I've just noticed something very strange...

My Netgear router reports:

Up Down
Attenuation 30 dB 29 dB
Noise Margin 6 dB 6 dB


Whereas a customer's Dlink router that I'm testing for him before
installation, shows

Attenutation 9 dB 9 dB
Noise Margin 31 dB 31 dB

for the same phone line, plugged into the same wall-socket by the same
cable.


This makes me wonder: has one of the routers got the headings for the two
attributes the wrong way round?


Given that lower attenuation and higher noise margin is better, and that I'm
only about 100 metres from my exchange, I suspect that the Dlink is right
whereas my Netgear is arse-about-face!

"Martin Underwood" <me@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:42a1aaeb$0$21809$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader01.plus.net...
Yes.

What firmware version are you running in the Netgear?

http://kbserver.netgear.com/release_notes/D102700.asp shows that latest 3
firmware versions included a fix which "Corrected the display of Line
Attenuation and Noise Margin listed in Router Statistics."

Regards
Sunil

"Sunil Sood" <news@soods.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3ge0adFc0o83U1@individual.net...
Heheh, good find

"[-=Dan=-]" <getbent@ease.com> wrote in message
news:3ge457Fblnr3U1@individual.net...
I did think that a noise margin of 6 dB sounded very poor for a
newly-installed line (within the last five years) that is probably only
100-200 metres long (allowing for the line being routed via roads rather
than as the crow flies. People in various groups said that I was very lucky
to be able to get 2 Mbps with that much noise.

Now I know that Netgear had got their attenuation and noise the wrong way
round! Pillocks!

I'll upgrade the firmware now: I'm on V1.01.00 and I see that the current
Netgear firmware is V1.01.28.

Martin U:
Not just your Netgear, ANY and ALL Netgear...
Regards,
Martin

"Martin²" <never@give.one> wrote in message
news:42a25455$0$7524$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader03.plus.net...
Oh, had they made the same mistake in the firmware of all their routers?
What a cockup! At least the firmware upgrade for the DG843GT fixes it for
me, as well as fixing the logging emails which did not have a "Date:" field
in the header (!), and adding additional features such as Atheros Extended
Range on the Wireless page. Shame that Atheros Extended Range doesn't seem
to be documented in the on-screen help, a revised version of the user manual
or the knowledgebase.

Like all firmware upgrades, I was terrified that there'd be a power cut or a
mains glitch while I was uploading the new firmware to the router.


(Talking of cockups, I noticed that the DLink that I was testing had a great
one: on the summary page that shows how long the router has been up, it
always displays some ridiculously large number because it subtracts today's
date/time from the date when the router was booted - and the latter is
always 1 Jan 1970 or 1980 because the router's time of day hasn't yet been
adjusted early in the boot cycle.)

"Martin Underwood" <me@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:42a2c4e5$0$5825$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...
No - Martin just had a single bad experience with a Netgear modem/router
(can't remember what model but it wasn't the DG series I think) a long time
ago and now everytime a Netgear thread appears he always feels compelled
says how bad every Netgear product is in his view.

If you have any questions http://forum1.netgear.com/support/index.php is
probably the best place to ask.

Regards
Sunil

"Anthony R. Gold" <not-for-mail@ahjg.co.uk> wrote in message
news:alh5a1pl6p8jb64imk4ohusnqoau9lemf4@4ax.com...
Isn't the Date field compulsory? Every email that I've ever received from a
recognised email program such as Outlook, Outlook Express and the various
Unix mail clients such as Elm - they all include it. I'd have thought that
Date, From, Subject and To were essential parts of an email. I've found that
timestamps added by the various mail servers along the way are quite often
wrong by several hours because people don't bother setting the correct
timezone: if you translate all timestamps to GMT, each hop should always
occur *later* than the one before it. At least with the use of Windows XP
and W2K or W2K3 server, most computer clocks should be correctly synced to
Microsoft's master timesource.

I noticed this morning that the new router email reports the sent time as
1000 rather than 0900 because it's got the daylight saving wrong. However I
tend to display the received time in my Outlook Express. It would be so easy
for Netgear to have incorporated the standard rule for the dates when
daylight saving begins and ends - as Microsoft do with Windows.

By the way, does anyone know what the three hex numbers in the subject of a
Netgear router email are? Before the firmware upgrade the subject was
"NETGEAR Security Log [03:04:05]" and now with 1.01.28 "NETGEAR Security Log
[55:F3:B9]". When I first saw one of the emails, I thought for a moment that
it was the time when the email was sent - ie 4 minutes past 3 AM.

One feature that would be useful is if there was a way of making the router
generate a test email on demand to check that the recipient details are
entered correctly. You can set the interval to be every hour, but waiting up
to 1 hour until xx:00 isn't really an option, especially as with the Netgear
the time is taken from a time server so could can't keep faking the time to
xx:59 to trigger another email.

"Anthony R. Gold" <not-for-mail@ahjg.co.uk> wrote in message
news:q1o5a1td13cj57k8istfpqmmjen6n7hjto@4ax.com...
So presumably mail clients are clever enough to be able to search the
"Received: from <server1> by <server2>; <timestamp>" lines looking for the
earliest timestamp to display as the "Sent" date if there isn't an explicit
"Date:" field.

Thanks for the education!

On closer inspection, it's stranger than that. On the router's "Schedule"
page, you can select the Timezone (their word) which is in Windows form (eg
"(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time: Edinburgh, London") and enable/disable Daylight
Savings. And this does give the correct time from the timeserver - it allows
for the fact that we're on BST at the moment. However the "Date:" field in
the email wrongly says "Date: Sun,5 Jun 2005 09:00:00 -0000" instead of
"Date: Sun,5 Jun 2005 09:00:00 +0100". So they are taking the time from the
time source (which is always in GMT, I believe) and allowing the timezone
and daylight savings shift for determining the router's internal clock but
they are ignoring the daylight savings shift in the email "Date:" field.
Also, for those people who live in places like India with n-and-a-half hour
shift from GMT, the extra half-hour is ignored both for internal time and in
the email. Still not quite there, Netgear :-)

Ah, yes! [blushes] I was looking on the "Email" page. The "Send Log" button
is on the "Logs" page. I'll remember that one for the future - it's
especially useful if it's AOL where customers don't usually use Outlook
Express so there aren't simply settings that you can copy out of the
"Accounts" menu. It's a case of trying to work out what AOL's SMTP server is
(I *think* it's smtp.aol.com, but I could be wrong) and whether it requires
authentication even though you're connected via an AOL line rather than a
"foreign" line.

"Sunil Sood" <news@soods.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3gg2a7Fc8gpuU1@individual.net...
DG834G units, a MKI and a MKII, one at home and another at the office, both
run 24/7 and are rock solid. I can't fault these units. Excellent bit of
kit. Both running 1.05.00 firmware.

James

"James" <james477657575@mail2u.com> wrote in message
news:3ggsmuFcbv22U1@individual.net...
Yes, my DG834GT is very stable and very easy to set up - much easier than
Dlink 604.

It's run for about 300 hours without needing a reboot (apart from to upgrade
firmware!)

You're not kidding!