[ale] PPPo{EA} v NAT in DSL gateways

[Jason Fritcher]

On Dec 31, 2008, at 11:16 AM, Jason Fritcher wrote:
> I wanted a Cisco, but didn't want to pay full Cisco prices, so I went
> to ebay for mine. :) I found a seller there has several 857Ws up with
> free shipping for $289 or best offer, and he accepted an offer for
> $260. UPS says it should be here Friday, so I can let you know if
> everything was on the level afterward.

Here is my followup on my Cisco 857W purchase. After running it for a  
week, I can say that I really like this router. It took a full day of  
research to figure out how to configure all of the bits and get them  
playing nice together, but that was because I could not get the Java  
based web-config tool to work on my Mac. Its been rock solid this  
whole time, I've had no wifi problems like my Linksys had, but I'm  
still investigating 2 instances of my PPPOE session being dropped  
while the DSL line remained sync'ed. I'm currently thinking the DSLAM  
gets busy enough at times that it stops answering LCP Echo requests  
and so the router thinks the session has hung, but I need to wait for  
the next drop to find out for sure. The beautiful thing about this  
router is the shear amount of debug info you can get to diagnose those  
kinds of problems.

-- 
Jason Fritcher
jkf at wolfnet.org