Router recommendation in the $250-300 range
Submitted by mvsystems on Thu, 04/26/2007 - 10:34am.
Can anyone make a router recommendation in the $250-300 range that they are using. I have a site set up with 60 IP phones, 8 SIP trunks and 8 analog trunks with a Sangoma card. We used a Linksys router that seems to have run fine for a couple months but know is acting up. All phones lost registration this morning until the router was rebooted and they re-registered and started working. Then a half hour later all outbound dialing both SIP and analog stopped working, you could dial out then dead silence until you hung up. Rebooted the server and it cured that but hoping its related to the junk router.
Many Thanks
those linksys routers are not bad
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 11:23am
i think it might have been your provider and not your router how i know this is i have 10 remote phone on my system and i have had the same issue and when i can always call the remote phones but i can never call out my digital trunks until i either reboot trixbox or unplug the router
Linksys / cisco
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 4:47pm
Any of the rv0 routers RV042 is about 160.00 USD
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewproduct.asp?PID=ROUTERS-LINKSYS&up...
I use the RV082 / RV016 VPN routers
they have a dual wan port setup which allows for two inet connections you chose to bond the channels or use one as backup.
It does 1 to 1 nat (say you get thre ips from the provider you can use one as the nat one to many for the PC's / Phones. you could thn setup a port for nat 1 to 1 and pass a public ip (note not a DMZ zone a TRUE 1 to 1 nat) to a box / device behind the device
Like if you had a hub between the cable / DSL modem and a router with the TB plugged into the hub.
Let's break this down some
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 4:51pm
Let's break this down some more... are you using switches or hubs for the distribution of the 61+ devices going into the router? If you're only using hubs and letting the router do all the switching, then there's your problem. If I had 60 or more extensions, I wouldn't be trying to skimp on the equipment handling my traffic.
My experience has been that until you get near $1000, any router is going to have problems with capacity like that and constant volume.
look at http://m0n0.ch/wall
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 5:12pm
look at http://m0n0.ch/wall or www.pfsense.org to roll your own. For $300 you can have a powerful router indeed. These boxes are stable, too with excellent uptime under heavy loads. Just give it good hardware -- intel NICs, etc... and you won't be sorry.
pfSense!
Thu, 04/26/2007 - 7:03pm
pfSense would be an excellent choice indeed.
I don't recommend those RV devices from Linksys at all, they have a very small throughput!! Absolutely insufficient for any decent sized network with high speed broadband connections.
For a dual WAN router (with 8-port switch), the Netgear FVX538 is a far better choice. It has 91 Mbps WAN to LAN (almost wire speed!) and 60Mbps 3DES throughput.
It can support up to 200 VPN tunnels, and has all the NAT options just like the Linksys.
Overall, a much more powerfull device, and still at an extremely attractive price! ($350)
Has anyone have any feedback
Fri, 04/27/2007 - 11:12am
Does anyone here have any feedback with HOTBRICK router VPN appliances? I picked up 3 of them (401 VPN) and so far they run pretty good. I did have to dumb them down a bit to get them to VPN to each other but I had no problem getting a tunnel to my pfsense. They also have a feature for VOIP.
This may be an option for you mvsystems. Pricing on some models are below your price range but I beleive they have one up there that may do what you are looking for. They also have one VPN model that has a dual * EDIT *WAN* with VPN support
pfsense on Nokia firewalls.
Fri, 04/27/2007 - 8:55am
I have multiple Nokia IP 440 firewalls running pfSense. They're great solid machines. I installed pfSense on Compact Flash cards with IDE adapters.
I have about $70 in each of them. The Nokia IP440 usually comes with 4 port ethernet card. Several have 8 eth ports. (2 cards)
The only drawbacks are they're loud. (Fan noise) They're a 4 u rack space. and they're quite heavy. And the original CD Roms don't like CDR's.
I don't have any experience with the newer and smaller IP 330
There is always the Netopia
Fri, 04/27/2007 - 9:52am
rv082
Fri, 04/27/2007 - 12:37pm
I agree with Bubba that the rv082 is decent.
There's one catch with using the dual-wan in load balancing. The nat isn't sticky. So outgoing connections may go out from either WAN port.
This can break certain services. Most obvious example is logging onto a forum that checks if your IP has changed. You may be prompted to log on again and again each time it uses an alternate WAN port to connect out.
The work around is to bind any problematic connections to a specific wan port. You can do this by IP or port.
