On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 10:02:14AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 09:20 +0000, Chris G wrote:
the router (a 2Wire 2700HGV) and its software seem pretty good. The 'advanced' tabs in the router set up seem to give one a fair amount of control.
My main issue with those is that the firewall/port forwarding settings are initially a bit confusing as they are done by machine name not just a list of rules against ip addresses and if the Router isn't the thing on the network handing out DCHP leases then they are done by mac address or something.
It actually seems very similar indeed to my Speedtouch so, even if a little odd, was fairly easy to understand.
Also why why why when BT are shipping their routers to their customers they insist on leaving them set at a non optimal MTU for the BT adsl network (which causes issues with several vpn solutions and various other things) is beyond me.
So should I change it? If so, what to?
There are some obvious things I have to do:-
Change the address of one of the routers so they're not both 192.168.1.254 Turn off DHCP on at least one of the routers (unless I split subnets, see below)Even if you end up with them on different subnets, if they are on the same physical network you need to be turning off DHCP on one of them.
Yes, I was meaning actually physically splitting the network as well, but I don't see any point.
We have two main users, it *feels* like it would make sense to use one ADSL router as the default gateway for one user and the other ADSL router as the default for the other user. Then set up so that the 'other' router is the alternative gateway. Are there any downsides to this approach?Not really, an alternative is to run one router for desktop browsing and the other for things like mail services, remote access etc with of course the ability to swap one service to another if needed. You could if you wanted to be very clever probably rig up something with RIP and gateway metrics to automate the changeover and then put your external services on dynamic DNS.
OK, thanks, I think I'll go with the simple approach initially.
I don't think there's any easy way to use both routers from one system (to use up all the bandwidth) is there? At least there isn't without a lot of hassle.To pool the lines together and use the total bandwidth as one connection would require ISP co-operation even if the connections came from the same provider. Then from your end you have to ditch the two routers and either have a linux box with two ADSL interfaces (or two pppoe interfaces to adsl modems) or buy a lot of money's worth of Cisco with two ATM interfaces. I have done it the cisco way before and it wasn't fun to configure.
Yes, as I thought, not really a serious possibility.
Thanks for all the comments/help.