Cisco SOHO

[ggadrian]

Well, after the summer I'm provably going back to Oslo and I'll be living again in a student residence. Last time I bought there a Belkin N450 for the incredibly high price of 500NOK (about 80$) which was a fine router, but too basic for that price.

I've repurposed that router as an AP in my parents house, so I'll have to buy another one (we get 1 RJ45 socket in each room) and I was thinking: how good is the Cisco SOHO line?

If I get a SOHO cisco, will I get some useful knowledge playing with it? Is the product worth it's price or I'll be just paying a premium because it's cisco with no associated benefits?

I don't mind buying an "expensive" router (although I'd like to keep it below 200€), but I want a reliable product that's rock solid and with good performance.

I don't need AC wifi, although I'd like to get 5GHz. The VPN capability of the router is nice to have, but I could live without it. 4 Gigabit ports are a must.

I've also tried dd-wrt for some time in a TP-Link WR1043ND and yes, it had much more functionality than the original firmware, but it was way less stable, so I got back to the original firmware since the router is in a small office and they can't have a router that hangs. I'll be using the router for my dorm, but I get mad when thinks stop working, so I'd rather buy a reliable router with a good firmware or one that's known to be rock solid running dd-wrt.

So, any recommendations?

 

[cmetz]

ggadrian, the Cisco/Linksys SOHO line has nothing to do with any of the other Cisco product lines and has been sold off to Belkin.

TP-Link with third-party firmware should be a reasonable choice. I'm a bit surprised you found it to be less stable - are there any other builds available for your device?

 

[ggadrian]

ggadrian, the Cisco/Linksys SOHO line has nothing to do with any of the other Cisco product lines and has been sold off to Belkin.

TP-Link with third-party firmware should be a reasonable choice. I'm a bit surprised you found it to be less stable - are there any other builds available for your device?

I think it was the latest build at the time, but I can't really mess with that router to see if the newer one's are more stable, they need it on alms 24/7 and right now it does all it has to do.

Do you have any particular model to recommend?

 

[Agamar]

If you want to try to learn something useful, try getting any of their small router line or go with a ASA series router/firewall. All of these are going to be more than the SOHO series, but you can find them pretty cheap used sometimes.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ebay often has good deals on Cisco gear, especially if you don't need gigabit. (Ex: for a gateway device).

 

[ggadrian]

Ebay often has good deals on Cisco gear, especially if you don't need gigabit. (Ex: for a gateway device).

Yes, but I'm gonna use it in a dorm room, so i'd rather have a gigabit router instead a router and a switch.

Any models I should look for?

 

[Mushkins]

Are you actually allowed to connect routers to your school network? Might want to check that out first. When I was in college, our dorms had a strict "switches only" policy and IT did regular network scans to identify rogue routers plugged into their network. You could lose your housing privileges over it, it was no joke. They didn't want people using them to set up personal VPNs or open unsecured wifi to let non-students on the school network.

 

[ggadrian]

Are you actually allowed to connect routers to your school network? Might want to check that out first. When I was in college, our dorms had a strict "switches only" policy and IT did regular network scans to identify rogue routers plugged into their network. You could lose your housing privileges over it, it was no joke. They didn't want people using them to set up personal VPNs or open unsecured wifi to let non-students on the school network.

I actually don't know, but I've been doing that for six moths without any problem.

It's not actually the school network, it's the residence network and the residence building is owned by a private company.

If I weren't allowed to plug a router then I'd find a way to do it without them noticing, I really don't want my computers connected to a network I can't control.

 

[Mushkins]

I actually don't know, but I've been doing that for six moths without any problem.

It's not actually the school network, it's the residence network and the residence building is owned by a private company.

If I weren't allowed to plug a router then I'd find a way to do it without them noticing, I really don't want my computers connected to a network I can't control.

If it's a private company and not a school network then they probably don't have a policy about it, but they should

I'd still be very careful. Any SOHO device you really cant do much with but screw with your own connection, but when you get into the larger devices that let you play with routing protocols directly and you're connecting it to a LAN, you could accidentally cause some big issues for the whole residence network.

 

[ggadrian]

If it's a private company and not a school network then they probably don't have a policy about it, but they should

I'd still be very careful. Any SOHO device you really cant do much with but screw with your own connection, but when you get into the larger devices that let you play with routing protocols directly and you're connecting it to a LAN, you could accidentally cause some big issues for the whole residence network.

Can I screw the rest of the LAN just messing with my router? That's kind of cool (not that I'm planning to screw with the residende network).

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Cisco small business is just linksys with cisco labels.

 

[JackMDS]

Can I screw the rest of the LAN just messing with my router? That's kind of cool (not that I'm planning to screw with the residende network).

Yeah, given your story as develops through the thread (with all due respect) it is a little "naive dream".

You are on someone else restrict private Network connection without a real network on your own and you think that you can have in value trying to "play" with a SOHO Router.

 

[ggadrian]

So, it looks like I'm not going to get any value from buying a SOHO router over a high-end consumer one, am I?

I've been looking and I've found two strong contenders: Asus RT-AC68U and Netgear R7000, although it seems that the netgear as a small performance advantage, what do you think about those two routers?

 

[ggadrian]

Yeah, given your story as develops through the thread (with all due respect) it is a little "naive dream".

You are on someone else restrict private Network connection without a real network on your own and you think that you can have in value trying to "play" with a SOHO Router.

Well those networks, as far as I know, aren't heavily watched and at least in the one I was I was getting a solid 35/25, so when I come back I'll provably try to setup a VPN.

It's mostly that I like to play and experiment with electronic stuff and pro routers seem rather interesting.

 

[JackMDS]

Then you should two Routers for the Money.

One to connect to the source and use for your regular use (given one room dorm any decent sub $100 Wireless Router will do).

Then get a second sun $100 with a lot of RAM to be able to fit on it the full size DD-WRT.

Configure the second Router as segregated Router ( http://www.ezlan.net/shield.html )

Hopefully (depends on the school IT people ignoring you) you will be able to "play" with all the aspects of DD-RT and learn many aspect of advanced networking.

 

[Mushkins]

If you're looking to learn, be responsible about it and set up a lab environment. This can be as simple as not plugging the WAN on those routers into anything, or buying two routers and connecting them directly to each other with no connection to the school network or the internet (this is how it was done in our lab sessions when I was in school, Group A would have a router and a laptop, Group B would have a router and a laptop, and we'd connect them to each other).

You connect a business class router directly to your residence hall LAN and start playing with routing protocols, you very much could cause some serious damage to their network. Thats not the kind of thing that they just shrug off and say "dont do it again," we're talking calling in network engineers from the parent company of the building owners to do very expensive, long hours of work to trace and fix what you fudged up. Then its as simple as finding out that a rogue router with an IP address of 192.168.10.13 was on the network, that IP address was assigned to port 24 on XYZ Switch at the time of the incident, which is plugged into port 14 on ABC Patch panel, which is run to room 204, and the landlord is knocking on your door with a not too happy look on his face.

On the plus side, if you mess something up in your lab environment, it doesnt mess anything up with your regular LAN connection and you can deal with it later