The router also has very basic ability to prioritizing traffic by port/ip and VPN server capability. Once or twice I've had to reset the router. And yes, if you have the money I'm sure you can get something better. But the Rv082 is good value for the money.
-- James
Yea, I wish the RV had some
Mon, 04/30/2007 - 3:37pm
Yea, I wish the RV had some sort of traffic shaping. As a minimum port/packet prioritization. That is the only thing missing that could come in handy for VoIP.
Given the choice btw a RV082 and a Soekris 4501 with m0n0wall, which would be better?
I like m0n0wall for it's traffic shaping abilities. Comes out to about the same price as the RV082 but has less ethernet ports. Can't do Nat-T which probably won't be a problem.
I'm a sucker for the roll your own stuff but sometimes it's nice to just buy the box and plug it in if there isn't a price advantage.
Linksys, from what I hear,
Mon, 04/30/2007 - 7:35pm
Linksys, from what I hear, became a different company after Cisco bought them out. Unfortunately, I swore them off long before Cisco came sniffing around. So, I can't attest to their products. I'll tell you though, that we have had routers from Cisco, Linksys, 3Com, Netgear, and USRobotics. None of them could handle the load for our exchange / IIS servers without locking up periodically. Some locked up every week, others it was more sporadic and less often -- once a month or so. The point is that they weren't cutting it. So, I put a monowall into production running on a Celeron D 2.8Ghz, two intel nics, 512MB of RAM and a transcend industrial IDE flash drive. We haven't had a lockup now in two years of production. The machine has been rebooted only for some config changes and firmware upgrades. It also gets hammered pretty well as an IPSEC gateway for a few telecommuters, too.
We were so excited, that we standardized the build and started selling them to clients, especially those previously complaining of lockups and loss of Inet services (using 3com routers, etc...). Once they got over the cost (their retail cost), they were well pleased and their lockup problems went away as we said they would. So, in my opinion (and it is just my opinion), better the worst monowall or pfsense than the greatest Linksys.
another vote for m0n0wall or pfsense
Mon, 04/30/2007 - 10:53pm
Yet another vote for m0n0wall or pfsense.
I hate moving parts for critical items like firewall/routers, so I usually purchase a Soekris 5 or 7 port 4801. If 3 ports will do it, then a 3 port Wrap box works very well too.
This is great for a SOHO solution too, as it provides features like VPN access, tunnels to branch offices and traffic shaping - e.g. give the voip interface priority.
I'm told that a good commercial solution is made by SonicWall. I've used their products in the past and been very happy, though they can be expensive.
I have a hard time believing
Tue, 05/01/2007 - 9:16am
I have a hard time believing a Cisco was constantly locking up unless it was at the end of it's life or had some sort of hardware problem. Cisco IS routers. That's what they do.
I DO believe that dollar for dollar, m0n0wall on a Soekris or Wrap is much better value than a Cisco and their 45%+ margins.
I can provide witnesses. :)
Tue, 05/01/2007 - 10:34am
I can provide witnesses. :) Cisco 800 series (I forget if it was an 803 or 806) circa 2004 or so purchased new from Tech Data distribution. We even added additional ram to try to stop the lockups, but did no good. But, you believe what you want to believe. I have no reason to lie. Could have been a faulty router, I guess. I did not try to exchange it.
Cisco 800 Series
Thu, 05/10/2007 - 8:38am
That's JUST the 800 series. I bought a brand-new 831 not too long ago for my mother's condo because she saw me build Trixbox systems and freaked out and "had to have one", so having a Cisco 1721 myself running QoS and a complete Trixbox system (flawlessly -- my only downtime is my residential cable modem but that is in the process of changing) and I had all kinds of problems. I bought a SmartNet for it and called TAC, there's some problem with the newer IOS versions and running any application that requires the crypto module/engine -- like firewall, IPSec/VPN or anything like that -- it causes memory leaks or something. Stay away from the 80x and 83x series -- if you want a small basic router either get an 85x or 87x series, which you can get with or without wireless, with Ethernet WAN, ADSL2+, G.SHDSL, ADSL over ISDN, and many more. Or just do like me and get you a Cisco 1721 with at least 64MB RAM/16MB ROM and a VPN accelerator module and handle QoS and firewall and multiple NAT without even flinching. I highly recommend it. NEVER had any problems and I hand-configured the unit from the Cisco IOS command-line and then double-checked it with Cisco SDM (their graphical user interface config- can't perform half the functions that CLI can but it's handy for monitoring) and have it up flawlessly. Don't even have Cisco certs -- but this has inspired me to go get them. Just research around on Google and Cisco's site -- if you need help message me and I'd be glad to help you.
George Chongris
(972) 215-0323
Does RV0X2 really have any VoIP QoS?
Wed, 08/29/2007 - 10:38pm
mustardman:
Quote:
Yea, I wish the RV had some sort of traffic shaping. As a minimum port/packet prioritization. That is the only thing missing that could come in handy for VoIP.
Some are saying on this VERY thread that RV0x2 does port/packet prioritizaton, but I can't find any confirmation of this capability on the Linksys website.
Hope someone would clarify this.
Thanks.
netopia is very stable
Thu, 08/30/2007 - 5:09am
Linksys RV082
Thu, 10/18/2007 - 6:20pm
The RV082 looks like a really good router. I took Bubba's advice after installing roughly a dozen DDWRT firmware versions of consumer routers. The DDWRT has a great feature set, fabulous QoS, but lacks stability in some situations. I grew tired of them, and switched to the RV082. This is a very easy to set up device, with failover / load balancing capabilities, and a good support forum. Thanks Bubba for the great recommendation!
Peter
I'm going to downgrade my
Sun, 10/21/2007 - 3:26pm
I'm going to downgrade my recommendation on the RV082.
The dual-wan mode has a quirk. Unfortunately, this quirk can affect voip. By default in dual wan mode it will randomly send out packets on alternate interfaces. Of course the receiving end will now get packets from two different ip addresses throwing half of them away as bogus.
Right. So you then decide to "bind" your voip to one internet connection. Sounds good? The catch is that if that internet connection goes down it automatically falls over to the other internet connection. This means your voip will reestablish itself on the other internet connection.
At first this sounds good. Except I have a stand-alone sip voip adapter gizmo. When your internet connection comes back up any active connection -- your SIP tcp/ip port to the server will still be stuck on the other internet connection. But any new connections --your udp voice packets -- will go out on the internet connection it was bounded to.
And when the other end gets a bunch of udp packets that don't match the ip of your tcp/ip connection they all get dropped. One way audio.
I tried to add firewall rules on source and destination ips to block all voip connection on the second wan. There may be a way to do it, but I couldn't get it to work. It seemed like the firewall rules were completely ignored for any protocols you specified to be bound to a particular wan port. No matter what I did it would still fail over to the second internet connection. And then when the first internet connection came back up there'd be 1-way audio.
If anyone has a way around this I'd be very glad to hear it.
For other things this router is okay. But in this particular case it's a bit of a pain. Resetting the router will fix it.
James Bennett
-- www.jebsolutions.com
The main issue is running
Wed, 10/24/2007 - 9:57am
The main issue is running the RTP traffic inbound though a router doing NAT or masquerading. If you want to have a remote phone that is not on a vpn tunnel in you have to have a router that supports NATing or SIP Proxying the traffic.
I have only come across a small number that work right they are as follows
1) Astaro Linux (High cost) Works very well
2) IX67 Medium cost, works well but limited in support in # of trunks.
3) Endian (Works but had a devil of a time.
I have no doubt that their are others that work 100% but I would buy Astaro for clients if they had the money. IX67 otherwise based on my experience.
The root problem for anyone interested is that the RTP media stream is not supported at all with NAT. RTP was meant to work with IPV6 were every device had a real IP and when you do NAT stuff can break. Some routers NAT do tricks to fix this but many do not. It's a hit or miss and unless it's designed to do it don't believe that it will.
RV082 required a power cycle...strange
Fri, 12/14/2007 - 10:52am
I have a number of TB servers, each natted behind their own RV082 router. Remote phones in various locations all connect to the servers- no issues. Until recently, that is.
Suddenly one group of remote phones, all natted behind a Linksys DDWRT, suddenly lost connection to the TB server. But that same TB server had other phones in other locations working just fine. Plus a local test phone on that server continued to work fine. So it appeared to be a problem on the remote end. However, everything seemed okay on that remote end- internet access was okay. The phone programming used the IP address of the TB server- not a host name. They could ping and log into the TB server. I had the affected remote user power cycle their modem and router. That didn't help.
Something was blocking the one group of remote phones at that one IP address from registering on my TB server. Strange, as everything had been working for a couple of months. Perhaps some ISP routing issue-or port blocking- or something, I thought. Again, other groups of remote phones from other locations were still working fine on this TB server.
