Router recommendation in the $250-300 range

analog trunks were not working either, activity light on the router were solid instead of flashing.
NO ONE CAN RECOMMEND A DECENT ROUTER?

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.

Another nod to pfsense

of course I'm not using hubs, we have 4 (24) port 10/100/1000 switches. TB is completely on its own network and data is on another network.

I think the Linksys RV series are fine. Very few people are lucky enough to have ridiculously fast broadband that is too much for the RV.

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 routers, as well as the 3com 3026 Ethernet router...
The 3com router is nice because it has advanced features like multicast routing, PIM DM and PIM SM, all kinds of VPN options, very powerfull for a decent price..

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

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.

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.

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

but a little slow also i couldn't get remote sip clients working (no audio)
which did work on linksys wrt54g with dd-wrt , but the linksys kept on locking up

currently i installed a wrt300n and still cant remote sip clients to work

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

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?

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!

I'm running 22 SIP phones behind a Fortigate FWF-50B and have not had to reboot yet. Phones are behind a NAT on the Fortigate as well.

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.

I have an alix on order, let you know when I get it built, have had great luck with the previous WRAP boards, extremely flexible.