[lug] OT- Info on WAN router via Linux

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Oct 10, 1999 at 10:56:32PM -0600, zeb wrote:
>This came up on a another list, any info please?

Sangoma makes great WAN cards.  They tend to be a little touchy to set
up initially, but once they're going they work great.  They do tend to
require a good bit of messing around to get set up.  We've been selling
them in our small form-factor firewall machines, and recently for a
customer out of the area we had to send them a standalone router+CSU/DSU
because we just couldn't talk them through getting the Sangoma set up.

In addition to the cards with integrated CSU/DSU, they also have ones
that will talk to an external CSU/DSU.  With the appropriate cable,
one should be able to set these cards up directly connected to a
router for testing, as the author of the message you forwarded on
was interested in doing.  You can't get into that for under $500 I
don't think though.

The card with integrated CSU/DSU is just under a kilobuck, which does
put it close to the cost of some of the stand-alone router+CSU/DSU
combinations.  It's nice to have the WAN port directly on a Linux
box -- you don't have to configure a router-to-router network or
anything of that sort.  However, you don't really save any money,
and it tends to be harder to configure.

I'd be reluctant to recommend them unless there was some compelling
reason not to use a stand-alone configuration.  Especially if the
comparison is between a router alone, and one of these cards and
a Linux box.  In that case, you'd be spending more money for a
(in general) less reliable system.

Sean
-- 
 Give me immortality or give me death!
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.