Small Business routers

16-bit

16-bit

16-bit

Associate
Joined
16 Sep 2006
Posts
377
Location
In the vicinity
Hey Guys,

I've been using Drayteks for some for most of my customers (10-100 Users per site) but finding that quite a few of them have weird faults and was wondering what routers/firewalls you guys use.
 
Cisco routers mostly. No other reason than they rarely break (never, in my experience).

Firewalls - usually whatever a salesman has managed to flog them previously, Juniper, Netgear, Cisco. I don't have the foggiest on how to use them so I couldn't tell you specifics.

Router demands would depend on what they're using it for. Could it be better served with local caching or replication etc. ?
 
We always use Draytek, though there have been quite a few faults with the latest firmware releases

We use Cisco routers for the bigger stuff, firewalls we use Juniper, seems to be an ongoing discussion on here about what is best
 
I normally go with a dedicated linux box with Clarkconnect installed personally, gives additional features such as apache and obviously you can install a lot more tools in this kind of setup like ntop etc. This does have modules for content filtering, web proxy etc as well :)
 
Juniper SRX 210s these days, freakishly good boxes for the money. Replaced our use of J series routers and SSGs pretty much in one product line. JUNOS, decent performance, never breaks. Bargain of the century at £550...
 
bigredshark said:
Juniper SRX 210s these days, freakishly good boxes for the money. Replaced our use of J series routers and SSGs pretty much in one product line. JUNOS, decent performance, never breaks. Bargain of the century at £550...
Click to expand...

I'd second that, using the SRX boxes in loads of places now and the absolutely wipe the floor with everything else you can get for the same money.
 
bigredshark said:
Juniper SRX 210s these days, freakishly good boxes for the money. Replaced our use of J series routers and SSGs pretty much in one product line. JUNOS, decent performance, never breaks. Bargain of the century at £550...
Click to expand...

£550? That is very good value!

Is that the price because you spend so much with them or can someone who only buys a couple of firewalls a year like me get that price?

Shame I just bought an SSG-140 for a new site a few months ago
 
howler said:
£550? That is very good value!

Is that the price because you spend so much with them or can someone who only buys a couple of firewalls a year like me get that price?

Shame I just bought an SSG-140 for a new site a few months ago
Click to expand...

You can get the SRX210-H online now for around that (a quick Google even finds one supplier flogging them at £500+VAT).
 
Why are these better than a pimped up server (NAR-5500) running pfsense? Or anything else in this price bracket? I am not a huge fan of pfsense but I am struggling to justify the business case for throwing them out as VPN throughout is around 100Mb (our cross connect max speed) and you get things like OpenVPN thrown in for sfa as opposed to a licensed road warrior limit...
 
1.2.3-release has been out donkeys, 2.0 is beta (and has been for a long time) and is nowhere near production quality and I think throwing 500 quid at a barebones appliance which then relies on having a free distro loaded onto it is maybe a false economy. The firewall works but on occasion completely stumps me. Some things about it just feel illogical but maybe that's my ignorance.

I just feel there is probably better out there but I haven't had the opportunity to use anything yet so was hoping someone could throw a few rays of light on it...
 
s0ck said:
Why are these better than a pimped up server (NAR-5500) running pfsense? Or anything else in this price bracket? I am not a huge fan of pfsense but I am struggling to justify the business case for throwing them out as VPN throughout is around 100Mb (our cross connect max speed) and you get things like OpenVPN thrown in for sfa as opposed to a licensed road warrior limit...
Click to expand...

Because if it breaks or something doesn't work as advertised then I call Juniper and it gets fixed in a couple of hours. How much money are you going to loose if your network stops working and you have to spend a day faffing about on forums troubleshooting it? That's worth far more than £550 any day, how some businesses can't appreciate that is beyond me.

It's also an order of magnitude more reliable, generally more secure and the performance is predictable and reliable as it's ASIC based (software routers do stupid things when they get heavily loaded).
 
howler said:
£550? That is very good value!

Is that the price because you spend so much with them or can someone who only buys a couple of firewalls a year like me get that price?

Shame I just bought an SSG-140 for a new site a few months ago
Click to expand...

We do spend a lot (£millions a year) with Juniper but that pricing on the SRX is nothing special discount wise, you should be able to come close online...
 
djevil said:
I normally go with a dedicated linux box with Clarkconnect installed personally, gives additional features such as apache and obviously you can install a lot more tools in this kind of setup like ntop etc. This does have modules for content filtering, web proxy etc as well :)
Click to expand...

This sort of setup has no place in businesses IMO


Pea0n said:
Agreed. 877 (assuming DSL line) would be an excellent choice providing you're able to use the CLI. SDM sucks IMO

- Pea0n
Click to expand...

absolutely this, or an 1800 if you have the need for it.

The web interface does suck monkey balls. The CLI really isn't that hard, if you can't figure out how to do a basic DSL config with some reading and common sense, you shouldn't really be supporting 100+ users tbh
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom