Belkin F5D8235-4

I was looking to upgrade my home wired network to gigE and to hopefully gain some better range and throughput on my wireless. On the wired side I was looking for throughput greater than 100mb, but not worried about achieving line rate. The unit has to sit in my office, fan noise and big footprint was a no-no so a traditional switch was out from the start. I needed 4 gigE ports, (2 wired PCs, WAN and a Qnap SAN disk). The device had to pass v6 fine.

I couldn't find much on tinterubes about the belkin, but it seemed to be a sensible price and offer what I wanted, and if all went well I'd get a spare gigE port and some decent wireless if I bought some suitable client wireless.

The Belkin came running firmware v 2.01.07, the Belkin website said the latest version was 2.01.06 so I cracked on. Like all good men, the manual and CD stayed in the plastic bag, and the device was plugged in, a bit of google-foo later I discovered it boots on 192.168.2.1 with a 'null' admin password. First thing to do is to change the admin password to something other than 'null' (there's a bug in the firmware that stops you setting it to anything if you switch to 'use as access point' so change it now!).

Next task is to disable everything that you don't want enabled for an AP, eg dhcp, turn it all off, then it's time to switch the device to AP mode, click 'use as access point' and set an ip/mask in your broadcast domain then apply changes... once it reloads you should now have wired clients on all 5 ports able to talk through to your router on v4 and/or v6 addresses.

Configure your wireless as you see fit!

I can't get the NTP working, it works in router mode, but not in AP mode, this is pretty annoying as it has an eco mode which enables you to turn the wireless on/off for time of day to save power for periods when it's not in use. Check firmware option doesn't work in AP mode either, I guess both would be fixed if there was a default route option.

It's doing some network stuff which I've not investigated yet:

Nov  3 01:34:35.378: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGP: list 199 permitted udp 192.168.254.3(0) (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 239.255.255.250(0), 1 packet
Nov  3 01:34:51.389: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGSP: list 199 permitted igmp 192.168.254.3 (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 239.255.255.250 (0), 1 packet
Nov  3 01:34:56.180: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGSP: list 199 permitted igmp 192.168.254.3 (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 234.2.2.9 (0), 1 packet
Nov  3 01:39:58.833: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGP: list 199 permitted udp 192.168.254.3(0) (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 239.255.255.250(0), 146 packets
Nov  3 01:39:58.833: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGSP: list 199 permitted igmp 192.168.254.3 (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 239.255.255.250 (0), 5 packets
Nov  3 01:39:58.837: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGSP: list 199 permitted igmp 192.168.254.3 (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 234.2.2.9 (0), 5 packets
Nov  3 01:39:58.837: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGSP: list 199 permitted igmp 192.168.254.3 (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 234.2.2.7 (0), 6 packets
Nov  3 01:41:54.350: %SEC-6-IPACCESSLOGP: list 199 permitted udp 192.168.254.3(0) (FastEthernet0/0.1 0022.75d3.874c) -> 192.168.254.255(0), 1 packet

The router supports USB mass storage. I've only tried a single 2gb USB key (the manual says you can add a powered 4 port USB hub). You can access the storage remotely by mapping windoz tcp 139 \\z.z.z.z\ to your device. So far it seems unreliable for large files (400mb) as I'm getting regular timeouts, with windoz errors such as 'the specified network name is no longer available'

things on the list to test:

access from xp & ubuntu to the usb drive (only tried from win 2003 server)
ipv6 only wireless and wired test
gigE wired throughput testing
wireless throughput testing v4 and v6
iozone/bonnie tests to usb drive

I noticed that the UK power brick is quite leaky (long story) and will trip a sensitive consumer unit earth leakage breaker. Will try and get some figures over the next few days.