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Cisco Director Wireless-N Music Player

Michael Brown — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:45:16 -0500

It's no Sonos (or Squeezebox, for that matter)

By launching a full line of music-streaming products, including the Director DMC250 reviewed here, Cisco clearly has the Sonos Digital Music System in its sights; unfortunately, it’s fallen well short of the target.

Our biggest complaint has to do with the convoluted setup process, which includes installing Cisco’s LELA (Linksys EasyLink Advisor) on at least one PC. LELA isn’t a bad utility—if you’re completely terrified by the prospect of setting up a home network. If you’re an old hand, it’s a waste of computer resources.

The default installation also forces you to set up a user account on Cisco’s website. A spokesperson tells us this is because Cisco needs to act as an intermediary between you and Rhapsody. Really? What if you already have an account with Rhapsody? What if you decide you don’t want anything to do with it? There’s apparently some way of installing the Cisco media server software without LELA or divulging your email address to Cisco, but the documentation doesn’t mention it.

Our second biggest complaint is that it takes the Director a mind-blowing 74 seconds to start up from the time you push its power button to the time it’s ready to play a note. That’s a full minute and 14 seconds. We’ve listened to songs that were shorter than a minute and 14 seconds. When we asked the product manager if our experience was typical, he sheepishly replied, “Yeah, we’re working on that.”

The Linksys Director comes with a good remote control, but you can also navigate its menus using the buttons arrayed around its display.

The Director has a luscious 3.5-inch display, so it’s too bad it won’t consistently display album art. Cisco’s media server insists on pulling album art from the AMG online database instead of simply looking in the album folder or parsing the track’s existing metadata. If your track’s metadata isn’t mapped exactly the way it is in AMG’s database, you’ll get placeholder art.

You can connect the Director to your network with or without an Ethernet cable (the device is outfitted with a dual-band 2.4/5.0GHz 802.11n radio but can fall back to 802.11b/g mode). There’s an integrated amp that puts 50 watts per channel into a four-ohm load or 40 watts per channel into an eight-ohm load. Cisco uses spring-loaded binding posts, so forget about using banana plugs.

We auditioned the amp playing Paul Thorn’s “Lucky Seven Ranch” through a pair of TBI Audio’s Majestic Diamond IR monitors and were not at all impressed. Low and midrange frequencies sounded as though they were passing through a wall of mud while the highs sounded paradoxically shrill. Very odd. We had a better experience when we used the Director’s line-level outputs to connect the player to TBI’s Millennia amp.

As with the Sonos system, you can also plug an analog source (a cassette deck or a turntable with an integrated pre-amp, for instance) into the Director and stream its audio over your network. You can also stream music from a host of free Internet radio stations (but not from LastFM, Pandora, or Slacker). Cisco does top Sonos in device connectivity: The Director is capable of hosting both a USB storage device and an iPod (using an optional dock).

Some Linksys and Netgear Routers Vulnerable to New Exploit

Paul Lilly — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:43:49 -0500

Two security researchers on Saturday have warned that if you use cPanel to administer your website or certain Linksys or Netgear routers, you're leaving yourself open to web-based attacks that could potentially take control of your systems.

The attacks are based on CSRF, or cross-site request forgery, which can be exploited simply by surfing to the 'wrong' website, say Russ McRee of HolisticInfoSec.org and Mike Bailey of Skeptikal.org.

"CSRF is bad stuff," Bailey said at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. "It's a very under-appreciated vulnerability, and it's all over the place. Because it usually gets rated as a pretty minimal issue, it almost never gets fixed, and that means we have these kinds of holes all over."

When visiting a malicous website while logged in to the program, the attack is able to trick cPanel into carrying out sensitive commands by duping the device into thinking they came from the victim. And it doesn't look like this will be fixed anytime soon.

"The response I got from cPanel was we can't fix this because it's a feature," Bailey said. "Apparently, they're worried it's going to break integration with third party billing software, so they can't fix this."

Much more info here.

Image Credit: Linksys

Linksys Integrating Home Network Defender into Routers

Paul Lilly — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:45:48 -0600

Safe surfing remains the best defense against internet-borne attacks, but it won't provide you that warm fuzzy feeling that an additional layer of protection offers should you slip up. And if you share your PC, your safe computing regime goes straight out the window if your roommate wanders haphazardly across the web.

In an attempt to beef up security, Linksys announced it is teaming up with Trend Micro to integrate the latter's Home Network Defender internet security software into its routers to help block malicious sites from doing harm. Previously offered as a software application, Home Network Defender will be integrated with the Linksys WRT310N and WRT610N routers, offering protection to any computers connected to the network.

