Cisco WRV 210 Firmware Upgrade at End of LIfe

[WS-CiscoWRV210]

I am new on Cisco and not very knowledgeable on networks but looking for firmware upgrade to Cisco/Linksys WRV210 router.  Present firmware is 1.1.16 and I believe that 2.0.1.5  is available but I am not able to find if.  The router is on Cisco's "End of Life" list and is not supported it seems.  I should upgrade to a new router if there are any suggestion.  It's used for small business at home wired structurally with cat5e and wireless.  Runs well on my PC but when I switched to Macbook pro, I often have to renew DHCP lease to continue a connection.  When I added a Dynex gigabit 8 port switch to my stereo equipment "head in" to split the Ethernet to the TV, Receiver, Blu-Ray and Set Top box the streaming on Pandora stops now after a few minutes of listening.  Message shows up on TV (unstable network connection) or (Not connected to the Internet) and then drops Pandora.  With Ethernet connection running Pandora on my Macbook pro  is still fine and never interrupted.  I am auto setup for 100mbps full duplex (which might be a problem) and the new gigabit 8 port switch can not be manually set that I know of.  It may not be the router but a network auto negeotiation problem.  I would like to upgrade to 1000mbps network to better steam netflix, etc.  I am not sure that I even have the WRV 210 router setup correctly but if I replace it, I will use it in another application.  I thought I would update the WRV 210 router firmware to see if it helps while working this problem out.  I cannot find the firmware, if anyone could make a suggestion I would it would be greatly appreciated.

[markfurlong · Accepted solution]

Scott,

Navigating the Cisco website can be a little daunting at times.  Here's a link to the firmware:

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/release.html?mdfid=282414014&flowid=788&softwareid=282463177&release=2.0.1.5&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest.

You may need to be logged in to reach this link.  If you don't have a Cisco user id, you can sign up for one and it will allow you to obtain more resources than when not logged in.

Mark Furlong

[WS-CiscoWRV210]

Mark,  Thank you very much.  I have downloaded but not upgraded yet.  Do you have experience or suggestions for any of the other issues with mac and router or network streaming suggestions?  Should I upgrade my router hardware to a piece you might suggeste?

Thank you again form your response.

[markfurlong]

Hi Scott

The firmware upgrade will most likely help with some of your issues; we saw good improvement with the 2.x versions of firmware.  However, the overall reliablity of the wrv210 has not been good and we stopped deploying them some time ago (we still have a number of them in service at client sites and they are running OK).

We provide service to small business clients and for most of them we have adopted a hybrid model with a rvs4000 router and wap2000 wireless access point.  Moving to this model has been great and we have been very happy with both the rvs4000 and the wap2000.  For very small clients we have used the rv120w but our experience with that is limited.

My recommendation would be to upgrade the firmware and see how much that helps with your issues.  If you are still having issues or when you are ready to upgrade to a full gig network, get an rvs4000 as your router and repurpose the wrv210 as a wireless access point (not really supported by Cisco but it does work); this requires turning off DHCP and using a LAN port for your uplink, WAN port is not used.

Mark Furlong

[WS-CiscoWRV210]

Hi Mark,

Again thank you for the great information and your quick response. I am not sure how to set up the wrv210 for security and reliability of connection as these two seem to conflict at times. Would you suggest 100mbps at half duplex vs full? Would you block Anonymous and block multcast? MTU manuel or auto? These thing and more, I know nothing about. Do you know of a tutorial in the router that is good or should I just search the community for similar questions on that router? I have appreciated your responses and suggestions and will be looking forward to going full gig.

Best Regards,

Scott

[markfurlong]

Hello,

Recommend using the default settings for most parameters and only change them when you have reason to do so.

Don't know of any tutorials, but you can try the online device emulators; since one does not exist for the wrv210 you can try one for a similar device like the rv120w.

Mark

[WS-CiscoWRV210]

Hi Mark,

I set most all to default on the WRV210 but had trouble with the wireless using WPA2 (personal) TKIP+AES {Invalid password) using Macbook pro. Finally found a blog that said to use WAP(personal) AES only. It worked fine. Didn't change or delete keychains so that was nice.

Only question is,....... I read to set MTU to "manual" and change the value from the 1500 default down to 1400 for the macbook pro and router which speeds things up so there is no fragmentation of packets? Mark, do you have any advise on that portion of the set up?

I did generate the WPA key so I think that the security is at about medium with 20 characters.

Thank you again for your time,

Scott

[markfurlong]

Scott,

Is your macbook older?  Surprised it does not support WPA2 but WPA is more secure than WEP.

Don't have any advice for the MTU setting; for the units we've deployed we've always used the automatic setting for this.

Mark

[WS-CiscoWRV210]

Mark,

My macbook pro is less than 1 year old and does support WPA-2 running Mac OSX 1.6.8 Snow Leopard. It came with a free upgrade to OSX 10.7 Lion but I have not sent in for it yet. This problem is a known issue on all the forums but no one knows how to fix it. The fix they say involves deleting / changing System.keychains and writing script similar to the post below which is using WPA and not WPA-2.

I, like many other users, have had the mysterious "Mac OS X wants to use keychain system" dialog box after each reboot, when AirPort tried to access the wireless network for the first time, that refused to accept any known password. There have been some users out there who solved the problem by simply removing the System.keychain from /Library/Keychains/. Some other users suggested creating a new System.keychain with a known password.

I didn´t feel comfortable using one of those solutions, because I had the feeling that there must be (1) a reason that there is a System.keychain, and (2) that it doesn't have a keyword that is known by the user. Digging a bit deeper into the system (BTW, I'm a designer and no programmer), I found out that the initial installation of 10.4 (and every subsequent update) contains a postflight script that will create this particular keychain. So my solution was quickly found.

You need to have admin-rights on the Mac you want to update using this hint. Then just:

Make a backup copy of your current System.keychain. In Terminal, type:

sudo mv /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /Library/Keychains/System.keychain.bak

Use the command from the postflight script to let the system create a fresh keychain:

sudo /usr/sbin/systemkeychain -C

Reboot.

Since taking these three simple steps, all I had to do was enter the information for my WPA protected AirPort networks once, and everything was up and running like it should be.

The MTU is also a known factor but some of the fixes are a little too in depth for my knowledge base and time allotment. The problem is that the MTU default setting of 1500 is too high

and creates packet fragmentation, slowing down internet speeds. There are ways to find that exact value to use for my particular network but 1400 was suggested as a better default number for the macbook pro for no fragmentation and considerable speed increase. It is all a little tweaky for me but if you at Cisco knew about it I would try to do it.

Thank you greatly for your time and suggestions,

Scott

[mpyhala]

Hi Scott,

If you are interested in finding the correct MTU, check out the following page:

http://gregalbrecht.com/2008/06/10/detecting-mtu/

I'm sure there are many sites like this, this is the first I found after doing a search.