” when browsing to the web ui. It looks like you have to close Safari at least and then you can see the Web UI.
6. Finally remember that user names are case sensitive, so the user name Rich is the not the same as rich