Well I want to confirm everything said by Lanner regarding the Netopia routers but I wanted to add my experience.
One thing that you should know about the netopia if you have used it is that if you like a command line interface similar to a Cisco router instead of the menu interface you get at first just hit CTRL-N and it will toggle between the menu and command line interface. There is a manual for this command line interface you will need since there is no online help available at http://www.netopia.com/equipment/pdf/manuals/CLI/C LI_49.pdf
In terms of my experience using the netopia R910 and R9100 models they will do pretty much everything you could want from a device at this price range. I setup a VPN with 5 R9100's using IPSEC encrypted with 3DES (Only supported if you add the encryption card) and it works great. Also if you are comfortable with the slightly reduced security of PPTP you can setup a small number of users for VPN using just the normal microsoft PPTP client software included out of the box in Windows98 and up without needing a Windows NT box with RRAS installed.
If you want to serve multiple web sites most of the cheap router/firewalls cannot utilize any more that 1 IP address on the WAN interface which means you can only map port 80 once to an internal server. With the Netopia you are able to map multiple IP's from the WAN port to internal servers. This means that if you want to map port 80 on your second static IP to a different server, you can. The only problem is if you get multiple IP's via DHCP I don't think you can do it, but that's understandable.
Some other features that a power user might like are SNMP manageability, Radius client for configuration logon authentication, PPPoE support, AUX port can be hooked up to a modem for dial backup, optional Appletalk support including AURP for tunneling, DHCP address serving, syslog event logging support, and more!
One of the only areas I personally have found a bit weak is in the routing area. The netopia R series only supports RIP but not any of the more modern protocols like EIGRP or BGP or anything like that so you pretty much need to use RIP which I have always found requires certain prayers and offerings to work, or use static routing. Oh but one nice feature is that you can insert static ARP entries using the command line. This is useful if you are on subnetted ADSL and need to be able to communicate with someone else on the same class C as refered to in this local providers FAQ
They are basically saying that in IPv6 everyone will be given a/48 which means that as you connect to your ISP it will automatically give you a range of IP addresses large enough for you to have 2^16 or 65536 different subnets. Because IPv6 is a 64bit network with 64bit host system that means each subnet can have practically an unlimited number of devices in it. You can basically give every piece of dust floating around in your house an IP address and each room could be on it's own subnet!
And still as they state, they can easily give up to 178 billion of these/48 network numbers away until address assignment starts to become an issue again which still leaves 85% of the address space unused.
Now the real trick as the article alludes to but doesn't really address is the complexity of handling the routing for multihomed sites. Someone still has to figure out how to make multihomed routing easy, fast, and efficient.
I have put together a wireless system that is currently being used in an Oilfield application.
To translate the input of a device with a varying voltage (Pressure, temperature, etc transducer) we use a little device from Dataq www.dataq.com part number DI-194 which converts the signal into a serial stream. This device has 4 channels so it can be hooked up to more than 1 sensor. Then we use a radio modem from Freewave www.freewave.com which is expensive but incredibly robust and reliable. These modems do NOT need a license as long as their output power measured at the antennae is under 1 Watt. The pre-built modems are very expensive but the OEM modules are cheaper if you want to build your own box with the DI-194 inside which is what we do.
Ok. I'm a Canadian and I have to admit there is one thing I really don't get about US lawmaking.
What is with all the extra junk that US lawmakers put on their bills? Government spending and Immigration laws all in one? That just sounds crazy to me. If they were actually serious about debating the merits of each issue they wouldn't go around attaching their pet projects to ride the coattails of truely important issues.
It should be noted that in Apples press release it says the following:
Apple® today announced it has licensed Amazon.com's 1-Click patent and trademark for use on its Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), as part of an e-commerce patent cross-licensing agreement
Which seems to sound like Amazon did not get cash, but the ability to use something that Apple may hold a patent on. It's a swap meet of useless patents, just like kids on the playground trading baseball cards.
Yes this is bad Karma. They place an ad with a rumor site presumably because they are getting traffic consisting of people interested in the apple platform and probably either existing customers or people who are looking to buy a mac soon. So what drew that crowd into that website in the first place? NEWS ABOUT APPLE and RUMORS. Now if they took off their apple rumors then the traffic dissapears and Apple would not want to advertise there and neither would anyone else either.
I guess it's clear then, keep publishing rumors. It is a classic loose loose situation. You loose the rumors and you loose apple as an advertiser evenually as your traffic dissapears. You keep publishing rumors and you loose apple as an advertiser right away.
