Nat!'s Web Journal

On a whim I bought the DSL-Router Trendnet TW100-S4W1CA a cheap little thingy because I am getting sick of my Linux box serving basically just as a DSL router. It used to serve NFS, but Apple wore me down with it's incabable NFS code, that kernel panics just too much. The Linux box, an old AMD K6-400 takes too much power and it's too noisy.

I bought the router from Atelco. It was the last box left. Never buy the last box left...

Well I did. Sure enough it was a returned router. Some idiot "Rainer" had already set up the box and entered a password. After probably failing to get it to connect with T-Online he returned it and now I have it. That preempted my "easy Web Setup" and I put the handy Quick Setup Wizard to the task - only available on Windows... But! The Quick Setup Wizard also required the password! After perusing the documentation I noticed that "Rainer" had 111 written into the dialog boxes. Bingo! 111 was the password. (One can reset to factory defaults by pressing Reset five seconds, but I learned that later).

The Windows setup then had me sweating for a minute, because you can't use it to setup a T-Online DSL account. The dialog box to hold the username is simply too small for T-Onlines massive 42 character user. That's I guess why "Rainer" returned the router. Luckily the Web Interface is much better than the Windows client in all cases except the setting the server name, where the HTTP interface always insists on truncating the last character <grunt>
Connecting to T-Online via PPPOE then went flawlessly.

Actually I am impressed, with what you can get for € 39. It has DHCP (even static!), NAT, a simple Firewall, port forwarding and even dynamic DNS support. I have turned my Linux server off, ah blessed silence. The only sound I hear now is that damned Radeon 9800 card, which I will silence soon with a Verax fan.

This is sweet. I opened up port 22 and port 9 in the router to pass through to my G5. I let the router "Always connected" to T-Online, keeping my dynamic IP current on DynDNS. Now with the help of Broadband Reports I can send a wakeup packet to my G5 and then ssh into it. If the setup is idle, it shouldn't waste more than 15 W.

Next I will buy two cheap 11 mbs bridges for €100 total to get rid of the cable going from the router to my machine room. I hope it will be as easy to setup.

Can't recommend the TW100-S4W1CA yet, as I have little working experience. The only thing missing offhand is the ability to create a local DNS server with a little /etc/hosts table.