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April 14, 2003
So I Lied
Even though there is a looming employees' strike, and I
said I would not be buying any toys, gadgets,
critical network infrastructure items until after the strike,
I came across the Hawking Technologies FR24 Dual WAN 4-port
Firewall Router (see it here).
No, it does not appear to be as robustly built as the Nexland
Pro800turbo (see it here), nor as
easy to set-up or use, but then it costs substantially less
than $100 ($63 from Amazon.com) versus over $300 for the
Nexland.
Time will tell whether this is a wise buy or not but it should arrive sometime late this week and I'll let you know more when I do. In either case, the point of getting a dual WAN port router is that it allows two broadband inputs. This should provide for failover capability should one or the other of the inputs fail. Thus, I hope for increased reliability.
The downsides? I loose my Linux-based firewall in place of the one built in the FR24. Also, the eight-port D-Link switch I was using goes out the window in place of the 4-port in the FR24. While making things less complicated is usually a good thing, having all my eggs in one basket, as it were, means a single point of failure could knock out everything all at once. So while I am gaining reliability as far as access, I may be reducing total system reliability. Again, time will tell how well it works and what the balance point is.
Secondly, having two ISPs apparently causes problems, at least with the Hawking, as far as bonding the two lines together. Hence, only one line will be in use at a time, rather than two. This means I can't double the speed, as I had hoped I could. Having said that, I may be able to work around this with software (see this here or here) but I will need to actually get the box in my hands and test to see if I can do this.
Finally, I've emailed and received responses from both Nexland and Hawking (full marks to Hawking who responded within an hour, on a Friday evening) to confirm that they can work with two different ISPs. If you think about it, there are some very serious potential problems with two sets of DNSs, mail servers, news servers, not to mention IP addresses. How either of these boxes work around that I don't know. Stay tuned and I'll let you know if it does, work that is.
Aloha!
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