Xincom DPG502 Twin WAN Router

Jason — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:21:28 +0000

Ok, how about a little geekery on this gorgeous Friday. First, let me say that I am very thankful for this summer’s weather here in SF, last year was poop. Anyway, I have been noticing some issues with our 6Mb/768Kb DSL line in the past couple of days. The biggest reason I have not called them yet is that I don’t want to have to tear into all of the network cabling, switches and router to plug a box directly into the DSL modem…because I know that is what the techs are going to want. But, this brought me to investigate my Xincom Twin WAN DPG502 router. Pretty fancy name huh? Well, the reason I bought it was because it allows you to do some pretty slick load balancing and aggregation of two internet connections for not a lot of money. At first I was a bit skeptical about the deal working very well because the router was less than $200 when I bought it. I have the 6Mb down Speakeasy DSL line (which I have seen a little over 5Mb on the whole time I have had it) and a Comcast cable modem. Comcast’s crap DNS problems from last year is what really prompted me to look into a solution like this in the first place.

Anyway, I started poking around inside the very nice and robust Xincom web based GUI to see where my current load balancing settings were at. I then decided I would actually do a little reading and see if there was a firmware update for the 502. No, firmware update, but I did come across a little PDF on setting up load balancing on the DPG502. I changed my settings from IP basded load balancing to Packet Based, hit update and decided to take a look at what kind of download speeds I would see with the change. Well, I was blown away. I clicked on the San Francisco link on the Speakeasy broadband speed test and got the following numbers:

10534kbs / 508kbs

Jesus. Today must be my lucky day I thought. Well, it turns out that there is some kind of issue around here (with all of the construction I am sure) with the DSL line. If I run the test out on the Speakeasy line only, I am seeing about 2500kbps down and 250kbps up. But, if I run it on the Comcast cable line, I see anywhere from 8500kbps down to 10000+kbps down and 250+ up. Jesus. I guess Comcast got their act together around here. Anyway, Speakeasy is on the case and I will hear something back from Steve in the next 5 hours. Speakeasy is an awesome company and this is the first time I have had to call their support line for anything. Their DSL has been rock solid and fast since the day I set it up. But, this Xincom 502 router is pretty darn cool. It works like a champ day in and day out. If there is a problem with one of the lines, it emails me. I can see real time stats on each line, send traffic based on specific ports and/or local IP addresses over a specific interface…it is really sweet. My Vonage line has never sounded as good as it has since I specified all traffic to and from that thing goes out over the DSL line.

So, if you are a geek, you have two internet connections (or you want two) and you are looking for a new gadget, the Xincom DPG502 should get some serious consideration.

Blogger = POS

Jason — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:24:21 +0000

Ok, I like free and I am not complaining here, but Blogger is a piece of crap. I have had problems with their system virtually every day. It is either unreachable due to too much load, or there are crazy errors when I try to publish to one of our sites. I don’t get it. Isn’t Google stock trading at almost $400 a share? They don’t have the money to put one of those Google Clusters, or however many they need, in place to run Blogger the way it should be? Obviously blogging is becomming a bigger and bigger part of the web today, which is why Google has launched their own Blog Search now. So, how about you guys put the Blogger POS you bought on a system that it can run on.

Why the rant? I have been trying to publish, via ftp, to one of our sites for the past 3 hours. The error I get is a dns host lookup error…the host doesn’t exist. Well, it works for me. Maybe Comcast is running DNS for Blogger.com. That would explain everything.

Jason Golod Blogs » Comcast

Xincom DPG502 Twin WAN Router

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