ASUS Wireless Router RT-N56U

I got the router more than half an year ago, to replace my old D-Link DIR-655 which was really good router but had ridiculously weak signal (I had problems to connect my mobile devices in the other rooms. Later, I also found that the weak signal was the reason for my wireless printer to malfunction).
As usual, I am not going to write a complete review but only to add my personal opinion and experience that is not mentioned anywhere else on the net.

To begin with, the router is really good, fast and with plenty of features out of the box. I have to mention that the official web page was well behind the real specifications of the actual firmware at the time I bought it. I was very close to buy the better and more expensive router RT-N66U just because it said that it has VPN. For my surprise, when I upgraded the router to the latest firmware, right after I bought it, it had already VPN...

Just to mention my priority pros/cons features that are specific to this router (I assume that port-forwarding, virtual host, etc. as standard): Firmware version: 3.0.0.4.374_979 at the time of the review.

Pros:

• Fast dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz wireless router
• Gigabit WAN/LAN
• Strong signal
• Support for 3G/4G modems (a bit limited but still quite functional)
• Multi-Function Twin USB 2.0 Port + samba share
• Advanced web interface
• telnet - this is really perfect!
• Traffic manager
• Network tools: ping, traceroute, nslookup, netstat, Wake On Lan
• System log

Select wifi channel in a crowded neighborhood

It seems that this will become a routine task for me.

Recently, I was suffering from serious network speed deterioration. I use an 802.11g wireless router to connect my computers and mobile phone to internet. As it turns out, there are about 24 wireless access points "visible" from my computer. Earlier, an year or so, I have easily selected channel 11 since most of my neighbors were using the default channel 6. Anyway, a quick check with NetStumbler reviled the horrible situation - all of my closest neighbors were using channel 11 - same as me...

Well, it was looking quite OK to move back to channel 6 since that channel looked least crowded and with the weakest signal. I did it.

Today, I have tried another tool inSSIDer that again reviled  a horrible situation. My neighbors were using routers that span over 2 channels, and the first program showed only one of them. After reconsideration I have moved to channel 4 - you can easily see the reason for that on the screen  snapshot  (the bold red curve is for my router). It could be particularly bad. Apparently one of my neighbors delivers stronger signal than my own router located in the same room as the computer... 

It is obvious that I will need to check the frequency spectra quite often... and inSSIDer will be the best tool for that.

Update: There is one more complication. Newer routers can also automatically select the best channel(s) that make my efforts useless. It seems that the easiest and better solution is to upgrade my old router, in other words, buy newer.

Configure Win XP TCP/IP settings from a limited account

I have occasional problems with my Internet provider when theirs DNS sever is down or does not respond for whatever reason. I have found recently that I can use different DNS server to overcome the situation. The remaining inconvenience is that one cannot change the TCP/IP from a limited account... unless one uses a command line shell with administrative rights.

Here I have found all I needed to change the parameters on the fly: Configure TCP/IP from the Command Prompt. First I have set the new DNS setting for my wifi connection the usual way, then I have dumped the setting to get the correct syntax.

netsh -c interface dump > filename.txt

The LAN connection still had the DNS set to the DHCP server, so from those two configurations I have created these two scripts to alter the settings:

to set up static DNS:

netsh interface ip set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" source=static addr=xxx.xxx.xxx register=PRIMARY
netsh interface ip add dns name="Wireless Network Connection" addr=xxx.xxx.xxx index=2

and to set up DNS from the DHCP server:

netsh interface ip set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" source=dhcp register=PRIMARY

- Change "Wireless Network Connection" with the network connection you want to configure.
- Replace xxx.xxx.xxx with your primary and secondary DNS addresses.

Another alternative is to use a graphical interface to change between different connection profiles: NetSetMan. It looks quite good but I use VirtualBox and that one has its own subnet address and configurations. I got the impression that the setting are applied to one of the network adapters but it is not clear to me what happens to the others... Using the netsh.exe I know for sure which adapter I am messing with. Also on some places I use the LAN most of the time then for a while the wifi with several different profiles (whatever is the local wifi access), then back to LAN. It starts to get messy. Usually I need the static DNS only in cases when the ISP's DNS does not work.
Update: From the support forum of the program it is clear that the setting in each profile are affecting only the selected network driver: NetSetMan & VMWare. This means that one can create a "static DNS" profile and select an adapter to which the settings should apply.