General : Oddity in router interface

[Milambar]

I was examining the page source of VmRouterStatus_status.asp, in order to modify my script that monitors and logs my router status. I spotted a huge chunk of the page has been commented out.

<!--
<tr>
	<td class="title">Ethernet 1 Link Status</td>					
        <td>Up</td>
	<td>1000 Mbps/Full duplex</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td class="title">Ethernet 2 Link Status</td>
	<td>Up</td>
	<td>1000 Mbps/Full duplex</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td class="title">Ethernet 3 Link Status</td>
	<td>Up</td>
	<td>1000 Mbps/Full duplex</td>
</tr>
<tr>
        <td class="title">Ethernet 4 Link Status</td>
	<td>Up</td>
	<td>1000 Mbps/Full duplex</td>
</tr>
-->

I'm wondering if anyone had any ideas as to why VM decided to comment out this block, rather than allowing it to be displayed normally?

[Kushan]

Probably done as part of their "Let's take the netgear firmware and dumb it down for the thickos" plan.

[Sephiroth]

There was a long thread in one of the forums a few months ago that went into a lot of things that were commented out. But if you want it you gotta find it!

[kwikbreaks]

I'd guess that the code that should have populated those fields either never got written or was so inefficient/bug ridden that they just commented that out too.

I'm 100% convinced that the old flood detection / pingtest "bug" was fixed simply by ignoring the setting and leaving the code inactive regardless.

There's more than one way to eliminate bugs and commenting out non-essential buggycode is the probably the cheapest. It's certainly the most reliable.

[qasdfdsaq]

I wouldn't say it's the most reliable, just randomly commenting out buggy code can break a lot of other things if inter-dependencies are not considered properly.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Kushan

Probably done as part of their "Let's take the netgear firmware and dumb it down for the thickos" plan.

More likely what Kush says plus what can we take out that won't cause the world to howl but will reduce resource contention in the SH2.

[kwikbreaks]

Looking at the commented out code the fact that the fields appear to be populated suggests that there is code running to populate them. That suggests it could be dumbing down or (imo) more likely that the code isn't working correctly so they don't want to present obviously wrong status information to users and have opted for the simplest way to avoid that. It would be interesting to know if it changes if a cable is disconnected or a 100Mbps device substituted. Does the current all ports connected at 1000Mbps reflect reality at that time?

[Milambar]

Thats a good thought. I realise that its showing all 4 as connected, yet the reality is that only 2 are connected to actual devices. The other two ports are unused as most of my devices connect via wifi.

I guess that suggests non-functional code behind them.

[kwikbreaks]

In that case I suspect there is no code behind it and the html was just a mock up of what could be done. In past life I used to work for a software company - we always reckoned that the best demos were by slide projector rather than showing live code...