Firmware v1.9.2.7 CR5, updated: v1.9.2.7 CR5a [Oleg]

[Jean-Fabrice]

excellent all I love this community...

btw, tomilius, I need your help
Did you notice this thread : http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=2541 ?

JF

[Styno]

This is my last post on this subject

Actually, I couldn't find the answer specifically addressed after looking for a good few minutes.

- In the Wondershaper topic; exactly the same problem + the answer from Oleg: read post number 35 and 36.
- A topic about this problem + an answer: http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=2212
- Even Google gives the answer when searching for the error (3rd result): http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=...lassless&meta=

Pretty much proves my point

About the WIKI, yes that one is rather outdated. I created *kuch* *kuch* most of those articles in the 1.7.5.9 days when I myself was a noob too. I can't find the time and spirit to do an update round. Work, forum, GF and Webtools require all my time. I was kinda hoping the community would pick it up as soon as a number of articles would be present, but not much is happening there...

[tomilius]

Pretty much proves my point

Oh. Yeah. It was early when I posted that... or at least it was when I read that post. Kind of pathetic. The information he was looking for was there, though there was no direct, thorough guide on getting wondershaper going (if you need one, do you have any business using it anyway?), and that's what I was looking for and couldn't find. Hehe. Sorry. I get obsessive.

[guch79]

I have the same problem as tomekk.

only i have a Cabel dhcp connection.

Since i upgraded to cr5a, my wan dies.
There is no log of it in the syslog.

Is that also in the next firmware?? or do u need more info to help me out.

[Tomekk]

Well like we said in this topic for my case the solutions are:

- For WAN problem when diferents types of wireless cards connect, desactivate the WMM.

- For FTP problem you will need to wait for the next release of oleg's firmware.

All others firmware freatures are working very well..

[Pup]

Hi guys!!!

I've bought WL-500g recently to connect me and neighbours to Internet. I've got quite good wifi connection with public IP address. The network consists of:

- Asus WL-500g connected to Internet (ethernet WAN)
- Alfa AP set to WDS with Asus
- 3 Ovislink client devices connected to Alfa AP
- 2 my laptops connected to Asus or Alfa

I started with latest official 1.9.4.0 Beta, everybody was dancing and singing. But only until neigbour's son started with huge downloads, using Bittorent (or how's the thing called). When running that, my speed is like 10-20 kbits and ping about 3 seconds!!! The line is 512/128 kbit down/up, with 15-20 ms ping on idle.

I say OK, no problem, there's Bandwidth Management in WL-500g. I've limited his IP to 64 kbit download, it seemed to work. Next day he promised me to download only at night and I removed the limit. Obviously, he turned it on again few hours after the promise. I've set the limit again, but it didn't work any more. I was trying to set the limit again and again, the only thing I achieved was that I had to reset the Asus because it was no longer possible to connect to web interface.

After that I decided to try Oleg's 1.9.2.7 CR5a, set up Asus again and started to read about Wondershaper. I've got some Linux knowledge, but to be honest, using just web interface would be easier for me. I've tried to set the limit using web interface again and found it uses wshaper, but probably different way than described here - I've found no /usr/local/sbin/post-firewall. So, this is the story and a couple of dumb questions now:

- is it suitable for my purpose to use just web interface to set bandwidth limit???

- if I decide to set it up manually, could somebody advice me how (ports, priorities,...) and make a script for me???

- if doing it manually, there is probably some more sophisticated setting than just limit speed for one IP address. Any suggestion is welcome

[Styno]

- is it suitable for my purpose to use just web interface to set bandwidth limit???

I think the webinterface should do the trick. It limits the total bandwith to a certain pc (not just bittorrent, but HTTP, FTP, etc. too). Don't know why it stopped working...

- if I decide to set it up manually, could somebody advice me how (ports, priorities,...) and make a script for me???

- if doing it manually, there is probably some more sophisticated setting than just limit speed for one IP address. Any suggestion is welcome

That's a difficult one. The 'tc' (and Wondershaper) possibilities are virtually endless. Your problem can be solved in several ways, but the simplest way (which is implemented using the webinterface afaik) is to limit the bandwith to the neighbours son and to give everyone else the rest.

For the other options you could take a look at my script in the Wondershaper discussion thread. It is an example of an customized Wondershaper script.

[tomilius]

I think possibly a bigger question you should be asking is, "do I have the time and the energy to deal with a router and its problems every few days?" For me, this router has been no picnic, and having to mess with it every 2 days is no exaggeration at all... OK, well, most of that was just customized tweaking, but I haven't found the wireless interface to be stable worth anything nor the router to be very reliable overall--that's just me, many people I'm sure have gotten it stable and set up great for their purposes, but... *shrug.* It's something to consider. I'm mostly saying this as an "I told you so," really, in case it happens to you too.

Either way, welcome to the community, Pup. You may be here for a while. Muhahahahahaha! I've taken Styno's logical view on newbies (I'd be happy to explain everything, but I must restrain myself or everyone will feel they deserve equal explanation which I likely won't be willing to give a 3rd, 4th, or 5th time--I'm serious, not poking fun at anything here) so you'll have to do some looking around the forum and site to figure out the internal mechanisms of custom firmware and, perhaps, of linux too. I'll tell you one thing, since you mentioned it: post-firewall must be created. I guess I'll give you a link too, but just one: http://wl500g.dyndns.org/. Follow Styno's Wondershaper link as well, and you shouldn't have any trouble finding the Getting Started section, which I've restrained myself from linking... oh, no I haven't. Now that's all. In a perfect world you'd have found and used those already, and possibly even solved your problem.

[Pup]

Styno & Tomilius,

thank you for quick response, guys.

