NETGEAR FVS336G vs DRAYTEK 2950G

[Dennis Wood]

I ordered it from the US. The vendor is listed in the first post of this thread, http://www.dsl-warehouse.com/

Cheers,
Dennis.

 

[Dennis Wood]

I'm a big fan of long term updates so here's an important one. The Draytek stopped routing on Thursday creating a stressful hour or so until the spare Netgear FVS336G was swapped in. A reset of the draytek 2950 made it accessible again, but testing will have to wait a few days. Lesson here is this:

1. A hardware spare for critical equipment is a good thing.
2. Make sure you backup router configurations via the router's OS. I didn't and burned up 2 hours re-tweaking the Netgear for use at our Dual-Wan location. If you're hosting VOIP, VPN, doing rsync etc. then router configs are a time investment.
3. In terms of VPN, I've been using Shrew more and more. The ability to export and import connection profiles meant that getting VPN working to these very different routers is as quick as double clicking the saved profile that was created for the Netgear which took at least 1 day to get sorted.

So had I backed up the Netgear config, getting a busy office back online would have taken 5 minutes, instead of 90.

 

[Markwirez]

I ordered it from the US. The vendor is listed in the first post of this thread, http://www.dsl-warehouse.com/

Cheers,
Dennis.

Did you find out what caused the issue with the routing to stop working? Did the whole thing "Brick" on you or was it a router configuration issue?

 

[Dennis Wood]

After a reset to factory defaults (using the reset button on the router face) it seems to be OK. We'll see how things go under heavy loads.

This time I've been quite careful to ensure I've got configuration backups of all of the routers in service. Every time a change is made, I'll be saving the backup configurations so any resets in the future don't carry such a time penalty.

 

[Sevenfeet]

So is the Draytek considered to be the best dual wan router out there, despite the $400 price tag or are there other competitive alternatives that can do load balancing right and have decent bandwidth (>25 MB/sec)?

 

[Dennis Wood]

The Draytek 2950G got a bit better with the latest firmware. They've added content filtering to the object based filter setup which is a lot more complicated to set up, but also much more powerful now in terms of which workstations, see which URL filter etc. ...and you can schedule all of them. The aftorementioned URL content filter setup has changed a lot, and it's not covered in any pdf/ manual updates that I can find...so while it's much more powerful now, you're also on your own to figure it out. I'd say the update though was well worth it. Once you get acquainted with the filtering setup, it's incredibly flexible. This is the best description of how they work I have seen: http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor_filtering.html You can also customize the messages delivered to your users when a blocked site is encountered...also a useful update with firmware 3.3.0 Btw, the release notes mention "Supports GlobalView Web Content Filter" and has zero mention of the changes made to URL content filtering...which is not cool as your old URL blocked keywords disappear. You'll want to take note of them before updating to 3.3.0.

Smartmonitor and recently, the bandwidth monitoring tools (visual graph as well as IP based monitoring) proved very usefull in quickly diagnosing VOIP port scanning and a resulting network change to stop it.

Recent updates to WAN2 provider mean we now have a 20Mbps connection and all continues to tick along at the higher speeds. Still highly recommend this router. Turns out we need another DUAL wan router for another site, so we're going to give the 2955 a try.

Cheers,
Dennis.

 

[medusakeith]

i'd see some update about DrayTek's utility which them finally made it for Windows 7/Vista version as following linkage: http://www.draytek.com/user/SupportDLUtility.php

 

[JoeJoe]

Does the Draytek monitor monthly bandwidth usage?

Does it automatically keep SSL (bank) connections to a single ISP connection when using dual WAN ISPs, or do you have to add these rules yourself?

Can any ISPs dynamic DNS be used, such as namecheap.com's service? (I couldn't see how)

Is there a static/reserved DHCP option? ( I could see it)

Do you think this device works better than pfsense?

 

[Dennis Wood]

Better late than never I'd say for a response.

With a monitoring workstation setup (must be XP OS) you have full monitoring status on just about anything you'd like, including bandwidth.

Banking has not been a problem (SSL)

There a variety of dynamic dns option...we use dyndns

Yes, there is a static/reserved DHCP option.

Having just built my first pfsense 2.0 box, I'd say if given a choice, I'd go with pfsense. I'll be posting my experiences with the dual WAN pfsense boxes I just built up.

 

[medusakeith]

Did anybody hear about vigor2950's migration from Draytek?