Help with broadband router on Cable

[rawky]

Hey all

I am pretty much a complete noob when it comes to networking. I'm pretty computer literate when it comes to anything else, but sit me in front of router settings and network protocol and im screwed! :-D

Anyhoo, 6 of us have just moved into a house and subscribed to Telewest 10Meg broadband. We're using the install that was in from the previous tennants, its a bit messy but works of a fashion. The cable modem runs into a "safecom SBRU-10100 4-Port Cable/DSL Broadband Router" which in turn runs into a Netgear FS108 switching box. I've been learning my way round the settings and have got the internet itself working using mac address cloning and have also found the UPnP settings and turned them on so i can use BitTorrent (Azureus). However even when Bit Torrent isnt running we're experiencing MAJOR slowdown when using firefox or internet explorer. Web pages are on average taking 20-40 seconds to load and on 10 meg this shouldnt be the case. We have no idea why this could be, if anyone could help us we will be majorly grateful !

(well we're not guna buy you flowers or anything but you'll have a warm fuzzy feeling inside )


Much thanks

Martin

[Gerschwin]

I guess to start you could check your line speed - http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp

May be a DNS issue possibly - try a trace route to a few sites and also IPs

Try rebooting the Safecom box and also removing the Netgear switch from the equation

[rawky]

Originally Posted by Gerschwin

I guess to start you could check your line speed -

May be a DNS issue possibly - try a trace route to a few sites and also IPs

Try rebooting the Safecom box and also removing the Netgear switch from the equation

Tried rebooting the box and removing the switch. No dice, how would i perform the other tests>?

M


Did the ADSL speed test and it told me my speed was 8.8 Mbps. Even if this is so its still not downloading aty that speed.

[Mutley]

So, how many seperate IP devices (PCs etc) do you have attached to the internet? If it is only four, I'd suggest you connect them directly to the router - it has four ports from your description. I'd certainly start from that point, before attached devices like switches. Also, make sure you start with default settings on your router. See what happens as your add more computers. It could be a problem with the configuration on one of the PCs - as they are all set up to use DHCP to configure their network interfaces, or do any have static IP address assigned?

Hope that helps a bit.

[rawky]

Originally Posted by Mutley

So, how many seperate IP devices (PCs etc) do you have attached to the internet? If it is only four, I'd suggest you connect them directly to the router - it has four ports from your description. I'd certainly start from that point, before attached devices like switches. Also, make sure you start with default settings on your router. See what happens as your add more computers. It could be a problem with the configuration on one of the PCs - as they are all set up to use DHCP to configure their network interfaces, or do any have static IP address assigned?

Hope that helps a bit.

hi mate

cheers for that its all stuff i can understand . We have 6 ip devices connecting to the switch, currently we have the router empty except for the WAN port and the cable connecting it to the switch. I'm going to try resetting the router to its base settings. I have assigned myself a static IP i think, other pc's havent, my friend tried to do that yesterday but didnt have much luck, Would you suggest setting up all static IP's or leaving them all DHCP?

Thanks Again

M

[tfboy]

I have a linksys router at home, so can't offer any help with the actual web interface you get, but I have never used DHCP because although it's plug and play, when you do get issues, it can be tricky to resolve because you're relying on what the router is dishing out

I would have the router's LAN ip address set to something like 192.168.0.254
then you can start setting all your PCs to use static IP, starting at 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, etc. The subnet mask on all PCs will be 255.255.255.0 and the gateway and DNS will both be the same: 192.168.0.254 (the router).

Like others said, I'd remove the second switch for the time whilst you diagnose the problem, and then add them back in later. Just start off with a single connection (your PC) into the router, set up static IP addressing and take it from there.

I've often had DNS problems (NTL grrr!) but never speed issues. When you say web pages take ages to load, does it take ages to get anything, but as soon as the page starts to load, it loads up really quickly? If so, then that's typical of a DNS problem: it takes ages to find the site, but once it's found it, you get it loading up at 10MB speed

edit: have a look at this: http://safecom.cn/code/product/net/SBRU-10100/qig/

P.S Sorry, re-reading your post, I'm a bit confused. I'm trying to understand your physical connection. Do you have an NTL / Telewest cable modem (coax cable in, ethernet cable out into the safecom router) or does your router replace / plug straight into the fat coax cable?

