Cisco 861W opinions?
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From: Scott on 6 Jun 2010 00:46 I'm looking for a good reliable router / access point for my home office. The router I have now is a D-Link DIR-655 which itself is the best router I've used, but even it has the occasional problem with the access point dropping connectivity to all clients needing a reboot. I'm tired of screwing around with routers that need reboots to restore functionality, and I'm to the point of finding something business- grade / commercial-grade. Netgear and Linksys low-end products have left me similarly disappointed in the past. Looking at Cisco offerings, I found the 861W which looks reasonably priced. Any opinions? Thanks, Scott
From: bod43 on 7 Jun 2010 05:56 On 6 June, 18:10, Scott <smba...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks for the reply, Doug. I'm not too worried about the Cisco > command-line interface. Although I've never worked with a Cisco > product before, I am relatively well versed in CLIs, and often times > prefer them to GUIs. > > I looked into the 881 series as well but the availability seems to be > much poorer. There are numerous places with the 861W listed as in > stock, but almost every place that has an 881 series lists it as > either 'out of stock', 'unavailable', or 'call'. This makes me wonder I had assumed, and still do not know either way, that the 860/880 relationship was similar to the 850/870. 850 Cheaper Slower CPU - possible limitation on data rate than can be supported Only one VLAN No "Advanced IP services" software - only needed for very exotic stuff or more than one VLAN. 870 More expensive Faster CPU - higher forwarding speed Up to four VLANS - needs more expensive software "Advanced IP services" I am not really familiar with the 860/880. Here are the forwarding seeds (fast switching - which is what you get in most cases). 850 10,000 pps 5 Mbps (bits per second) 870 25,000 pps 12 Mbps 860 10,000 pps 12 Mbps 880 50,000 pps 25 Mbps 890 100,000 pps 51 Mbps NOTE:- these speeds assume the worst case of 64 byte packets. Average packet size in most cases is much more than this and throughput correspondingly higher. assuming 250 bytes is still going to be quite conservative unless you are doing something odd or perhaps VoIP where small packets are used. These speeds do not apply to traffic switched within the integral 4 port (or whatever) ethernet switch. I imagine that will be wire rate on all ports. So the 860 will be good for say 50Mbps internet access unless as mentioned small packets are in use. Figures from:- http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/routerperformance.pdf Hmmm that's a "partners" link. Don't think I am logged on right now but the ways of the Firefox they can be quite mysterious. Document may be available otherwise. Google for [router packets per second 3725 3845] seems to help. That's how I found it.
From: bod43 on 7 Jun 2010 06:15 On 7 June, 10:56, bod43 <Bo...(a)hotmail.co.uk> wrote: > On 6 June, 18:10, Scott <smba...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > Thanks for the reply, Doug. I'm not too worried about the Cisco > > command-line interface. Although I've never worked with a Cisco > > product before, I am relatively well versed in CLIs, and often times > > prefer them to GUIs. > > > I looked into the 881 series as well but the availability seems to be > > much poorer. There are numerous places with the 861W listed as in > > stock, but almost every place that has an 881 series lists it as > > either 'out of stock', 'unavailable', or 'call'. This makes me wonder > > I had assumed, and still do not know either way, > that the 860/880 relationship was similar > to the 850/870. > > 850 > Cheaper > Slower CPU - possible limitation on data rate than > can be supported > Only one VLAN > No "Advanced IP services" software - only needed for very > exotic stuff or more than one VLAN. > > 870 > More expensive > Faster CPU - higher forwarding speed > Up to four VLANS - needs more expensive software "Advanced IP > services" > > I am not really familiar with the 860/880. > > Here are the forwarding seeds (fast switching - which > is what you get in most cases). > > 850 10,000 pps 5 Mbps (bits per second) > 870 25,000 pps 12 Mbps > > 860 10,000 pps 12 Mbps > 880 50,000 pps 25 Mbps > 890 100,000 pps 51 Mbps > > NOTE:- these speeds assume the worst case of 64 byte packets. Average > packet size in most cases is much more than this and throughput > correspondingly higher. assuming 250 bytes is still going to be quite > conservative unless you are doing something odd or perhaps VoIP where > small packets are used. > > These speeds do not apply to traffic switched within the > integral 4 port (or whatever) ethernet switch. I imagine > that will be wire rate on all ports. > > So the 860 will be good for say 50Mbps internet access > unless as mentioned small packets are in use. > > Figures from:-http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/... > > Hmmm that's a "partners" link. Don't think I am logged on > right now but the ways of the Firefox they can be > quite mysterious. Document may be available otherwise. > Google for [router packets per second 3725 3845] > seems to help. That's how I found it. Sorry I meant to mention. 860 and 880 will I think have the same life expectancy. The lack of availability of 880 is likely due to the 860 being cheaper and and at the same time more than man enough for the job of a broadband SOHO router. They probably don't sell enough to bother stocking them.
From: Scott on 11 Jun 2010 16:10 Okay, so the beast arrived on Wednesday. My first impressions were good - unboxing it shows it to be heavy, sturdy-looking, ... big ..., it appears to be of quality physical construction. Unfortunately, it's gone downhill ever since I started trying to configure it. The CP and CP Express software seem to be extremely poor quality. I'd read warnings about this ahead of time, but usually I suspect those sorts of warnings come from novice users unfamiliar with networking... I've had numerous problems with the GUI software. 'CP Express' insists on running a wizard each time I try to use it, but appears to fail to save the settings at the end of the wizard, leading CP Express to insist on running the wizard again next time I use it. The 'CP' tool would load up and display a blank windows explorer page and sit there with the progress bar moving for hours, but not actually doing anything. I eventually determined by googling around for similar problems that it was lacking 'Adobe Flash'. The CP software requires flash and java, and the failure mode of not having flash installed is to sit there and do nothing. Note to Cisco: an error message would be handy. Fortunately, when I finally did get CP to work and write some settings to permanent storage, it cleared up the wizard problem with CP Express, so I can at least get CP Express to launch and view the settings. Unfortunately, neither program seems to be capable of setting the router's IP address. Well that's not entirely true.... They'll both change the router's IP address, and the router responds to pings at the new address, but the router does not respond to telnet or web connections. It's effectively bricked until I power cycle it. I suppose I could try to get into it via the serial console and see what's going on inside the box. Can anyone confirm for me -- do the internal telnet and web servers need to be restarted after changing the IP address? I had hoped to at least get a basic workable configuration using the GUI tools that I could then tweak over the command line. The GUI tools just don't seem to be functional enough to do this. I wonder why Cisco includes these tools with the router if they're not capable of performing even the simplest and most common configuration changes that need to be done to a router. Scott
From: Scott on 11 Jun 2010 17:37
Silly configuration professional software.... It changed the IP address without updating the access control list.... Well, that's one problem solved. Fortunately, the CLI seems to be relatively easy to learn. |