[ILUG] OT: Smarttelecom wireless modem

[Justin Mason]

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Niall O Broin writes:
> On 18 Mar 2005, at 11:37, Cian Cullinan wrote:
> > The site doesn't give any information except that it costs €140 which
> > seems steep, and a nice woman at the help desk could only tell me it
> > was a "HUAWEI" -whatever that is. Some sort of combined
> > modem/router/4-port switch jobby probably, but the www.huawei.com site
> > is horribly slow and I couldn't find anything useful.
> > Better off getting something standard from Linksys etc?
> 
> Absolutely. Linksys WRT54g (which runs Linux, so you can have fun 
> hacking it too, if that floats your boat) costs 75 EUR from I.T. Direct 
> in Dublin and works nicely. The Linksys has no modem but IIRC Smart 
> supplies a modem F.O.C. anyway.

I'd strongly recommend buying one of these and flashing it yourself.
I made the stupid mistake of buying a Netgear MR814, which is pretty
similar, but

  - DDOSed a host in Australia with NTP traffic continually due to a
    stupid amateur decision by the firmware developers. (this is now fixed
    apparently);
  - sends cryptic messages to my syslog which aren't mentioned anywhere on
    the net, or on their site;
  - hard hangs once every 1-2 days, requiring a full power cycle;
  - uses firmware developed by a Taiwanese firm with a content-free
    website and no other presence on the net;
  - has been unmaintained by NetGear for the last year, presumably because
    it's an old model and they can't make any $$$$ off of it by now.

Naturally, it's unflashable, so it's just an unreliable, antisocial piece
of cheap kit that's now unmaintained.

If I'd bought a Linksys, I could at least have something where I can fix
the bugs myself, or find decent tech support!  Lesson learned... buy open
source ;)

- --j.
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