Now what about editorial content. Will apple stop advertising in newspapers or magazines because they publish bad reviews of an apple product? How far could this go?
I think the greatest opportunity for opening up the phone equipment will be for business PBX type equipment. Currently if you decide to install a Nortel PBX you are locked into using Nortel phone sets and Nortel modules running Nortel software. I don't know if anyone has looked into the prices of the better PBX systems lately, but I can tell you that they are very expensive.
Now imagine if these systems were open. You can basically plug in a box which would be more like a traditional computer with a T1, PRI, or maybe just plain copper interface card. The software running on that computer you can use to setup new phone sets, assign speed dial numbers, configure call blocking, and manage voice mail boxes. Because it's open you can get plug in software and hardware. Just a plugin away from an automated attendant that will read back your current emails over the phone. It would also simplify the voice over IP situation because just because your office has one brand of PBX doesn't mean you cannot talk to the branch office with an entirely different PBX over your existing WAN or VPN links.
On the hardware side of things you no longer need to buy your phone sets from the same provider as the PBX. Just buy whatever model has the features you need and plug it in. Say you want one of those new 2 mile range cordless phones instead of a traditional phone set, just plug it in.
Who is going to build this equipment you might ask? The answer is every telephone and network equipment company that is looking for a new market to sqeeze some profit into their bottom line. This is a perfect opportunity for the computer industry to undercut the traditional manufacturers. Most network equipment manufacturers would kill for half the mark-up that PBX's are sold for today and they will be the ones to create the technology. Someday your phone may have a Cisco logo on it.
You have to look at the recent history of Toshiba in the courts to maybe understand why they would sign a license agreement that nobody else seems to care about.
Remember the 5 billion dollar floppy drive issue?
Most experts said at the time that there was a good chance that Toshiba could have got away with a much cheaper hit on that issue but the management was afraid of the outside chance of an even steeper court settlement. They appear to be pushovers when it comes to these legal issues.
If anyone holds any patents that could possibly affect Toshiba, take notice. Send them a friendly note from your lawyer now demanding a license fee. Chances are that they will pay it without asking too many questions.
I would like to inject a bit of caution to the discussion.
You see, I tried to save some money by using generic PC100 memory and it didn't work. The problem I found is that the machine needs 2/2/2 timed memory sticks, and higher quality=better stability. You might end up looking at the PC133 rated memory, going a bit over the specs with generic stuff may help resolve potential timing issues. I was lucky that I was able to exchange the memory I bought for better quality memory and the dealer ate the cost since I had specified that it must be Mac G3 compatible on the purchase order. The frustration of having 4 brand new blue G3's all crashing because of bad memory was a lesson to me, you get what you pay for.
The other area which you must be very cautious in is video cards. The quality of the mac drivers will be critical to your success. Currently ATI is the only one that seems to be in the game right now but those ATI rumors persist.
The things which will work with little hastle are most USB devices, just have to check if the manufacturer supports the Mac. 95% of IDE DMA/33 or DMA/66 hard drives will work, the problem might arise with the apple disk tools not being able to format the drive. I wouln't buy a hard drive any larger than the biggest one apple offers to avoid that potential hazard. Monitors are safe, apple dropped their proprietary monitor connector a few generations ago thank god. Watch out with printers. Some of those cheap as dirt printers on the market are brain dead so without a supported driver they are table art. A postscript printer is the native mac printer type but postscript doesn't come cheap, and it doesn't come with inkjets until they get to large format. If you don't need perfect prints (not doing publishing) just get a printer which is supported. Epson seems to be one of the better injet manufacturers for mac support.
Stuff that doesn't work well: Anything in that braindead cheap group of junk equipment like winmodems. Most add on PCI cards do not have mac drivers even though the mac supports the PCI slot standard. DVD decoders, TV tuners, some SCSI cards. First step would be to check a prospective devices manufacturer driver page. Some devices are supported on the mac but don't ship in a box that comes with drivers or any clue that it might be mac compatible. Lots of multimedia software is the same way. There are many educational and low end multimedia titles on the PC shelves that are hybrid discs with the code for both mac and PC computers on the same disk.
Here are some links to mac news pages which you might like to dig through the archives for. All 3 tend to run feature articles when new OS and hardware come out to gather problem reports and solutions which I find very useful. www.macfixit.com www.macnn.com www.macintouch.com
Basically everyone has noticed that this service doesn't have any advantages over using the services of your bank and email that you have now.
I have to agree except for 2 minor issues that I don't think are very relevant.
1. They offer a system where there is a return receipt on the email so that you KNOW for sure that someone has looked at it.
