Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 19:07 Post subject: Router for HTTP over SSH tunnel
I just changed my ISP to Surewest from AT&T Uverse as Surewest is running fiber straight to the home. So now I've got 8Mbps up and down. I pulled out my ancient Linksys WRT54G v5.0 to get me up and running. Now, I've found that this router is too slow to handle what I need to do.
I've got a remote windows laptop at work I use putty to SSH into my home linux box and create a tunnel to have firefox from the windows laptop use as a SOCKS proxy. The page load times when using the proxy over SSH tunnel are atrocious. It takes yahoo.com over a minute to load. I never had this problem with my slower AT&T Uverse service which only had 768K upload speeds. So the only differences in this setup now are my home router and ISP. I'm guessing the router hardware in the AT&T equipment was a lot beefier compared to this old Linksys.
I've been looking around for a decent home router under $100 and started looking at the Netgear WNR3500L which seems to be a good deal. My home network only uses 100Mbps ethernet and 802.11g, but I could possibly see upgrading to an N based adapter in the future. Also stream netflix and other online video sources now as I killed cable tv. The USB port on the WNR3500L is also a nice feature. I also would like to start toying around with streaming some movies from my linux box over the internet to my remote laptop since I've got nice upload speeds now. Can anyone recommend this router or another one for my needs? Thanks
While the WRT54G v5.0 is very bad it shouldn't be causing this sort of behavior if all you're doing is tunneling to an internal server and back out to browse the web. IMO you should test without the router to see if it's really the problem.
If you do want a new router refurbished E3000's straight from linksys's website have been $90-100 lately. They're simultaneous dual band and have USB too. The Asus RT-N16 is another popular choice that has ridiculous flash and RAM, USB, but only 2.4 GHz band. _________________ Read the forum announcements thoroughly! Be cautious if you're inexperienced.
Available for paid consulting. (Don't PM about complicated setups otherwise)
Looking for bricks and spare routers to expand my collection. (not interested in G spec models)
Thanks for the recommendation. I can't imagine any of my issues are related to something other than the router. I just set up a plain FTP server with no security on it and am only getting average download speeds of 400K from my laptop at work. Something just isn't right.
One other interesting thing I've noted when I'm having issues with the HTTP over SSH tunnel is my putty session. If I'm trying to load a page like yahoo and it's going very slow, my putty command line session becomes extremely slow as well. In the process narrowing down which router I'm going to switch to.
