Hardware DSL Sharing Difficulty

[cbman]

Well.. Not really difficulty.. but I picked up a

GVC GNET IP0005 Single Port DSL Router (with hardware firewall) for a good price (Real Cheap)

It works pretty good after I made a custom powersupply for it (The original was missing which is why it was so cheap) so I just rigged it to one of the molex (sp?) cables with a custom cable I made.

I also picked up a 5 port hub (Just 10 baseT nothing fancy)

This works so amazingly better than the crappy Enternet Software that the difference is like night and day.

Now It worked Great the first night I had it hooked up.

Then I tried Fiddling with it a bit and now my Bandwidth has dropped and Ping have skyrocketed.

I put everything back to default and it still sucks.

(First night was great with an average of 800/150 but now I can't seem to hit any higher than 400/50)

Is there anything I should check to see if I can get my connection back to normal... or would a windows reinstall be about the only way to clean the slate.

(On WIN98SE at the moment)

Thanks.

[agallag]

I assume you're on Sympatico HSE huh? Me too. My speed is good right now (just checked it at http://fastweb.sympatico.ca/test/ontario/en.html, got 855Kbits/s download), but I'm downtown Toronto. I use a netgear rt314 (router with 4 port switch). It's been amazingly reliable (both the router and the dsl service in general), without a single outage or anything for many months.

What did you "Fiddle" with? Are you sure it's back to defaults? I guess you've already tried resetting the router and your computer (power cycle). Do you have a second computer you can test the connection with? Preferrably one that has never had that crappy Access Manager (enternet) garbage on it. You could also try putting enternet back on and taking out the router to see if that's the problem.

In my humble (and not so valuable ) opinion, you should always reinstall your OS when making major changes, such as removing something like enternet software. It does some pretty intrusive changes to your network configuration, and I don't trust it to put it back to normal. At least remove everything from network configuration and uninstall your nic, then reinstall everything. That quite often fixes weird problems like this.

Keep us posted if you figure it out, or have any more questions. I hope this helped, at least a little.

[Gurm]

FWIW, Enternet's PPPoE implementation is the SINGLE WORST POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE. I mean, let's face it - all PPPoE sucks donkey schlong. But Enternet sucks WORSE than anything else.

So what's the BEST PPPoE software, you ask? Why RASPPPoE, of course. Or, upgrade to WinXP and RASPPPoE is built right into the OS (those pesky MS guys, licensing everything in sight!).

- Gurm

[cbman]

Well... I was fiddling with mainly all those fun little options under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\VxD\MSTCP

But I have double checked things and its back to windows default.

I never had enternet on this machine since getting the router as I did a clean install right after I bought it.

Maybe its just my ISP.

Oh and my speed dropped shortly after I lost line sync for two days as the Digital Card had become unseated at their end for my connection (As well as 5 other people)

Maybe its just a stupid cap they put up because they oversubscibed the area and are going to be putting in fibre in the new year... (Right now they are using 2 or 3 T1's and thats it)

[cbman]

I don't have Bell Sympatico HS.. (Well it is.. its just resold by our local privately owned phone company)

On that link you gave me I got

1MB - 484 KBits
2MB - 490 Kbits

[agallag]

Definitely sounds like a problem at their end. Unfortunately they usually don't do anything to fix it unless your speed drops below ~300Kb/s. Give them a call and explain the drop in speed (don't mention your fiddling, just mention the outage they had), and see if they'll take a look at it. Couldn't hurt.

If you've got the time, another reinstall couldn't hurt either, even if it probably won't help much...

[cbman]

That is what I was guessing...

It just annoys me that I had one day of optimal High speed Internet without any software crap and then this...

Oh well.. the hardware solution with the hardware firewall was worth it.