No it's even worse than that. The switch gets overloaded with a single browser session making multiple connections. Eg http://switch/main_page in turn loads up a heap of small images, css, java script, frames, etc, and the browser tries to load them all concurrently for performance reasons but the switch just starts refusing (connection reset) subsequent connections once it is already handling a few, so it just doesn't work. I'm the only one who logs into the switch. James

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 07:25:14AM +0000, James Harper wrote: this is why i prefer a fairly decent(*) desktop computer or laptop instead of an openwrt style router. they have anywhere from reasonable to excellent CPU capability, lots of storage space (relative to a linksys/netgear/*wrt*/etc anyway), lots of RAM. desktop (or mini-itx) machines even have PCI or PCI-e expansion slots. i was routinely building internet gateway boxes running linux with a dns server (bind8 at the time), squid, apache, sendmail and lots more that served entire schools with hundreds of students in the mid 90s...on 486 boxes with 16-64MB of RAM. they were more than adequate for the job - it annoys the hell out of me that the openwrt boxes can't even match that. (*) by fairly decent, i mean something equivalent to or better than a mid-1990s PC. you probably couldn't find something so primitive these days, and why bother when it's easy to find early-to-mid 2000s era PCs (i.e. up to 10 years newer than that) being given away for free. even something like an old celeron CPU eeepc is pretty good for the job, except for the shortage of ethernet and expansion ports....but the ethernet shortage is easily solved by a cheap gigabit switch (and/or USB NICs) and the lack of expansion ports is no worse than (or considerably better than) most openwrt compatible devices. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #392: It's union rules. There's nothing we can do about it. Sorry.

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 07:53:32PM +1000, Kevin wrote: sorry, my mistake. i assumed he was talking about one of the linksys WRT type devices. are there any alternative linux firmware replacements for it? netgear make a halfway decent 48 port switch, GS748TAU. IIRC they were about $900 each when i bought a bunch of them back in 2008 or so for work (as an alternative to ciscos that were closer to $12K each IIRC). a quick google search says they're about $600 now. there's probably some things a cisco could do that these couldn't but a) i didn't need them, and b) they weren't worth paying more than 12 times the price for. I bought 6 of them at the time, i think, for under $6000. i couldn't have bought even 1 of the ciscos for that amount, and buying 6 of them would have cost about $72K. they had (prob. still have) a crappy but functional web interface (it worked in linux w/ iceweasel, anyway) and no command line that i ever discovered but they never caused me any grief. craig ps: generally, i like cisco gear (real cisco, not linksys) - it's usually well made, solid, and reliable. the only problem is that it's absurdly overpriced for what it is and what you get. corporate pricing for people who don't dare buy anything else (unless it's some other nobody-ever-gets-fired-for-buying big name with similar absurd prices) in case they get blamed if something ever goes wrong. somehow i missed the brain-washing sessions at cisco-sponsored conferences where they take all the bright young network engineers, pump them full of booze and ego-multiplying bullshit sessions and cisco branding propaganda and turn them into True Believers incapable of any critical thought. they probably spotted me as a cynical advertising-resistant disruptive influence or something. -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #69: knot in cables caused data stream to become twisted and kinked

Quoting Craig Sanders (cas(a)taz.net.au): Don't think so. http://www.humans-enabled.com/2007/10/dont-use-linksys-srw2048-until-it.html However, one could either sell it or let it achieve its best and highest purpose as landfill. ;->

There is a commandline interface on the srw switches, but it's a bit convoluted to get to. But yes, the management software is awful, and being constrained to IE is a limitation I'd rather do without (especially as it doesn't actually work anyway). Firefox doesn't work, but I think that's nothing to do with concurrent connections. I use the 1810G series switches these days, although they don't support 802.1x which is a bit of a pain. James

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Craig Sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au> wrote: I had a netgear ADSL 2 modem/firewall appliance and it kept flaking out with the load my family was putting on it, I put it in to bridge mode and fed it to a Dell server running smoothwall with a few addons, 250GB hDD with 2 GB RAM and a 3.6GHz processor seem to handle it a lot better then the crap modem did A bit of overkill I suppose but it hasnt let me down yet -- Mark "Hiddensoul" Clohesy Mob Phone: (+61) 406 417 877 Email: hiddensoul(a)twistedsouls.com G-Talk: mark.clohesy(a)gmail.com - www.shed.twistedsouls.com - GNU/Linux.. Linux Counter #457297 "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code" "Linux is user friendly...its just selective about who its friends are" "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a V8 station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" "The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers"