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[rlcronin]

The router has to be next to my cable modem which is on the first floor. There are 2 floors above and one (basement) below. Signal is excellent on first floor, very good in basement and 2nd floor. Good on 3rd floor except behind a wall with no direct view to the stairwell leading down (and even in those spots its no worse than the 857, about -75 dbm on average). Most of the devices in that room are connected to the network over a 500 megabit powerline ethernet arrangement. The wiring to that room is relatively new so I get very good throughput (350 megabits on average). The only WIFI I use up there is on portable devices (phones and tablets) and the 865 delivers adequate signal and throughput to them for the most part. The 857 signal was definitely weaker.

This is an old house (circa 1965) with lots of separate rooms behind sheetrock walls. Almost no line-of-sight-to-the-router from any of them. At the moment we've only got a few devices that we're using on 802.11n. I used to have quite a few more that talked over wireless bridges, but I mostly replaced those with powerline ethernet. Pretty much all I have left using wireless is phones, tablets and  one laptop. I believe all are dual band capable, but I think only the laptop supports 300 megabits. So yes, the 865 is overkill for the moment. I was mostly interested in the promise of better signal strength for the portable devices and that seems to have come to pass.

Yes, there is a reboot later option. Thankfully its not needed very often as most changes seem to be able to be applied on-the-fly. The 857 wanted to reboot after nearly every little change I made.

The QOS UI can be seen here:

http://goo.gl/MkE0V

Looks nice, although it is not clear why I would need to use it. I have 60 megabits down and 8 megabits up and rarely have any bandwidth conflicts. I've left QOS off for now.

I'll try some transfers over the coming days and report back.
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bc

[FurryNutz]

Thanks for the feedback and pic. Ya, it's the same as the 645s QoS option. At least these 2 routers offer up higher Up and Downlink speeds selections. I would be interesting to see if it works on your 60/8 ISP connection since the other DIR series seem to have this cap at 2Mb Up that people are talking about.

If it works out, maybe use it as your main host router and turn the 857 into an AP upstairs. 

Keep us posted and again, thanks for the feedback.

[rlcronin]

Methinks it is time for the 865 to have its own forum. I have found a glitch. I use Open DNS (I have configured the two Open DNS resolvers as hardcoded DNS server addresses on the Internet page). If I have DNS relay on as well, then all works fine. If I turn DNS relay off and disable/re-enable the LAN adapter on a PC (to force it to renew its info from the DHCP server) then DNS stops working altogether. Turning DNS relay back on solves the problem. This may be related, but I noticed that with DNS relay off, when I had the PC renew its info from the DHCP server and did an ipconfig /all, I noticed that it had *4* DNS servers listed, the first two from Open DNS and the second two from my ISP. I do not want to uise my ISP's DNS servers at all. How come I am getting them assigned? This didn't happen on the 857 ...
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bc

[FurryNutz]

Did you ipconfig /flushdns?

I've asked for one to be created.

[rlcronin]

Thanks for the feedback and pic. Ya, it's the same as the 645s QoS option. At least these 2 routers offer up higher Up and Downlink speeds selections. I would be interesting to see if it works on your 60/8 ISP connection since the other DIR series seem to have this cap at 2Mb Up that people are talking about.

If it works out, maybe use it as your main host router and turn the 857 into an AP upstairs. 

Keep us posted and again, thanks for the feedback.

Oh and as regards QOS, I was going to try it but I wanted to type in my exact specs (60/8) and there didn't seem to be a way to do that. It only had certain presets. The closest I could come would be 50/10, but I didn't want to do that.

Also, re your comment about using the 857 as an AP, were you suggesting I use it in bridge mode, or connecting it to the powerline ethernet and using it as a pure AP? Its not immediately clear to me how either scenario would benefit me. Can you explain?
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bc

[FurryNutz]

Oh and as regards QOS, I was going to try it but I wanted to type in my exact specs (60/8) and there didn't seem to be a way to do that. It only had certain presets. The closest I could come would be 50/10, but I didn't want to do that.
What is the next higher value above 60? Yes they only have presets so you need to try the preset value even if it's above 60, I think it's 100 isn't it?

Also, re your comment about using the 857 as an AP, were you suggesting I use it in bridge mode, or connecting it to the powerline ethernet and using it as a pure AP? Its not immediately clear to me how either scenario would benefit me. Can you explain? The 857 doesn't have a bridge mode so you'll need to run a wire for AP mode:
Turning a router into an AP.

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bc

[rlcronin]

It seems there may also be a UPnP issue. I can no longer get my Windows Home Server's remote access to work. If I shut it off and back on again, it seems to work for a while, but in less then 5 minutes I get a warning from the WHS connector that port forwarding via my router is not working. The WHS attempts to open the ports it needs by sending UPNP commands to the router. Those seem to work at first, but then it just stops.

I've tried to activate some more detaile logging information on the logs page, but that doesn't seem to work either. Sigh ... ah, life on the bleeding edge ... fun fun ...

Oh and while we're on the subject of bleeding edge, I also had an issue with my VOIP. I could not hear audio on an incoming call I got earlier this evening. We retried several times to no avail and gave up and reverted to cellphones. I am sure this is probably related to the SIP ALG. I have turned that off now, but have not yet had an opportunity to see if that helped. I'll have a co-worker call me in the morning to see if thats fixed. On the positive side, I've had to fiddle with that in the past as well (at least with every Dlink router I have had) so I am hopeful everything will be fine.
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bc

[rlcronin]

Did you ipconfig /flushdns?

I've asked for one to be created.

I rebooted. But perhaps an explicit flushdns might help. I'll try it ...
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bc

[FurryNutz]

Setup DHCP reserved IP addresses for all devices ON the router.

It seems there may also be a UPnP issue. I can no longer get my Windows Home Server's remote access to work. If I shut it off and back on again, it seems to work for a while, but in less then 5 minutes I get a warning from the WHS connector that port forwarding via my router is not working. The WHS attempts to open the ports it needs by sending UPNP commands to the router. Those seem to work at first, but then it just stops.

I've tried to activate some more detaile logging information on the logs page, but that doesn't seem to work either. Sigh ... ah, life on the bleeding edge ... fun fun ...

Oh and while we're on the subject of bleeding edge, I also had an issue with my VOIP. I could not hear audio on an incoming call I got earlier this evening. We retried several times to no avail and gave up and reverted to cellphones. I am sure this is probably related to the SIP ALG. I have turned that off now, but have not yet had an opportunity to see if that helped. I'll have a co-worker call me in the morning to see if thats fixed. On the positive side, I've had to fiddle with that in the past as well (at least with every Dlink router I have had) so I am hopeful everything will be fine.
--
bc

[rlcronin]

Ah well running a wire is not an option.
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bc

[FurryNutz]

How about with powerline?

Ah well running a wire is not an option.
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bc

[rlcronin]

I rebooted. But perhaps an explicit flushdns might help. I'll try it ...
--
bc

Nope, turned off DNS relay, did ipconfig /flushdns and ipconfig /renew, got 4 DNS servers again and nothing worked. Couldn't even get to www.google.com. Definitely an issue there ...
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bc

[rlcronin]

How about with powerline?

Well of course I could connect the 857 via powerline and set it up as an AP. But then of course the bandwidth of the wireless devices that associate with it would be limited by the bandwidth of the powerline connection (which is 350 megabits on average so I guess it might be worthwhile). It would be interesting doing a speedtest when connected that way versus when connected to the 865 downstairs. I suspect it might be marginally better, but its probably not worth the bother ...
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bc

[rlcronin]

Setup DHCP reserved IP addresses for all devices ON the router.

Not sure what you're getting at with this suggestion, but setting up reserved DHCP addresses for all my PC's and the Windows Home Server was one  of the first things I did. I always do that. It makes life so much easier. I still have the apparrent UPNP issue regardless though. I suppose I could manually setup port forwarding for the WHS, but isn't that what UPNP is for? It seems to be broken.
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bc

[rlcronin]

Here's another issue. I setup a login password on the router (the default of blank didn't seem too secure, even with Remote Administration off, I still would rather have a password). Well, setting it up works fine. From that point forward I have to provide the password to login. Until I reboot the router, that is. After which the password has reverted back to blank. D'oh!
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bc