[rawky]

Originally Posted by tfboy

I have a linksys router at home, so can't offer any help with the actual web interface you get, but I have never used DHCP because although it's plug and play, when you do get issues, it can be tricky to resolve because you're relying on what the router is dishing out

I would have the router's LAN ip address set to something like 192.168.0.254
then you can start setting all your PCs to use static IP, starting at 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, etc. The subnet mask on all PCs will be 255.255.255.0 and the gateway and DNS will both be the same: 192.168.0.254 (the router).

Like others said, I'd remove the second switch for the time whilst you diagnose the problem, and then add them back in later. Just start off with a single connection (your PC) into the router, set up static IP addressing and take it from there.

I've often had DNS problems (NTL grrr!) but never speed issues. When you say web pages take ages to load, does it take ages to get anything, but as soon as the page starts to load, it loads up really quickly? If so, then that's typical of a DNS problem: it takes ages to find the site, but once it's found it, you get it loading up at 10MB speed



P.S Sorry, re-reading your post, I'm a bit confused. I'm trying to understand your physical connection. Do you have an NTL / Telewest cable modem (coax cable in, ethernet cable out into the safecom router) or does your router replace / plug straight into the fat coax cable?

Yeah its a telewest cable modem going into the safecom router via ethernet. What is DNS in really lay-mans terms?
M

[Mutley]

DNS is the Domain Name Service. Its a system that allows the resolution of domain names (e.g. www.hexus.net) to IP addresses, so http requests (and others) can be routed correctly. ISPs provide their own DNS servers, which do a certain amount of cacheing - that is saving frequently requested lookups, to avoid trecks out of the ISPs network. Most ISPs have poorly configured services such as DNS, and users often experience problems as a result. There are free public DNS services "out there" but some ISPs (such as NTL) prevent you using them. One service definately worth checking out is OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.org)...by the way, Telewest do allow you to use other DNS services. Anyway, I don't think thats your problem!

Personally I don't have any problem with my PCs using DHCP from my router, you just need to make sure your router is configured to provide DHCP services - it may not be. I think you should definately reset your router to its default settings, and start from first principles. Make sure it is configured correctly to talk to the telewest service....
Basically your router has two sides to it - a WAN side and LAN side. The WAN side (Wide Area Network), presents the external face of your network to the world (through your cable modem). Its what Telewest will see. The LAN side faces "inward" to your Local Area Network.
The WAN side needs to be configured as a DHCP client, so that Telewest can provide you with your single IP address, and information such as default router and name servers. I doubt you should need to have your router ghost the MAC address of one of your PCs - I used to have to do that, but not anymore.
On the LAN side, make sure your router is set up to act as a DHCP Server, so that it can hand out the same information it has received from Telewest. And you must make sure that it set up to handle NAT (Network Address Translation). This is the mechanism by which multiple PCs on your LAN can use the internet via the one IP address that Telewest gives you. This should be on by default, in fact you may not even have an option to turn it on or off. If thats the case, it will be on.

If you do reset your router to default settings, make sure you remember to change the password, and check other security settings! The built-in firewall should be fine.

Hope that helps a bit more!
Mut.

[b0redom]

DNS in layman's terms is what maps human readable (www.hexus.net) to machine addressable (84.12.5.240)

If you have DNS issues (ie DNS becomes slow or stops working) your PC will be unable to work out what the machine addressable location is and IE/Firefox will sit and spin for a bit before timing out.

I would recommend that you force all your computers to static IP addresses - note you're also going to have to set DNS to point at your router, otherwise you won't see any webpages at all.

It's probably also worth doing the following:

ping www.hexus.net
tracert www.hexus.net

from a couple of PCs

and posting the results back. That we can start to eliminate parts of the network infrastructure.

Also turn off BitTorrent temporarily until you've got it sorted. That will cripple your network if you have a cheap router as it has to deal with loads of connections.

Finally, what do you mean by 6 IP devices. Just PCs or something else? It may be that there's something eating your bandwidth...

Tom

[b0redom]

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[Dav0s]

i can tell u from experience that your router doesnt like multiple conections at once, torrenting on that router is a right pain, ive never managed any really decent speeds.