2. It is a way for people without bank account access to pay their bills online. May be cheaper than your bank if you get charged a fee for paying your bills.
Some other things I noticed about the service. I briefly checked out their legal agreement and it struck me as being fair to both parties. A rare thing in the age of blanket disclaimers that disclaim responsibility for any and all blame.
I was also wondering how long it might be until they try to get Revenue Canada (Our IRS department) to let them have people file their returns online. That might be nice. I just found out this year that I could pay my tax bill online through my bank. The only time I ever pull my printer out of storage is to print returns once a year.
They probably have other plans, exclusive content and junk like that for the future too.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that you should know about the netopia if you have used it is that if you like a command line interface similar to a Cisco router instead of the menu interface you get at first just hit CTRL-N and it will toggle between the menu and command line interface. There is a manual for this command line interface you will need since there is no online help available at http://www.netopia.com/equipment/pdf/manuals/CLI/C LI_49.pdf
In terms of my experience using the netopia R910 and R9100 models they will do pretty much everything you could want from a device at this price range. I setup a VPN with 5 R9100's using IPSEC encrypted with 3DES (Only supported if you add the encryption card) and it works great. Also if you are comfortable with the slightly reduced security of PPTP you can setup a small number of users for VPN using just the normal microsoft PPTP client software included out of the box in Windows98 and up without needing a Windows NT box with RRAS installed.
If you want to serve multiple web sites most of the cheap router/firewalls cannot utilize any more that 1 IP address on the WAN interface which means you can only map port 80 once to an internal server. With the Netopia you are able to map multiple IP's from the WAN port to internal servers. This means that if you want to map port 80 on your second static IP to a different server, you can. The only problem is if you get multiple IP's via DHCP I don't think you can do it, but that's understandable.
Some other features that a power user might like are SNMP manageability, Radius client for configuration logon authentication, PPPoE support, AUX port can be hooked up to a modem for dial backup, optional Appletalk support including AURP for tunneling, DHCP address serving, syslog event logging support, and more!
One of the only areas I personally have found a bit weak is in the routing area. The netopia R series only supports RIP but not any of the more modern protocols like EIGRP or BGP or anything like that so you pretty much need to use RIP which I have always found requires certain prayers and offerings to work, or use static routing. Oh but one nice feature is that you can insert static ARP entries using the command line. This is useful if you are on subnetted ADSL and need to be able to communicate with someone else on the same class C as refered to in this local providers FAQ
They are basically saying that in IPv6 everyone will be given a /48 which means that as you connect to your ISP it will automatically give you a range of IP addresses large enough for you to have 2^16 or 65536 different subnets. Because IPv6 is a 64bit network with 64bit host system that means each subnet can have practically an unlimited number of devices in it. You can basically give every piece of dust floating around in your house an IP address and each room could be on it's own subnet!
/48 network numbers away until address assignment starts to become an issue again which still leaves 85% of the address space unused.
And still as they state, they can easily give up to 178 billion of these
Now the real trick as the article alludes to but doesn't really address is the complexity of handling the routing for multihomed sites. Someone still has to figure out how to make multihomed routing easy, fast, and efficient.
To translate the input of a device with a varying voltage (Pressure, temperature, etc transducer) we use a little device from Dataq www.dataq.com part number DI-194 which converts the signal into a serial stream. This device has 4 channels so it can be hooked up to more than 1 sensor. Then we use a radio modem from Freewave www.freewave.com which is expensive but incredibly robust and reliable. These modems do NOT need a license as long as their output power measured at the antennae is under 1 Watt. The pre-built modems are very expensive but the OEM modules are cheaper if you want to build your own box with the DI-194 inside which is what we do.
Ok. I'm a Canadian and I have to admit there is one thing I really don't get about US lawmaking.
What is with all the extra junk that US lawmakers put on their bills? Government spending and Immigration laws all in one? That just sounds crazy to me. If they were actually serious about debating the merits of each issue they wouldn't go around attaching their pet projects to ride the coattails of truely important issues.
I guess it's clear then, keep publishing rumors. It is a classic loose loose situation. You loose the rumors and you loose apple as an advertiser evenually as your traffic dissapears. You keep publishing rumors and you loose apple as an advertiser right away.
Now what about editorial content. Will apple stop advertising in newspapers or magazines because they publish bad reviews of an apple product? How far could this go?
