Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) reccomendation for ISDN router

At 18:16 1998-05-23 -0400, Troy wrote:
>Hey all,
>
>I've got a customer who's currently using a 3com impact (or some such) and
>NT Server for a dedicated ISDN Centrex connection with our Max 1800.  They
>would like to move to something that will give them better network
>performance.
>
>What I would like to reccomend to them, is somehting that will handle a
>dedicated connection, NAT for 10-20 systems, compression, remote management,
>etc.  I've use the P50, but as I understand it, it's not good with NAT.

My suggestion: Use Wingate on the NT server and let Wingate handle the
multi-machine adress translation. I have my network setup like this with a
PipeLine75, and it is really working very well. I only use the NAT in the
Pipe for grabbing a dynamically assigned IP from the ISP, and tranlating it
to my NT server/Wingate Proxy machines "Internet / Wan side" IP. 

This has been a great solution for us, and very good value for money, since
the NT server is there anyways for fax, mail and other communications, and
Wingate is very cheap. You also need one more network card, but thats
peanuts compared to the router.

Advantages: 

The router is not bothered with the job of keeping port adress translation
tables (if i understand port translation, I don't use it), which makes it
work more stable. I have none of the problems others describe with Ascends
NAT. No hangs, memory leaks etc. Uptime is past 100 days on the router.  

Speed. On a half-decent machine, Wingate won't slow down transfer rates
noticably. I let wingate use 500MB for caching, which makes a h*ll of a
difference with often visited websites.

Some security. I bet a hacker would get throug, but the proxy
server/firewall in Wingate offers a certain amount of protection, and you
can set all kinds of permissions for your internal users.

Its also much easier to setup static mappings, filters etc in wingate than
on the router itself.

I also use this setup for media conversion. I have two segments on the
internal Lan, one 100Mb only, and one 10Base2 coax. Both are connected to
the server, and a third network card with a crossover cable connects to the
PipeLine.

The cons then:

None really IMO, if the NTserver is there already. Well maybe that the
clients need to be able to handle a proxy server, but most do now anyways.


I have no info on dedicated service though, the phone bills would get me
killed!


This is a setup thats really working great IRL, so I can recommend it. I'm
really pleased with my P75. I had a P25, performed well but its crippled,
so I traded it in for a 75. I am also using an ACC Congo Voice Router, and
it works equally well, but I can't get its compression to work with a Cisco
AS5200. Its also a pain to configure, and remote management sucks compared
to the status screen and syslog features of the PipeLine. BTW, compression
Ascend - Cisco works great.

I can give You more info if You're interested!


/Marcus

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