Review : Usrobotics 9107a, ADSL router Options

[NickTheGreek]

I bought that today for a mere 70â?¬ ... it is considered one of the best routers around... you can also buy the 9108A which is identical but also features Wireless access (802.11b/g) and looks like this :

The package is satisfactory, containign all you can see here :

The product is an ADSL/ADSL2+ router, featuring speeds up to 24Mbps. Firewall enabled using "Stateful Packet Inspection", 4port Ethernet switch, a USB print server etc etc

A good choice for low money, the wireless model costs 110â?¬.. .and i am wireless ready, already so why take that ?

[NickTheGreek]

ðÜíôùò áðü ôçí þñá ðïõ áíáâÜèìéóá ôçí ãñáììÞ óå ADSL2+ (4096/256) áñ÷ßóáí ôá ðñïâëÞìáôá...

êáé ìåôÜ áðü Üðåéñá restart ( ôï router ìåôÜ áðü ìïõëÜñéá Þ uTorrent áðëÜ ðáãþíåé ) êáé firmware upgrade/downgrades...

äéÜâáóá êé áõôü óôï åðßóçìï eMule forum & îåíÝñùóá :

Us Robotics 9107/91108/9107a/9108a Sucks Big Time, problems with USR 9107 and 9108

US Robotics 9107/91108/9107A/9108A sucks big time, those two and I believe all newer models than those two are lamest of all routers I tried.
Firstly, maybe those routers are equipped with a good hardware (processor 200-250 MHz) (and medium memory size of 6-12mb), but they are configured for nothing, in my eyes, they are worthless.
They are based on BCM96345 chip, with BusyBox v1.00 and who knows which Linux kernel they used for the engine.

They have problems with every P2P over 120 opened full connections, and they have problems if you use DHT from any torrent with over 300 connection DHT connections, modem will slow-up with extreme lag, and it will kill web-telnet-ssh access or it will gave extreme lag to them, but after some time it will freeze-up, and after some time (from 2-12H modem will freeze-up completely even internet and LAN), in a first case you can free router with simple short restart, but for second big freeze-up, only solution is big or deep restart over 20 seconds.
Who knows maybe they have mem leak or maybe mem size isn't enough for even medium P2P job, or internal firewall identifies lots of connections as some sort of evil attack, which than slows down whole router. This is the LAME as hell.

Second big fook-up is if your ISP Authentication server is down, you can forget about automatic reconnection and automatic re-authorization, stupid fools from US Robotics decided that some of the pppd options should be fitted with culture low settings, options such "persist","holdoff" and "maxfail".
How router will react if Auth.Server is out,
it will try for 3 or 4 times to re-authorization for just 1 or 2 minutes. Which, of course, is not enough even for little server downs.
You can try your US robotics how its set for such action,
first enable system log into the status section of WUI, than when you eneter, click on configure, than click on "enable log", than set to the "local" and than set the log level to "informational", and the display level to "error".
Now you can set wrong user name or password intentionally into the Internet/Wan setup, and edit your current wan connection with wrong user name or password, than when you finish editing, router will restart.
After it restart wait for about 1 or 2 minutes and go to status/system log and look at the log, or refresh log constanlly just to see whats going on, you will see how much time router retries to re-auth. I saw with above mentioned models only 3-4 retries, and let me remand you 10 retries are the almost default on lamest of all routers. 3-4 times could be Lamest of the Lamest's. On normal good routers this value is fitted with 0(zero) value which represent infinitive retries.



Third problem is this routers are very problematic for FTP connections in Active mode if you are using other ports than 21-23, I'm using lots of FTP servers on ports 5794-6001, and I had no luck to set this router to receive the list from the FTP in ACTIVE mode. I tried to forward, to dmz, to virtual port. The moment my friends change the ports 5794 to 21, modem instantly fly's in Active. Again lame and worthless.


Please look what US Robotics said about their routers:
"Regarding the P2P issue, this is not a router designed with intensive P2P usage in mind, but it performs quite well with 50-100 sources. Slowness in the WUI is quite normal when the router is dealing with such number of connections. It is definitely not a P2P oriented router, but it should deliver for most of domestic users."
quoted from Rebollo, Jaime UK US Robotics technical support.

"9107/9108, There's no option for disabling Firewall and NAT (using PPPoE or PPPoA) but neither was there such an option in the 9105/06. However it is possible to disable NAT/Firewall using IPoA or MER. (In the 9105/06 it is possible to disable the NAT/Firewall from telnet, that's true, but as an undocumented feature)"
again quoted from Rebollo, Jaime UK US Robotics technical support.

US Robotics Support is lame and slow, they cant and they want help you.

I strongly advice you to stay away from any US Robotics router, till the moment someone decide to make open source modified firmware which is optimized for advance things.


If you have some ideas please make some suggestions.

Source : http://forum.emule-project.net