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My experience withe 871W as a WiFi and Lan Router
My Cisco 871W experience?
Well my experience regarding CISCO was? NONE! Never worked with CLI, but I was adviced to select CISCO to replace some old outdated Routers from Symantec (The could?nt handle the bandwith, and they couldn?t handle all the special wishes to VLAN, WiFi ect..)
Our Compnay have a central site connected to the internet though a 8 Mb/s (actually a 10 Mb/s, but the other 2 Mbit are separated into a dedicated 2 Mb/s VoIP MPLS VPN) though the 8 mbit connection a Cisco 1812W maintains connection to 12 Cisco 871W working as Department / ConstructionSite - Routers.
At every Site there is 2 LAN ports Bridged with a Wireless LAN wich are VPN site-2-site conneted to the central LAN. And 2 other Ports on a different Local LAN segment deperated from the ?Corporate LAN? for guest Access ect. The Guest Lan is likewise bridged with at Guest Wifi LAN. ? So customers can revice a WPA PassCode to access the Internet at our sites.
Basically I would say that I?ll take some time for a Cisco-CLI-Virgin, despite the comfort of Cisco SDM (Secure Device Manager ? A GUI to visually configure the router.). Regardless of the SDM, its almost 100% sure that you have to examine the CLI, to locate bugs that the SDM doesn?t catch.
All of my external sites have Static IP delivered by DHCP, and I only jyst recently discovered that the ?reset configuration? could be altered the meet My needs. Wich means that if the router needs to be reset, If I accedenly locks my self out (Router management access restriction) the Local Users can be instructed to insert paperclip in reset hole, and restart Router holding the clip inserted in 10 seconds. It also means that when a worksite changes, and the router goes to another site, I only have to change the IP adresse in my central Router (1812W) and Its up-and running again.
Generaly I like them. But the manuals located on the web and the internal webserver are a bit limited, and are mainly concentrated on the CLI and to explain
?what-am-I-looking-at, not ?how-can-I-use-it?..
The SDM needs to be praised!! ? the SDM v. 2.3.1 have section enabling the ability to cut and paste parts of the configuration directly in-to a window? Pretty Cool when you need to restore a previously saved backup. Just Paste the Backup Config to a window and hit the ?Replace? button, and the Router replaces the Config, and reboots (well ? once every 3 or 4 times you have to make sure I actually does so, and if not: repeat. - Just make a ping for the router and If it disapears, it booting!!
Now I only have one major problem the GuestWiFi authentication is done by inserting a WPA code in the router, (which mean that I have to be contacted to make it happened) but I would really LOVE it, if I had a central Website where my coworkers could click on a button and recive a timelimited code for Wireless Access on specific Routers. Or maybye a local Website running on the ROuter where an account could login an open an guest account for 2 days or 1 week ect...
The access to the Corporate VPN-LAN ssid (VPN-Site2Site) is made in such a way tha the individual Routers makes a RADIUS Authorization request to my AD, and thereby allows users having ?Dial-In? enabled in my AD, access to WiFI. (that took time to make!!)
Im running the IOS : advipservices9-mz.123-8YI2.bin image on the 871W boxes, and the c181x-advipservicesk9-mz.124-2.T2.bin on my 1812..
I would recommend the 871W, but do spend some time to play with router before hooking up the business though it.
For testing I had the 871W running the central site (10 Site-2-Site), with out any problems for 2 days.
Other great tools for Cisco Backups for a lot of boxes at he same time, which are a must-have is Kiwi CatTool: It will perform configuration backups of many devices at the same time, issue commands via Telnet or SSH to many devices at once, change all your network device passwords in one go. And a whole lot more.. go grab a freewarecopy at http://www.kiwisyslog.com/products.php (limited 2 1 thread, the ?Engineer Single install? version have 10 threads, and can only be running in one instance on the local LAN segment (broadcast Range). But it just what you need If you need the roll back the box to an old configuration.
