Andrew Speakman

I have been having problems with the router. I lose all access to the internet on occasions, even when there isn’t heavy traffic or p2p, internal connectivity remains fine. Looking at the router status page shows a connection as normal. To (temporarily) fix the connection, I have to click disconnect and then reconnect. Not sure on the cause, could be bad router firmware, or possibly, but unlikely a line issue, since I never had problems like this with my cisco. Admittedly it was connected to a different phone socket, but the S/N ratios are very high: 

I’m going to keep a close eye on things, and see if I can make a further diagnosis. Maybe Netgear will bring out a firmware update that will solve all? Things can be so unreliable – the synaptics touchpad on my laptop has just died – time for a reboot….

I’ve got a small Jason Crispin site going on googlepages.com. Jason will be proposing regular updates for me to put on there, see andrew.speakman.googlepages.com. Google Page Creator is pretty primitive at the moment, but lets see how its development progresses.

I’ve had this piece of kit for a few weeks now so have been able to get a reasonable feel for it. The first thing is that it is easy to set up and configure how I want. The only thing I found lacking from the config for was a setting for dns suffix under DHCP, but that isn’t really the end of the world, just no short cuts to local DNS names.

Cosmetically the ‘PN looks pretty nice, similar to most other recent consumer netgear kit. The blue dome LEDs are a handy feature to see what the wireless is up to, an illuminated LED is supposed to indicate an antenna is ‘on’, the angle of the LED on the dome does seem to correspond to the direction of the signal. There are also status LEDs on the front panel, but these are green, and just don’t go with the blue. I spy netgear cutting (small) costs here. The last LED thing is that the rear ethernet ports seem to have status LEDs, but these are disabled on the ‘PN.

Stability wise the PN seems reasonable, but I have had a few problems, I’m not sure if these are p2p related or down to problems with interference on my wireless network. The symptoms were that I temporarily (for a few minutes at most) lost network access, although the wireless connection was showing full signal. When they recur, I’ll investigate further. Wireless range is improved vs my old netgear WAP54G which was the main intention of getting the ‘PN. An other reason is that I think my old cisco 827 doesn’t support ADSL2, plus the cisco is a bugger to set up at first if you’re not using web setup and doesn’t offer full functionality if you are using web setup. Once properly set up, the cisco was a rock solid piece of kit. The final reason is that I wanted to simplify by having one piece of kit instead of two. In fact I was using three pieces of kit because the 827 only had 10mb ethernet ports so I had a separate switch to get 100mb over wires.

I’m not convinced by the DOS protection and was getting shed loads of ‘DOS attacks’ in the log file when using a certain eager p2p app. The log has a nice e-mail feature that you can set to send you an e-mail dump of the log each time it filled. When using the p2p app I was getting at least an e-mail a minute full of DOS(sers), so I had to disable logging of DOS attacks and port scans. It would have been nice to have a bit more configurability here, as to exactly what to log and also what constituted a DOS.

That’s pretty much all – I’m not sure about VPN, and it of course doesn’t have a VOIP – analogue port, but I’m not bothered.

broken store finder page through multimap. performing a search by hitting enter instead of clicking the button gives old results or no results.

Loads of websites I see disappoint me.

They use clip art photos of smiley plastic people from strange angles, looking studious, sat in groups, or at a computer. A classic example of this can be found at www.train2gain.co.uk.

Keep it real.

I want to see the real people behind the company and the real customers doing real things. I’d rather have some slightly imperfect real photos than some obvious stock images.

Websites that use generic clip art images also tend to be lacking in substance. They are often designed and then left, without content being added to or updated. Some are even left incomplete with placeholder messages such as ‘Begin Content here’: www.bytewize.net/case_studies.php, or ‘This page is being updated’, or even the old favourite ‘Site under construction, please call back later’.

Don’t have a ‘latest news’ section on a business website unless you update it at least once a month! If your latest news is more than six months old your company can’t be doing that well, can it?

Make sure that all the links to other pages on your site actually link to pages and don’t generate nasty 404 errors. It’s really very easy to analyse your log files, any decent hosting provider should offer log analysis facilities. Regularly look through the logs for 404 errors with referrring pages, particularly those with referring pages on your site.

A website is for life, not just for christmas.