Recommended router for small business?
 

Hi all,

When it comes to home equipment, I wouldn't have an issue, but corporate stuff is way above my pay grade to understand.

Anyway, we used to just be on a basic DSL connection and have recently moved to a proper leased line. It's great and it works well, but I feel that our Draytek 2955 may not quite be up to the task of managing it effectively (we've had some issues with forwarding the same ports to two different IP's on our subnet, for example).

I'm just testing the waters, but what would people actually recommend? Cisco equipment seems to be the firm favourite but is there a particular model that people like? Are they easy to manage for someone without any proper training in it?

Any advice at all would be appreciated.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Openwrt.

For everything.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

And can you name a good 1U unit that uses it?

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Take any decent Openwrt router and attach a pair of metal flaps to the side like you did with the Draytek 2955?

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

The 2955 is a 1U unit?

https://www.formosa.no/media/2010/04/Vigor2955.jpg

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Yes that is a 1U unit, in terms of it's height only needing a 1 unit space if located in a rack. Of course to locate such a router, which isn't the full width of the standard rack, you need the accessory draytek shelf metal flaps thingy.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

yeah I've probably not used the right terms there really. Any recommendations on a Rackmounted router, then?

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

It is worth checking your firmware version on the Draytek is current?

Our office uses a Draytek Vigor 2920 so I can't give other recommendations. It does what we need it to.

Cisco might be regarded as one of the big names for networking. Given they have complete series of courses and qualifications they may well be well beyond your needs.

Assuming you are part of a smaller business organisation, can you not call upon an outside specialist IT company to advise?

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

No you've used the correct terms, all you do with a router like that is buy a pair of plates that go either side so that it can be fitted into a rack

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

I've checked and we are on the latest firmware (October 2012 it's dated, so is perhaps nearing the end of its support). It does work ok, it just seems like it could be better.
I suppose I could ask an outside tech firm but it's really not essential. I was more just looking for an idea of what people tend to use, in case we ever decide we need to expend our IT budget quickly =P

Which is apparently what we've done. Or it came with them, not really sure which.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Historically for myself and where I've worked we've always had bespoke solutions because we've always had highly qualified dedicated network teams to look after them.

Given Openwrt is infinitely flexible and runs on literally hundreds of different devices it all boils down to your required specifications and needs.

How many ports? How many downstream devices? What sort of load, traffic, security, is required, etc. What level of resiliency or redundancy do you need?

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Asus RT-N66U (Around £100)

I use this at home and should have the power to handle what you want.

It support both 2.5 & 5GHz at the same time, has a guest network access.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/secur...tek-vigor-2955 - seems to be a fairly competent unit.

How CAN you forward a port to different IPs, how would it kow which one it was meant for.
To support a port forwarded service that may operate from different systems (but only one at a time), you need to use port triggering, where a certain condition that results from using the application (eg. outgoing on a known port), can be set to trigger forwarding of the required incoming port(s) while that condition is met

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

It's not forwarding a port TO different IP addresses, rather it's forwarding ports FROM different IP addresses. We have a small block of 15 IP's and it could just be me making a mistake, but it seems that when I forward a port from IP x.x.x.2, I can't then forward the same port from x.x.x.3. Or rather, I can and the interface doesn't give me any issues, but the port doesn't actually forward. Again, it could just be me, the Drayek interface isn't the clearest thing in the world (and it's not the worst, either).

"Highly Qualified" isn't a term I'd apply to my network skills. Give me a low level API or a programming task and I'm your guy, but networking? That's just the part time job :P

Anyway, it's not a massive deal, I was just putting the feelers out in case we could have been doing it better. Most people seem to think the Draytek should be good enough, so I'll persevere with it and see what happens.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Yeah, the heading up the infrastructure team at my last workplace had his email signature as his name followed by MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP. Those are the sorts of people I learned from :P

Nonetheless, forwarding from multiple IPs should work just fine on the Draytek (I say should as in it not working is probably not intentional) but I know for sure they work fine on Openwrt.

If you were any nearer I'd offer to install an Openwrt system for you as an externalsubcontractor :D

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

But if you set to forward (say for a web server) port 80 from x.x.x.2, you're telling the router you want incoming port 80 traffic to go to the .2 address.
You cannot then tell it you want the same traffic sent to x.x.x.3

Also, some routers will only forward for fixed DHCP assigned addresses, as dynamically assigned may not be the same destination.

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Aha, yes unfortunately this being a small company, we don't have anyone nearly that qualified. I was meant to be just a programmer, then one of our servers (that someone else set up years ago, nobody remembers who or when) died and I was about the only one who had an inkling as to what happened (HDD failure, on the RAID0 array - yipes). Even the outside firm they got in shrugged their shoulders at it. That's when I started looking into how things work and realised our entire infrastructure was an absolute mess. A single server failure shouldn't take down the entire domain, let alone a single HDD failure.
It's much better now, but I've learned all of this on the fly on my own terms, so no doubt things could be better still but right now I'm happy with the level of redundancy and failover we have. I still feel like I don't really know what I'm doing though, hence why I'm happy to ask for and listen to advice like this.

Sorry, I think you're getting a little confused with forwarding from and to.

What I mean is, we have a range of public IP addresses. Let's just say the range is 80.100.200.1 to 80.100.200.15.

Internally, we're still only a little class C, so everything is on 192.168.x.x. (we actually use a subnet of 255.255.252.0 which gives us plenty of addresses to play with).

All I want to do is something like,
Forward port 80 on 80.100.200.1 to 192.168.0.20,
Forward port 80 on 80.100.200.2 to 192.168.0.21,
Forward port 80 on 80.100.200.3 to 192.168.0.50,
etc.

Does that make sense?
(there's actually a lot more forwarding going on than that, that's just an example).

The Draytek actually seems to be capable of this, it has a section called "Open Ports" which lets you assign port forwarding rules from an Aux. WAN IP to an internal LAN IP individually. And this works.

The catch is that there's another section called "Port Redirection" and this doesn't let you specify an external IP, so it seems to override the "Open Ports" section somewhat. I say override, it hasn't been massively consistent, sometimes the "Open Ports" seems to be in affect while other times the redirection seems to take effect, at least when there's an overlap of any kind.

I think all I really need to do is just not use "Port Redirection" at all and stick to just using the "Open Ports", which will work, it just requires a fair bit of reconfiguration of the network, due to domain mappings and stuff. I figured if I'm going to go to that trouble, I may as well make sure there's not a better piece of equipment we could be using (which would require similar jiggery-pokery to set up).

This is just another in a long line of "things that have always been that way and nobody knows why" that I need to sort out :P

Re: Recommended router for small business?
 

Ah, multiple WAN IP's... http://www.draytek.co.uk/archive/kb_vigor_multinat.html
also found a pdf on port redirection that was no help!

bundle of FAQs here http://www.draytek.co.uk/archive/router_faq.html