The software integration is meant to deny access to sites it deems unsafe with user-adjustable sensitivity controls, as well as embed parental controls and user-activity reporting into the above mentioned routers. What it won't do is offer anti-virus protection, however Linksys says that four licenses of Trend Micro Antivirus plus AntiSpyware will come included as part of the deal.

Existing WRT310N and WRT610N have the option of upgrading their router's firmware for the new software integration, which will carry a 30-day complimentary trial. After that, the service runs $60/year.

Cisco Brings Very Sleek Media Hub NAS to the Table at CES

Paul Lilly — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:07:24 -0600

Cisco's making its presence known at CES with three new sleek looking web-enabled Media Hub NAS boxes. Adding to the sex appeal is a front-panel LCD and 6-in-1 media card reader found on the NMH405 (500GB, $400) and NMH410 (1TB, $430), while the 500GB NMH305 trades in those extras for a cheaper price tag ($350). All three versions ship with a single drive setup with the ability to accommodate a second drive configured as JBOD or in a RAID 1 array.

One of the main selling points looks to be the slick user interface accessible through any web browser equipped with Flash 9 or later. From within the UI, users can drag-and-drop files and folders or choose to upload them instead using the File Browser feature (doesn't support folders). Other goodies include a Media Importer application designed to automatically scan local and network shares and copy them to the Media Hub, and the ability to stream to any UPnP AV / DLNA device, as well as iTunes streaming.

According to SmallNetBuilder.com, who has been playing with one of the NAS boxes, Cisco managed to make the remote access feature stupid simple, bypassing the need to play around with your router's settings or setting up and configuring a dynamic DNS account.

FSF to Cisco: It's Time to get Sued!

David Murphy — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:30:21 -0600

The Free Software Foundation filed suit in U.S. District Court today, alleging that networking giant Cisco violated FSF copyrights by not giving its users the ability to share and modify the open-source software it uses as the basis for some of its hardware. That's a mouthful, so here's what happened: According FSF, the company found that Cisco was using a GNU-licensed version of Linux to power its firmware. Only, Cisco wasn't giving its customers the full access to the source code that the GNU license specifies as a condition of use!

According to the FSF, the company has been working with Cisco in an attempt to repair these licensing issues since 2003, when the FSF first noticed that Cisco's WRT54G router was running Linux source code, yet offering purchasers no way to access that source code as stipulated in the accompanying GNU license. Cisco allegedly took the ball and ran with it, levying the same treatment for a wide swath of its networking products and accompanying software. That's how things got messy, and why the FSF decided to pursue legal action to protect its copyrights.

"Our licenses are designed to ensure that everyone who uses the software can change it," said Richard Stallman, president and founder of the FSF. "In order to exercise that right, people need the source code, and that's why our licenses require distributors to provide it. We are enforcing our licenses to protect the rights that everyone should have with all software: to use it, share it, and modify it as they see fit."

The complaint, which you can read for yourself, asks the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to enjoin Cisco from distributing the infringing products. FSF also seeks monetary rewards -- all the profits Cisco has made from said devices. That's an open-source nuke, if we've ever heard one! Cisco has yet to respond to the suit as of this article's writing. But if this case goes in the FSF's favor, the idea is that Cisco would have to release all of the code that it's mixed alongside the GNU-bound Linux code. At least, if Cisco intends to keep using code that falls under a GNU license, that's the way it has to work.

Linksys DMA2200 Media Center Extender

Michael Brown — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:59:09 -0600

We’ve been waiting for media-streaming devices to catch up to 802.11n, and the Linksys DMA2200 does it in style—geek style, that is. The box isn’t particularly attractive, but we dig the dual-band Wi-Fi radio inside that’s capable of operating on either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency bands.

We also appreciate the built-in DVD player that’s capable of scaling our standard-def DVDs to 1080i. (Linksys’s DMA2100, the same hardware sans optical drive, sells for $300.) We tested the DMA2200 with Linksys’s WRT600N dual-band 802.11n router (reviewed above) and were impressed with the pair’s ability to stream high-definition 1080p video to a 42-inch ViewSonic N4285P television across a wireless network, even with the extender inside a cabinet inside our double-walled media room.
The wireless connection stumbled when we tried to stream HD video with 5.1-channel audio attached, however, and it broke down completely when we moved the extender into a more enclosed area of the cabinet. You’ll find photos of our test environments at http://tinyurl.com/28sjsu.