Not knowing what else to do, I power cycled my local RV082 feeding the TB server, and the remote phones all came back to life. And they have remained alive now for two weeks since...
I have never seen this before. Perhaps an issue with the RV082? Any clues, anyone?
No clue, but similar issue....
Mon, 12/17/2007 - 3:01pm
[update/edited]
My intermittent link issue is unrelated to the RV042... user error... please forgive the intrusion.
- Matt
VoipGarageSale.com
Adtran doesn't suck
Fri, 12/14/2007 - 8:39pm
I've had some really strange results with Linksys RV042, very high packet loss and other strangenesses. smallnetbuilder.com had a review on them lately with the same result, that they just chalked up to "unexplained".
Linksys WRT54GL isn't awful, but my Adtran Netvanta 2054 routers are SIP-aware, keep a VPN up flawlessly, and have great tech support. Very positive recommendation for Adtran!
dual wan = dropped packets
Mon, 12/17/2007 - 1:25am
If you don't bind the SIP connection to a wan port your UDP packets will go out over both wan ports. The receiving end then has the confusing case of getting udp packets from two separate ip addresses...and the ones on the IP that don't match the initial SIP tcp/ip port will be dropped.
Binding SIP to one wan is not a work around. When that wan drops it will fall back to the other wan. When the original wan comes back up you have one way audio. There is no way to 100% force the calls to only use one wan.
Here's a poor flow...
Wan1 (sip "bound" to here) - SIP UDP + TCP go out over this wan port and life is good...
Wan 1 drops connection
Devices reconnect on wan2
Wan 1 comes back online
TCP ip connection is still kept active and alive on wan2...
New outgoing SIP call on the server...
because it's "bound" to Wan1 the udp packets go out over WAN1...but the remote end is expecting them to go out over the WAN2 ip since that's where the TCP/IP connection is from. All udp voice packets will be dropped.
You can simulate this problem by just disconnecting and reconnecting the wan ports between calls.
I have tried various firmware on the RV082. I have tried adding firewall rules to block the other wan from handling any sip connections. It seems to 100% ignore firewall rules in the failover case.
If you only use one wan port on this router you will have no problems. But that means you might as well have just bought a much cheaper single wan router to start with.
-- James
If you have a solution that works please let me know.
Using single WAN on RV082
Mon, 12/17/2007 - 9:30am
My original intent was to use the failover capabilities of the RV082. But when setting it all up some months ago, I realized there may be problems implementing the failover feature with a SIP server. I think on the remote end- in the client's offices, the RV082 WAN failover should work okay. I was looking for a single router to standardize the installations- remote and to NAT the server. So I have only been using the single WAN port, without failover or balancing.
When the client called telling me all of their remote phones were down, I logged into FOP. There I saw several phones connected, including some remotes in various locations. But all of their remotes were "grayed"out. A problem on their end, right? Sure seemed so. But they had internet connectivity. I had them reboot their modem and router anyway. No change. Then I talked them through re-programming one of their Polycoms onto a different server. That one immediately registered. How bizarre. So I power-cycled the RV082 router feeding the TB server, and all extensions came back on-line.
It's been working now for 2 1/2 weeks since the failure.
Everything else about these routers seems really good- but I am pretty uncomfortable until this is figured out...
Speaking of
Thu, 12/27/2007 - 2:04pm
Speaking of m0nowall/pfsense. Anyone have that working on a PC Engines Alix? Total cost is around $200 with a flash card and theoretically more powerful than commercial stuff costing 3x more.
I've been looking at SnapGear but pfsense on an Alix is cheaper with more features and probably a lot more powerful.
SnapGear/CyberGaurd works in our installs
Thu, 12/27/2007 - 5:19pm
Cybergaurd (Snapgear) Models have worked very well for us. We use a combination of the 530, 560, and 570 lines (530 and 570 now replaced in the line with newer models). They support a wide range of end point and client VPN, plus traffic shaping options. For some versions (our 570's), the router can function as a SIP PROXY (we use this for remote sites). NAT works well when needed. We presently avoid the SG300 having had issues with it when it was first released. Check them out here if you like: http://www.securecomputing.com/index.cfm?skey=1571
The RV series was disappointing for us - especially when first released. The firmware was really terrible until they got a few revisions under their belts. We abandoned the RV line about 1 year ago - due to unresolved firmware and stability issues.
Member Since:
2006-06-05