Now imagine if these systems were open. You can basically plug in a box which would be more like a traditional computer with a T1, PRI, or maybe just plain copper interface card. The software running on that computer you can use to setup new phone sets, assign speed dial numbers, configure call blocking, and manage voice mail boxes. Because it's open you can get plug in software and hardware. Just a plugin away from an automated attendant that will read back your current emails over the phone. It would also simplify the voice over IP situation because just because your office has one brand of PBX doesn't mean you cannot talk to the branch office with an entirely different PBX over your existing WAN or VPN links.
On the hardware side of things you no longer need to buy your phone sets from the same provider as the PBX. Just buy whatever model has the features you need and plug it in. Say you want one of those new 2 mile range cordless phones instead of a traditional phone set, just plug it in.
Who is going to build this equipment you might ask? The answer is every telephone and network equipment company that is looking for a new market to sqeeze some profit into their bottom line. This is a perfect opportunity for the computer industry to undercut the traditional manufacturers. Most network equipment manufacturers would kill for half the mark-up that PBX's are sold for today and they will be the ones to create the technology. Someday your phone may have a Cisco logo on it.
You have to look at the recent history of Toshiba in the courts to maybe understand why they would sign a license agreement that nobody else seems to care about.
Remember the 5 billion dollar floppy drive issue?
Most experts said at the time that there was a good chance that Toshiba could have got away with a much cheaper hit on that issue but the management was afraid of the outside chance of an even steeper court settlement. They appear to be pushovers when it comes to these legal issues.
If anyone holds any patents that could possibly affect Toshiba, take notice. Send them a friendly note from your lawyer now demanding a license fee. Chances are that they will pay it without asking too many questions.
You see, I tried to save some money by using generic PC100 memory and it didn't work. The problem I found is that the machine needs 2/2/2 timed memory sticks, and higher quality=better stability. You might end up looking at the PC133 rated memory, going a bit over the specs with generic stuff may help resolve potential timing issues. I was lucky that I was able to exchange the memory I bought for better quality memory and the dealer ate the cost since I had specified that it must be Mac G3 compatible on the purchase order. The frustration of having 4 brand new blue G3's all crashing because of bad memory was a lesson to me, you get what you pay for.
The other area which you must be very cautious in is video cards. The quality of the mac drivers will be critical to your success. Currently ATI is the only one that seems to be in the game right now but those ATI rumors persist.
The things which will work with little hastle are most USB devices, just have to check if the manufacturer supports the Mac. 95% of IDE DMA/33 or DMA/66 hard drives will work, the problem might arise with the apple disk tools not being able to format the drive. I wouln't buy a hard drive any larger than the biggest one apple offers to avoid that potential hazard. Monitors are safe, apple dropped their proprietary monitor connector a few generations ago thank god. Watch out with printers. Some of those cheap as dirt printers on the market are brain dead so without a supported driver they are table art. A postscript printer is the native mac printer type but postscript doesn't come cheap, and it doesn't come with inkjets until they get to large format. If you don't need perfect prints (not doing publishing) just get a printer which is supported. Epson seems to be one of the better injet manufacturers for mac support.
Stuff that doesn't work well: Anything in that braindead cheap group of junk equipment like winmodems. Most add on PCI cards do not have mac drivers even though the mac supports the PCI slot standard. DVD decoders, TV tuners, some SCSI cards. First step would be to check a prospective devices manufacturer driver page. Some devices are supported on the mac but don't ship in a box that comes with drivers or any clue that it might be mac compatible. Lots of multimedia software is the same way. There are many educational and low end multimedia titles on the PC shelves that are hybrid discs with the code for both mac and PC computers on the same disk.
Here are some links to mac news pages which you might like to dig through the archives for. All 3 tend to run feature articles when new OS and hardware come out to gather problem reports and solutions which I find very useful.
www.macfixit.com
www.macnn.com
www.macintouch.com
Basically everyone has noticed that this service doesn't have any advantages over using the services of your bank and email that you have now.
I have to agree except for 2 minor issues that I don't think are very relevant.
1. They offer a system where there is a return receipt on the email so that you KNOW for sure that someone has looked at it.
2. It is a way for people without bank account access to pay their bills online. May be cheaper than your bank if you get charged a fee for paying your bills.
Some other things I noticed about the service. I briefly checked out their legal agreement and it struck me as being fair to both parties. A rare thing in the age of blanket disclaimers that disclaim responsibility for any and all blame.
I was also wondering how long it might be until they try to get Revenue Canada (Our IRS department) to let them have people file their returns online. That might be nice. I just found out this year that I could pay my tax bill online through my bank. The only time I ever pull my printer out of storage is to print returns once a year.
They probably have other plans, exclusive content and junk like that for the future too.