Aside from delivering the familiar Windows Media Center user interface, the primary advantages that devices like the DMA2200 offer are support for PCs equipped with CableCARD digital tuners and hooks to online media content offered by the likes of Comedy Central, Showtime, and the Discovery Channel. Unfortunately, we found the user interfaces most of those services offer to be utter crap. The ability to pause playback on one media extender and resume it on another, on the other hand, is a slick benefit.

Unlike the less-expensive (but only optionally wireless) Xbox 360, this new class of extender freezes out Windows XP Media Center users altogether: Your host PC must run Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. In fact, aside from the wireless feature and the consumer-electronics formfactor, there’s not a whole lot here that would lead us to recommend the DMA2200 (or even the cheaper, driveless DMA2100, for that matter) over Microsoft’s gaming console—especially if you’re into games.
Streaming 1080p video on a wireless network is compelling; being forced to use Vista to do it isn’t.

Linksys WRT600N Dual-Band Wi-Fi Router

Michael Brown — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:58:43 -0600

The Linksys WRT600N is the first 802.11n draft 2.0 router we’ve tested that can operate on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands simultaneously. It’s also the most expensive Wi-Fi router we’ve ever tested.

We tested the router at its default settings: The 5GHz radio operating in 802.11n-only mode and the 2.4GHz radio operating in mixed 802.11b/g/n mode. (Both radios have access to the same integrated four-port gigabit switch.) We used the latter for data and the former for streaming media to Linksys’s DMA2200 (reviewed below). The router delivered impressive results, especially while simultaneously transferring data and streaming HD video.

In fact, the WRT600N bested our previous favorite (D-Link’s DIR-655) by a whopping 43 percent at close range (see chart). The chasm widened to a staggering 170 percent when the client was placed at its furthest point from the router inside the home, but the gap narrowed to just 5 percent when we compared performance inside the well-insulated media room at Maximum PC Lab North. D-Link’s product beat Linksys’s when the client was outside the house.

The dual-band feature really came to the fore when we streamed 1080p video clips over the wireless network: The DIR-655’s data throughput dropped by nearly half in some situations; the WRT600N’s was unaffected.

Not everyone needs a router that can handle conventional traffic, VoIP, and high-definition media all at the same time. If you do, or if your neighborhood is simply jam-packed with competing access points, Linksys’s WRT600N should be at the top of your router shopping list.

Linksys WRT350N

Michael Brown — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:55:05 -0600

You can never have too much speed or too much storage, and the Linksys WRT350N makes it easy to have both. This router took first place while running in 802.11n-only mode and second place while running in mixed 802.11b/g/n mode. And its Storage Link feature enables you to plug in any USB storage device to add NAS functionality—the only router in this roundup to offer such a feature.

Linksys’s installation wizard prompts you to change the router’s password, and it encourages you to change its SSID and to set up Wi-Fi security, but it doesn’t push the issue or warn networking green peas of the consequences of not setting up security. The firmware-based help files were among the most comprehensive of any of the routers we reviewed, but inexperienced users will likely become lost if they rely on them to configure some of the router’s more advanced features.

Linksys supports not only WPA2 Personal security, but also WPA Enterprise, WPA2 Enterprise, and RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) security. This is overkill, since most people will never go beyond WPA2 Personal, and if it’s at all responsible for this router’s steep street price of $195, it’s not worth it. The presence of a four-port Gigabit Ethernet switch inside its shell certainly doesn’t explain the price tag, because the far cheaper D-Link, Netgear, and Buffalo routers are all equipped with Gigabit switches.

Setting up the router to function as a NAS box is as easy as plugging a drive into the router’s USB port and configuring access. You can format a blank disk (but only as FAT32), create partitions, and establish share permissions so that other network users can access the attached storage. The router has a built-in media server, too, enabling it to stream music, video, and digital photos from the attached storage to media adapters compatible with Universal Plug and Play. This is great for streaming music you’ve purchased or ripped from CD, but it won’t be of much use if you have a music-subscription service, such as Rhapsody, which requires you to use its player.

You can also set up the router and its attached storage to function as an ftp server, granting access to individual folders, selected partitions, or the entire disk. Unlike Asus’s innovative WL-700gE 802.11g router (reviewed February 2007), however, the Linksys will not function as an independent BitTorrent client.

The WRT350N delivered very good speed at range, beating even the mighty D-Link DIR-655 when operating in mixed mode with the client 120 feet from the router. We thought this range could be attributed to the Linksys’s odd fly-swatter antenna, but the DIR-655 surpassed it in terms of long-range speed when both routers were running in 802.11n-only mode.

The WRT350N’s Storage Link feature is cool, but we’re not sure those factors justify this router’s premium price tag.