On Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:37:55 -0800,
floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:
>>Watchguard 6tc is about $430 for 10 users street price. They
>>typically go for about $150-$200 on eBay.
>New or used? The Linksys units go for $20-40 used. No doubt the
>introduction of the Linksys cause the value of used Watchguard units
>to take a dramatic fall.
Watchguard 6tc typically goes for about $430 new. About half or less
used on eBay. Watchguard sells through dealers and direct at full
$700 list price. $1000 for 50 users.
http://www.guardsite.com/SOHO6tcWireless.asp
Online prices from $400 to $450.
http://www2.shopping.com/xPC-~PD-20652720~NS-1 http://geek.pricegrabber.com/search_...asterid=611271
Note that this includes one year of "Live Security" updates.
Incidentally, the Watchguard SOHO and Sonicwall SOHO have quite
similar features and issues.
>Yikes! With the WRT54G there simply is no limit, of course.
>The specified figure is merely how many DHCP addresses it will
>serve. I'm not sure that is an accurate figure either, as it
>may be possible to assign addresses within a 16 bit subnet,
>rather than just a 24 bit subnet. (It isn't worth the effort to
>find out, and the web interface only does a 24 bit subnet.)
It works. I ran into that problem over and over with Sonicwall. I
had an office with 8 IP's in use. No problem with a 10 user limit.
However, laptops kept appearing on the office. What would happen is
that someone would turn off a desktop machine, a few laptops would
drift by causing the user count to max out. Then, the desktop would
get turned on in the morning and find that it cannot connect to the
internet. The algorithm for adding/dropping DHCP clients is to wait
until the lease expires, which required that I cut the lease time down
to an hour to get it to sorta work. I don't know if Watchguard has
the same problem, but I suspect it does. Incidentally, both
Watchguard and Sonicwall will assign up to 253 IP addresses from the
DHCP server, but only route the first 10 (depending on license).
I found a better solution by using a /16 subnet instead of the usual
/24. I would put devices that didn't need internet access in the
subnet that did not see the router. However, that didn't solve the
transient laptop issue, which required a short lease time, or power
cycling the router, to be functional.
>Those numbers *all* have to be through the wireless! Even the
>WRT54G numbers are too low. Compared to the Watchguard unit,
>the Linksys box has a 200 Mhz cpu (both use a MIPS processor,
>but they are from different manufacturers, so I don't know how
>closely they compare).
Ok. They kinda looked like wireless performance results. Note that
using the router to terminate a VPN really puts a load on the CPU,
which therefore has a big effect on performance. I don't have any
reproducible numbers but I've seen over 50% drop in thruput.
>Probably that should be listed as "Loopback enable/disable".
No such feature in Watchguard or Sonicwall that I can find.
>>Watchguard has a content filtering and URL blocking service.
>> http://www.watchguard.com/products/webblock.asp
>> http://www.watchguard.com/products/promo_webblocker.asp
>
>The Webblock optional software is not content filtering of
>packets though. It is a data base of URLs with supposedly known
>content type. Hence if you don't want anyone browsing "adult"
>sites, it will block that type of URLs by address, as one
>example.
It's basically a blacklist with some keyword checking in the URL. I
did a dumb thing and added my name to the keyword list to see how it
worked. It didn't do anything so I stupidly left it. Then, I later
went to do an online order. The URL sent by the web page included my
name. I was instantly greeted with a "banned site" error message and
a trashed online order. Oops. This type of web keyword and blacklist
web filtering is really only designed for restricting access to
"adult" sites, and not as some kind of firewall protection feature.
>That wouldn't really be too hard to do. One of the LAN ports
>has to be isolated with a VLAN, and then connected to the Linux
>Ethernet device if connectivity is lost on the WLAN port.
>That probably isn't really very useful for most home or small
>business users, who need the LAN port and don't have an extra
>*unused* cable/dsl connection.
Agreed. However, it is an interesting feature. I setup one customer
with a 3Com LAN Modem for dialup backup via Watchguard Dual ISP
feature. There are probably better ways to do it, but this customer
already had the hardware, so it was an easy solution. (Speaking of
reliable, my DSL has been going up and down all morning).
That brings up the issue of command line editing. The WRT54G with
Alchemy firmware has an easily accessible and useful command line
available through telnet. Watchguard has a command line available
through an obscure procedure, but the commands are not documented or
officially supported. I've had support walk me through the cerimony
once, but don't recall the details. I think it's VxWorks based, but I
keep forgetting to check when I dive in there.
>I noticed that some optional features are available as a
>subscription! Pay by the year...
If you ever need an exercise in futility, try defining the ultimately
fair and universally acceptable method of charging for router
features. You can pay by the month, by the year, as part of a service
contract, in the original selling price, as part of per-feature
upgrades, or with a company wide site license. Whatever works, but
you still pay. You can't give it away or the company goes broke.
>>There is one really nice Watchguard feature. The box is bright red,
>>which methinks is proper for a firewall. (Better red than dead?)
I was thinking of buying some flame decals like the ones the model hot
rod cars have coming out of the wheel wells. Those would look nice on
a firewall. If it's gonna play firewall, it's gotta look like a wall
on fire.
--
Jeff Liebermann
jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D
http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
AE6KS 831-336-2558
Re: 56k dial up on laptop 802.11G ? 
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