Just to explain my approach. You hit the nail on the head, Tomilius. I really don't have time to become WL-500 and Linux expert. First I was just trying to work out my trouble, finding the best value for money (time, effort,...) solution, after I realized that the easy web interface setting didn't work. I understand also your approach and you might be surprised that I had read all the things you mention. I really know that post-firewall must be created and I would probably have no problem to follow step by step instructions in your post 16336 (thank you for it!!!). I just didn't find any suitable-for-dumbs-like-I-am explanation how to build the script - all the commands and their parameters. After reading all that stuff my feeling is there's a lot of useful things I can get, but it will take a lot of time to make them work, for a dumb like me. My idea was to ask somebody here to give me some template script I can just put some values (port numbers, kilobits,...) in, test and use.

Well, now I hope Styno is right and the easy way will work, to solve the trouble. Then I will see if I somebody gives me a hand or I will have time and energy to study and test all the stuff. I understand there are bunches of possibilities how to improve connection behavior, prioritizing response time sensitive applications. I like idea to protect the network funcionality against people like this "downloader".

[tomilius]

I just didn't find any suitable-for-dumbs-like-I-am explanation how to build the script - all the commands and their parameters.

...

I like idea to protect the network funcionality against people like this "downloader".

If you don't have the time/effort to exert on one method, another is to kick down the neighbor's door, open his BitTorrent client (you may have to get him a better one such as BitComet), and set an upload/download limit. There's another important thing. You have to limit the upload or you're screwed for the download too. That may WELL be the problem. Limit the upload to, say, 32k.

[Styno]

Tomillius, I can almost see you writing the stuff that you do, very illustrative

Pup, I', sorry, but writing a customized wshaper script will take me hours and when I send you that script you probably want something to be different so I can spend another hour or so. Then another guy steps in and say's: 'community, can you make me a script that does so and so, please?', by then I can spend all my spare time doing the hard work for others who don't have (or don't want to spend) time on it. Also we (I) don't get paid to do so, therefore I give you hits to the solution and you should figure it out by yourself. If you've studied the hints and have further question, you're welcome ofcourse.

Consider the WL-500g as a new hobby you just bought.

Note: As I'm not a native English speaker, I might seem rude or blunt but it's all meant in a positive way!

[Pup]

I've got the message, guys :-) It just took me some time to accept the fact I've bought a toy instead of tool.

I spent last night testing. Here are my findings.


Shaping set by web interface is definitely unusable. It shapes the bandwidth, but:

- Web interface to Asus is almost unserviceable from computers with limited bandwidth. You're constantly getting error messages in IE and you have good luck if you succeed just to remove the speed limit. This is the reason why I had to reset the unit last time.

- When down- or uploading on machine with limited bandwith, you have not very slow, but even no ping. You get just timeout messages, even if pinging only the router.


After that, the decision was very easy - set up post-firewall with wshape. I also tested and proved that running upload terribly degrades downloads. It was mentioned here regarding DSL, but it's the same for Wi-Fi WAN connection.

For the beginning, I decided to use very simple scenario - put bandit's IP in low priority:

/sbin/wshaper start $1 250 120 192.168.15.6

Since he's probably out for weekend I don't know results yet. But at least upload doesn't affect download and pings are very quick even if I have upload and download running together. Big difference!!!

Dark side is that I lost more than just 10% or so of the line speed, because my connection has a special behavior, designed for browsing and against downloading. Connection speed is doubled, but only for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds of full load it slows down back to the base limit. This feature in fact doubles the speed for browsing, but I must set the basic limit in wshaper to solve troubles with up- and downloading, which slow down the connection to the base limit.

[Styno]

You're coming along quite well I see. The problem with bandwith shaping is indeed the fact that you need to set the highest sustained bandwith instead of the maximum. And even then you need to keep some extra headroom.

What might be a solution is to use a dynamic distribution of the available bandwith. Below is an example of a class definition where a certain base bandwith is assured, but when needed AND available, it can borrow bandwith from other classes.

tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:30 htb rate (($UPLINK/10))kbit ceil $((9*$UPLINK/10))kbit burst 6k prio 2

[digimic]

Hello,
What is the diffence between the 1.9.2.7 CR5a version and the 1.9.2.7 version of the ASUS site?

What is the last stable version for the WL-500g?

thank you

[Pup]

You're coming along quite well I see. The problem with bandwith shaping is indeed the fact that you need to set the highest sustained bandwith instead of the maximum. And even then you need to keep some extra headroom.

What might be a solution is to use a dynamic distribution of the available bandwith. Below is an example of a class definition where a certain base bandwith is assured, but when needed AND available, it can borrow bandwith from other classes.

tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:30 htb rate (($UPLINK/10))kbit ceil $((9*$UPLINK/10))kbit burst 6k prio 2

Dynamic distribution sounds interestingly, but I have no idea how to use it for me. The "speed doubling" is especially useful for web browsing, but when somebody starts http download and I have higher limit for http than sustained line speed, I lose all the advantages of shaping, I believe.

BTW, another side effect of shaping showed up. Web interface to Asus is (almost) unusable from Internet now - no problem from LAN, big problem from WAN. Looks that web connection to Asus via shaped interface is a problem. Not only web management, also connection to camera doesn't work. Or better, it looks that ASP pages with Java script don't work, static (display.jpg on camera) picture works.

Speaking about camera, after connecting it router's CPU runs constantly on 80-90% load by rcamd. I'm very interested how stable it will be now.

Generally, my feeling about WL-500g is that it has a lot of features, but often not finished and tuned. Also, I'm in doubts how many of them you can use at time, with respect to router's HW resources.