New Router - Wireless Belkin Pre-N
Recently I realized that we had some dead spots in our wireless network - mostly in the family room. I did some testing using Cnet's bandwidth tester and confirmed that the dead spots were pretty bad in places - with an average of perhaps 300Kbps. Similarly, our downstairs computer was around 1.7Mbps. And both felt a little sluggish.
I had been using the Linksys54G router along with a Linksys booster (which was helping). But I decided it was time for a new router using MIMO technology. After wandering through the truly bewildering options on the Linsys site - there are ten different wireless g routers! - I decided to go with the Belkin pre-N router that cnet highly recommended.
We have a moderately complex network - several directly connected computers, including a switch, we use VOIP, and have network attached storage. On the wireless side, we have three wireless clients (including TiVo), and we have several family websites, hosted on both Windows and Linux. OK, so perhaps this is a rather complex network :).
The installation went fairly smoothly - and was a great opportunity to test the VOIP rollover (it worked fine). I had a few hiccups due to some statically configured systems, but the basic install was fine.
The great news was that there was a big improvement in the performance in the dead spots, with both of the above mentioned spots going to 3.5Mbps and becoming noticeably snappy. However, testing our web servers was another issue altogether. Even trying the simplest approach, e.g. http:/a.b.c.d/page.html did not work. Trying http://192.168.2.2/page.html was fine. So, I thought that my router setup was broken. I reset the router and reinstalled. No difference. I was confused.
The next day at work, I tried http:/a.b.c.d/page.html and it worked fine. I then tried http://foo.mydomain.com/page.html and that worked fine also - in fact everything was fine. When I went home that night, I tried again, thinking it was some config error on my part - but nope, still failed.
I contacted customer support. To their credit, one of the emails contained a work around and another email contained a clear statement of the situation. The third email was not quite comprehensible, which induced me to call support. I waited on hold for 45 minutes, then spoke to a first level tech who seemed to think that my wireless phones might be causing problems with my port forwarding/virtual server issue. I was escalated to a second level tech, who knew more, but admitted that my problem was beyond him (he suggested a reboot - which of course didn't work). On the whole, tech support was average (perhaps my expectations are a little low).
So, to the solution to the inside/outside problem.
1. If, from machine A, you want to use foo.domain.com to get to your server at 192.168.2.2 add the following into the hosts file on machine A:
192.168.2.2 foo.domain.com
You can find the hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc on Windows and \etc on Linux. You have to do this for all the machines in your home network. It's a bit of a pain, but it seems to work.
2. As for a more elegant solution, there isn't one. The quote from support is:
"We apologize that our router does not support the feature to access the webserver using the WAN IP address with in the network.In order to access the webserver within the network you need to use the LAN IP address of the webserver instead of WAN ip address."
Final thoughts...
* Excellent range
* Excellent performance
* Great value (the router was $94)
* Reasonable installation - pretty much the same as Linksys
* Annoying virtual server limitation - as you are never really sure if the virtual servers are working correctly, but it works.
* Documentation should have clearly mentioned the limitation, but it did not - and there was nothing I could find on the web site, Linksys' support web site is highly superior.
* One strange glitch is that yesterday we could not use any browser on any system to get to sites on the web that were using port 80 (e.g. nearly all of them), although we could ping them and get to web sites that were on other ports (e.g. 8080). A quick power cycle of the router fixed the problem - but it was odd.