Well my experience regarding CISCO was? NONE! Never worked with CLI, but I was adviced to select CISCO to replace some old outdated Routers from Symantec (The could?nt handle the bandwith, and they couldn?t handle all the special wishes to VLAN, WiFi ect..)
Our Compnay have a central site connected to the internet though a 8 Mb/s (actually a 10 Mb/s, but the other 2 Mbit are separated into a dedicated 2 Mb/s VoIP MPLS VPN) though the 8 mbit connection a Cisco 1812W maintains connection to 12 Cisco 871W working as Department / ConstructionSite - Routers.
At every Site there is 2 LAN ports Bridged with a Wireless LAN wich are VPN site-2-site conneted to the central LAN. And 2 other Ports on a different Local LAN segment deperated from the ?Corporate LAN? for guest Access ect. The Guest Lan is likewise bridged with at Guest Wifi LAN. ? So customers can revice a WPA PassCode to access the Internet at our sites.
Basically I would say that I?ll take some time for a Cisco-CLI-Virgin, despite the comfort of Cisco SDM (Secure Device Manager ? A GUI to visually configure the router.). Regardless of the SDM, its almost 100% sure that you have to examine the CLI, to locate bugs that the SDM doesn?t catch.
All of my external sites have Static IP delivered by DHCP, and I only jyst recently discovered that the ?reset configuration? could be altered the meet My needs. Wich means that if the router needs to be reset, If I accedenly locks my self out (Router management access restriction) the Local Users can be instructed to insert paperclip in reset hole, and restart Router holding the clip inserted in 10 seconds. It also means that when a worksite changes, and the router goes to another site, I only have to change the IP adresse in my central Router (1812W) and Its up-and running again.
Generaly I like them. But the manuals located on the web and the internal webserver are a bit limited, and are mainly concentrated on the CLI and to explain
?what-am-I-looking-at, not ?how-can-I-use-it?..
The SDM needs to be praised!! ? the SDM v. 2.3.1 have section enabling the ability to cut and paste parts of the configuration directly in-to a window? Pretty Cool when you need to restore a previously saved backup. Just Paste the Backup Config to a window and hit the ?Replace? button, and the Router replaces the Config, and reboots (well ? once every 3 or 4 times you have to make sure I actually does so, and if not: repeat. - Just make a ping for the router and If it disapears, it booting!!
Now I only have one major problem the GuestWiFi authentication is done by inserting a WPA code in the router, (which mean that I have to be contacted to make it happened) but I would really LOVE it, if I had a central Website where my coworkers could click on a button and recive a timelimited code for Wireless Access on specific Routers. Or maybye a local Website running on the ROuter where an account could login an open an guest account for 2 days or 1 week ect...
The access to the Corporate VPN-LAN ssid (VPN-Site2Site) is made in such a way tha the individual Routers makes a RADIUS Authorization request to my AD, and thereby allows users having ?Dial-In? enabled in my AD, access to WiFI. (that took time to make!!)
Im running the IOS : advipservices9-mz.123-8YI2.bin image on the 871W boxes, and the c181x-advipservicesk9-mz.124-2.T2.bin on my 1812..
I would recommend the 871W, but do spend some time to play with router before hooking up the business though it.
For testing I had the 871W running the central site (10 Site-2-Site), with out any problems for 2 days.
Other great tools for Cisco Backups for a lot of boxes at he same time, which are a must-have is Kiwi CatTool: It will perform configuration backups of many devices at the same time, issue commands via Telnet or SSH to many devices at once, change all your network device passwords in one go. And a whole lot more.. go grab a freewarecopy at http://www.kiwisyslog.com/products.php (limited 2 1 thread, the ?Engineer Single install? version have 10 threads, and can only be running in one instance on the local LAN segment (broadcast Range). But it just what you need If you need the roll back the box to an old configuration.
Posted by jacob.p@...
Updated - 8th Sep 2006
